“My friends were like, ‘Where are you going … and who are these white people?!’” Jacob Lusk mimics a startled face as he recalls his first trip to Palm Desert, California, to work with Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope. It was the beginnings of what would become their genre-defying trio, Gabriels – who have steadily gained ground by mixing doo-wop, soul, electronica and more – but Lusk initially had his reservations. Dressed in a black shirt with a pussy bow collar and glitter-flecked sunglasses, a super-wide-brimmed black hat beside him, the 36-year-old, speaking not far from where he is staying in north London, looks every inch the dramatic pop star. It’s the ideal get-up for our meeting in a London members’ club which he reckons “looks like something out of Kill Bill”.
But, back in 2016, life was somewhat different. “Ryan and Ari showed up at my church kind of unannounced, looking for a choir for an advert they were making,” he explains. “I wanted to get it over and done with as quickly as possible … I just did it because I love music. I did my vocals in around 20 minutes and was like ‘OK, nice to meet you … ’”
The truth is that Lusk wasn’t sure what a future in music looked like at that point. Raised in Compton, Los Angeles, his was a religious upbringing, devoid of secular music apart from jazz. Despite this, he had two important musical mentors: his father, who died when was 12, was a music producer, while the king of hooks himself, Nate Dogg, took Lusk under his wing when he was first trying to make it in the biz, after Lusk replied to a Craigslist ad and ended up in the rapper’s gospel choir, InNate Praise. After four attempts to get on to American Idol, Lusk finished fifth in the show’s 10th season in 2011, propelled by his bold baritone and celestial falsetto.
It wasn’t to be, however. Nate Dogg died while Lusk was on American Idol, “I didn’t know what to do when he first started to decline”, Lusk says. He has previously described his experience on the show as a difficult one, saying he felt that he had been made to feel “I wasn’t gay enough, I wasn’t straight enough, I wasn’t man enough, I wasn’t black enough”. Various projects and record deals stalled in the years that followed. “It wasn’t the best situation. I tried for a couple of years and … it kinda went bad”, he says matter-of-factly. “I knew I had to get a job or I’d be homeless. It was just ups and downs”. Lusk started working for a sunglasses brand, led a community choir where, he says, “I was just happy to sing”, and took on occasional starry backup gigs for the likes of Diana Ross and Beck to scratch the performer itch.
But after meeting Balouzian, a composer, and Hope, a DJ turned music video director, things began to change. “We started meeting up for a week or two every few months,” Lusk says. With Balouzian on violin, Hope on keys and Lusk both singing and proffering baked goods to his new bandmates, they began to write together. Putting each other on to their favourite music (including, in Lusk’s case, the soundtrack to the 1996 Whitney Houston film The Preacher’s Wife), they found common ground along the way. “I was like: ‘Yeah, I think I’m gonna keep doing this – no pressure,” he says. “The goal wasn’t to try and be some star”.
Similarly, Balouzian and Hope – now 34 and 39 respectively – never expected Gabriels to be anything more than a side-project (Hope later tells me that “I don’t think we wanted to be in a band, really, until right before we signed our record deal”). The universe had other ideas, however, and in 2020, Gabriels’ self-released EP led to plaudits from the likes of Elton John, who called its title track, Love and Hate in a Different Time, “probably one of the most seminal records I’ve heard in the last 10 years”, describing Lusk’s voice as “something else”. Its. video saw Lusk’s vocals give way to a recording of him singing Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit at a Black Lives Matter protest, past and present melding together seamlessly.
Gilles Peterson, an early champion, tells me that the band were “a lockdown discovery for me – what drew me in was this incredible voice poised between Al Green and [disco icon] Sylvester and I knew immediately that getting them into Maida Vale [where the band recorded a BBC session in 2021] would be a dream”. It was a huge turnup for the books, although Lusk remained cautious at first. “It was great to get those reactions, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up”, he says. “I was grateful for it, but I was just like, make sure you still go to bed and get up for work in the morning, to pay your rent!”.
However, as the praise began to trickle in there was one oft-repeated comment that he did have mixed feelings about.“I love, LOVE gospel music. I listen to it almost every day. But we’re not gospel.” Originally such descriptions rubbed Lusk up the wrong way, but these days he’s decided that “when people say you’re a gospel artist, or your music sounds like gospel, they have nothing else to compare it to. That’s the closest thing they can think of to God, or this otherworldly thing. So I can’t be offended any more.”
They have since ticked off many feted new-band accolades in record time, including a nomination for the BBC Sound Of … poll, appearances on Jools Holland and Jimmy Kimmel, and a Brits nod for best international group alongside the likes of K-pop stars Blackpink. When they played Glastonbury in 2022, “we were told there would be no one in the crowd … and then there were thousands of people waiting for us!” Lusk describes performing as his “safe space”, and it seems he has built himself up considerably from the days when rewatching clips of himself on Idol or reading social media comments felt too painful.
When I speak to self-described “studio rats” Balouzian and Hope on a video call from a recording session in Malibu a few weeks later, intense sunbeams threatening to obscure them entirely from view, they echo the sense of everything having happened at a frantic pace – recording, touring, living up to the growing buzz around them – but also of feeling a sense of kismet. Hope, who is originally from Sunderland (the band are named after the street he grew up on in the city, St Gabriel’s Avenue), describes their output as “something we wouldn’t do by ourselves … the curveballs that come up in the studio never cease to amaze me”.
“We come together and whatever ends up happening, happens. We unlock new things,” says Balouzian. The diversity of the group is, for them, one of its greatest strengths. “The three of us come from such different backgrounds, culturally (Balouzian is of Armenian-American heritage), so it’s interesting to talk about human experience and relationships,” says Hope. “Gabriels started as somewhere I could ask the questions that maybe I couldn’t ask outside of it. I can ask things without the risk of sounding stupid, or making an ignorant mistake – things about sexuality, gender, current affairs, race.”
The first half of Gabriels’ debut album Angels & Queens was released in September 2022, and its eagerly awaited second half arrives in July. The beating heart of Gabriels’ music is its connection to the politics of the day, but also to the purest and most universal of emotions. For all its drama and a fevered contest between horns and strings, one standout, Taboo, is essentially a song about a situationship that’s doomed from the off (“Bible says it’s bad but not for me/ Don’t bring me fruit then say I can’t eat”, Lusk sings coyly). “That ain’t no gospel song, for damn sure,” Lusk laughs. “It’s about being with someone who’s probably not the best for you, but you can’t get out, you’re enamoured.”
The more sparse but equally emotive Remember Me charts the reality of lost love, via some cutting lyrics (“Infatuation took me by surprise/ Now I see nothing when I look in your eyes”). If You Only Knew, written in the wake of the death of Lusk’s godsister, is a plaintive piano ballad which eventually gives way to a choir-backed, electric organ-fuelled crescendo. For Balouzian, a key part of being in the band is channelling tough emotions, “dealing with each other’s different traumas and triggers, learning patience – and also having an unconditional love for each other”.
Gabriels seem set bigger things. Even so, everything comes back, for them, to the craft. Balouzian is anti “schmoozing” and Lusk doubts some artists’ commitment to their output over the trappings of fame. “I think that’s a concern with music in general,” he muses. “I think a lot of people aren’t necessarily motivated by the right things.” He looks serious for a second before laughing. “A house in Hampstead would be nice, though.”
Gabriels’ Angels & Queens is out on 7 July.
