Lou Salome is what happens when a love story turns itself into a band. On paper, it reads like an indie film pitch: New York glam rock poet Leah Hennessey (step-daughter of David Johansen) collides with L.A. dream pop singer songwriter Jack Kilmer (son of Val Kilmer) and together they build an imagined romance that becomes a creative engine. In reality, they have shaped that chemistry into a debut album called Just Something You Cared About In High School, a widescreen collection of songs that glow with teenage longing, romantic mythology, and everything that gets lost in the blur between memory and desire.

Their origin story already feels like a scene from the album. Jack and Leah met in an acting class in New York during a snowstorm, assigned the campfire moment from My Own Private Idaho. Somewhere between the lines they were reading and the weather outside, they found a rhythm that carried past the classroom. A shared obsession with obscure British satirical post punk pushed them into writing together by instinct, and they jumped onto stages almost immediately, opening for underground icons like Ian Svenonius and Christeene.

Both artists already lived at the intersection of film and music. Jack is an indie actor known for films like Palo Alto and Lords of Chaos, while Leah is a director whose work includes John Early: Now More Than Ever and the cult series Zhe Zhe. That cinematic lens is baked into the DNA of Lou Salome. While the album is not framed as a concept piece, it plays like a film with a pulse, tracing the arc of infatuation from the first electric spark to the heartbreak that follows and, finally, to the moment where rock and roll offers its own strange kind of salvation.

Lou Salome has described their music as a dialogue. Their voices trade off like two characters in the same story, equal parts New York grit and Los Angeles glow. Critics have tagged their sound as romantic post punk pop with threads of glam and dream pop, but the heart of what they do sits in the space where performance and emotion overlap. The singles they have released, including “Your Eyes Immaculate” and “Enemies to Lovers,” lean into that blend. Vivid guitars meet soft focus vocals, and their songwriting feels alive inside its own sense of drama.

Just Something You Cared About In High School may look backward, but its purpose is forward motion. It is the sound of two artists who know how to turn emotion into performance and performance into a world you can step into.