Album Review: God Must Really Love Me by Tori Kelly
On her sixth album, made in the first year of motherhood, Tori Kelly sings about a marriage that holds, a new son, and the God she thanks for both.
Happiness is so hard to capture in writing, and God Must Really Love Me does a long job trying. The good news is established before the first track is up. A marriage that stands, a healthy son, and a God she gives praise to both. Tori Kelly, gospel Grammy recipient in 2019 and married to André Murillo in 2018, built most of this around the demands of a new baby; some of it was written on a tour of Europe in summer 2025. She writes best with some concrete presence: the locked door, the delivery room, a son’s eyes that could look like hers. When there is nothing in the room but happiness itself, she sings the happiness straight and lets the harmonies do the filling.
The sound of the album stays in one room throughout: warm low end, drums drawn back from any rigid pocket, stacked background parts that cite gospel without taking each song all the way into worship. The intro is small, contained, and quiet, her tone widening into clear elevation, more argument than tune. “Dive,” which she wrote while she was seven months pregnant, swells with a rounded, modern-pop beat, her vocal runs dancing on top of the rhythm, not cutting through it. Tokyo, the bright, airy shift the album sorely needed, the beat nimble and her phrasing more compact, faster, more liberated, sounds like it caught a different air.
Introduce a difficult circumstance, and her writing grows tight. On “Control,” she can’t find the house key, lights out, “Sweat on my eyebrow,” and just “trying to get my baby to eat.” The verse runs on background anxiety until the chorus rescues her. “Somethin ‘bout the way You take the weight off of my heart/Put me back together when the world tears me apart,” she sings with tighter, more clipped drumming than on nearly any other track, and the surrender, a relief instead of a doctrine. “Pray for You” deals with the same subject in reverse. Someone has thrown mud on her, and her reaction, instead of being a fight, is to bring the dispute to God. “I had a talk with God the other night,” she sings at the start, before settling into prayer and keeping her distance. “I wish you well, but from way over here,” she sings on the bridge, “See, I’m just protecting my own atmosphere” This is her kiss-off, perfectly composed.
Nowhere does she sound as afraid as on “Bird.” Set to an austere arrangement stripped almost of bass, leaving the voice stark, she delivers worst-case scenarios one after another: past her prime, the well run dry, “What if you leave like my dad did,” “Wonderin’ what they gon’ say over my casket,” a child whose “Eyes look just like mine” tangled immediately with “But what if I can’t provide.” The hook responds with an upward climb, “I’d be just like a bird, so high,” but the relief sounds wished for rather than earned. “Fly” elevates the same impulse into bright pop-gospel, the hook swelling to include a “You” whose “Pride won’t ask for help.” By the end of “Bird” she has talked herself most of the way down, half-believing the part about how the birds never worry.
Her two best swings come with a shift in the song’s structure. “Hurts So Good” uses a waltz time, a jaunty three-count that trips and recovers, supporting a story of loving someone past good sense. “You and me like fire, we light up/Then burn it all to the ground/But we’re still standing somehow,” she sings with a loosely teasing phrase in the devotional-like songs’ steadiness. “Too Much” opens with a tape snippet from the delivery room, counting her through and a voice announcing “We’ve got a boy.” The body of the song presents motherhood with the ground dropped out, a “I’m scared I’ll mess it up” sitting right next to “Knowing that you’re growing too fast.” She lets it sit alongside a warm birthday message dropped into the track of someone telling a small kid he’s the prettiest thing there ever was.
The middle section is a lot more sedate, and the writing feels less active. “Mine” states, with plain assurance, “I may not have everything/But I’ve got a song to sing,” “At least I know that it’s mine,” and the feeling is a familiar enough real one. But it arrives pre-arrived at, with nothing in its way. “Without You” says, “This life ain’t nothin’ without ya,” as a truth that is spoken, not found. “Bliss” pares away the fairy tale and house on the hill and chase for money, ending with “If I have you, I have everything”—a destination without a journey. This isn’t a flaw necessarily. “Name of Jesus,” the plainest song here, gets this from being only a few words on the beauty of the name, the genre and expectation of worship holding it up. The most human few seconds on the soft side come at the end of “Bliss,” a discarded outtake where a voice cuts her off mid-take with that “sounds so good.”
The most direct reading of what she’s looking for is in “Smooth Landing,” in which she finds herself in a space suit, bobbing away from home. “Houston, hey, from the rocket ship,” it begins, and you have an astronaut in love with her vehicle who has flown too far to want to be out there anymore. The things she is reaching back toward are very small and very precise, lying down in bed to “Watch Him paint the room with sunlight” to “Stare right into my baby’s eyes.” It is one of the contentment songs that does the most to establish the room and place before standing within it; the sunlight and child, and long, long trip home.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Control,” “Hurts So Good,” “Too Much”