Natalie Lu was a computer science student at San Francisco State, teaching herself guitar in her bedroom, when she released 'Your Face' as Wisp in April 2023 — the track went viral on TikTok and charted on Billboard's Hot Hard Rock Songs chart, turning a 19-year-old with no prior music career into shoegaze's most-watched new name almost overnight. She grew up in San Francisco's Sunset District and is of Thai and Taiwanese descent.
Pandora, her debut EP, followed in April 2024, and If Not Winter — her debut studio album, released on Interscope in August 2025 — has since crossed 2 million monthly Spotify listeners, an unusually fast climb for a genre that spent most of the 2010s and 2020s outside the mainstream.