Absolutely Designed Her Own Wedding Dress To Marry Noah Noah In The Agoura Hills

It was, according to Noah Urrea (the 25-year-old musician otherwise known as Noah Noah), divine intervention that brought Abby-Lynn Keen (the 22-year-old Tooting native who performs as Absolutely) to his doorstep in 2023. “I like to say that God delivered my wife,” he says. “That’s what it felt like.” That may be true, but there was also a more earthly intermediary in Brockhampton’s Merlyn Wood. Noah had been producing music for the rapper, who met Abby at a festival where she was performing and invited her to join them for a session at his LA duplex. “I was instantly infatuated, and wanted to get to know her more,” he says, though the true test of their compatibility would be the ease with which they composed a song. “It was so quick,” says Abby. “There was a synergy from the beginning.”

So much so, in fact, that the couple initially set out to be collaborators, filling their diaries with friendly coffees and gigs over the next couple of months. On one such occasion, Abby played Noah her then-unreleased “I Just Don’t Know You Yet”, a speculative love song to the man she would one day marry. “I remember thinking, ‘There’s no way this is how she feels about her future person,’” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Yo, if that were to be me, I would be, like, the luckiest dude.’” It was only over dinner à deux at Bestia in Los Angeles, where they could barely stop laughing over the plates of Italian food, that a deeper connection became impossible to ignore. They decided there and then to book a trip to Las Vegas to see John Mayer at the Sphere a few days later. After that, they were inseparable, making things official three weeks later. “There was no world where I didn’t see myself taking this as serious as possible,” says Noah. “It was just so beautiful and innocent and awesome that it needed to be for real.” There was, it would seem, something of the ordained to their meeting. “We share a faith,” Abby adds. “And it’s been so cool that we’ve grown in that together.”

The two are, in matters of romance, traditional beyond their years. To wit: it was at a New Year’s Eve party in 2025 that Noah asked Abby’s dad, Paul, for her hand in marriage. “Abby and her sisters had decided to go on a last-minute ski trip, and I was like, ‘Great, go! Because I’m gonna stay in London and hang out with your parents,’” he says. “I waited until 2am, when everyone had gone home, to muster up the courage.” Paul had a proposition of his own: suggesting that Noah pop the question onstage during her sister Rachel’s (Raye) This Tour May Contain New Music, for which her younger sisters, Abby and Lauren (Amma), were support acts. Noah decided to wait until the tour had wrapped. “I had just come off at the Greek Theatre on our final night and he was like, ‘We have to go to the after-party,’ which I didn’t really want to do, because I was so tired,” Abby says. “Still, I got ready.” Before they left their new home in the Hollywood Hills, Noah suggested they go on a stroll to take in the view across the canyon, where two friends were stationed in the hedgerows, cameras poised. “He got down on one knee, and then we prayed together. It was so cute, and I’m glad it wasn’t onstage.”

The after-party was, of course, an engagement party, with the couple’s families waiting at Raye’s condo alongside a mariachi band and tacos – a nod to Noah’s Mexican heritage. “I couldn’t stop crying,” says Abby, whose new marquise-cut diamond ring her fiancé had spent months designing with Liten Studio. “She’s a kooky, eccentric sort of woman,” he says. “So I had to make sure it was a one-of-a-kind situation.” Four months later, he slipped on an ornate gold ring jacket as her wedding band beneath the oak trees on a ranch in the rolling hills of Agoura. With room to host her family travelling from London, the venue suited the couple’s “fairytale vibe” while offering better odds of a rain-free wedding day than Abby’s hometown. “Everyone said we were insane for planning to get married so soon, but life is so unpredictable for us, since we’re always on the road, that we were just like, ‘Nah, f*** it,’” says Abby. “As soon as we were engaged I started researching suppliers, putting together Pinterest boards, and as much as we tried to do it all by ourselves, we ended up calling in Celebration by Brandy as our wedding planner, and I’m so glad we did. She was so helpful”.

It was all hands on deck by the time the couple convened their loved ones in late September. Maid-of-honour Lauren was setting up cabins and filling gift bags with Kleenex, gum and snacks, while Noah’s sister Linsey hosted a welcome barbecue at her house – a much-needed breather for Raye, whose week had taken her from the VMAs to the Grammy Museum and Bruno Mars’s tour. As a game of Guess Who broke the ice between the in-laws, the would-be-weds headed home early ahead of the following day’s rehearsal, bringing along an abundance of colourful glassware and audio equipment from their own home. “It was so much fun, doing it DIY-style, until my best man accidentally hit his head on a tree and almost passed out,” Noah says. “He turned out to be okay, but I’m sure he’s still concussed.” Less composed was everyone else, left “crying like a baby”, as Abby puts it, when she walked through the ceremony in a vintage polka-dot Stavropoulos dress from 1978. “It was so sweet seeing all the different periods of our lives coming together. Everyone was feeling it that day.” The couple made the first of what would be many toasts over dinner beneath chandeliers and amid floral arrangements by Noah’s mum, Wendy, before retiring to twin beds ahead of the wedding proper.

The day began with the spotlight on Abby’s cousin, whose birthday called for a big breakfast and the sort of soulful rendition of “Happy Birthday” you’d expect from the Keen family. The arrival of rental equipment struck a less melodious note, which the bride took as her cue to leave the men to the set-up and retreat to a common room dotted with beanbags and rugs. There, her seven bridesmaids were enlisted to push a table towards the window: even on her wedding day, Abby would be doing her own glam, and good light was essential. “I’m very particular about make-up, and get overstimulated when someone else is doing my hair,” she says. “And I think I needed a breather, anyway.” What followed was a decidedly more communal undertaking. “Everyone doing their make-up together, borrowing lip gloss, my sister doing my little sister and mum’s make-up,” she continues. “And seeing everyone getting into their dresses, and looking so cohesive, was just so emotional.” Abby had assigned each bridesmaid a colour – and had no intention of relinquishing creative control when it came to her own look, either. “I always knew I wanted to design my own wedding dress,” she says. “And because I’ve designed so many of my stage looks, I was born ready.”

With no references or moodboard, she opened Procreate on her iPad and entered a creative flow state, sketching an antique-inspired gown with a corseted lace bodice and a full skirt of cascading ruffles. Her longtime collaborator Guvanch brought it to life over the next two months, also creating a shorter, simplified version for dancing as a wedding gift. “Between fittings at Lollapalooza and random hotels, we added stripes and feathers and beads and sparkles, and it looked kind of like a coagulation of all of my stage looks, but exaggerated,” she says. “It was a dream come true, and I never wear white, so it just made it even more special.” She walked down an outdoor aisle carpeted in rugs, wearing an elfin veil, Swarovski earrings and Miz Mooz heels that she and a friend had covered in lace using Gorilla Glue. Playing was “Truth” by Kamasi Washington, the soundtrack to the couple’s first kiss. For Noah and his best man, the song doubles as a litmus test: anyone who loves it as much as they do could be the one. “Abby said it was the best song she had ever heard,” says Noah, who wore McQueen. As for her dress? “I’m just surprised she didn’t wear burgundy.”

After their local pastor had pronounced them husband and wife, the newlyweds retreated to a private room for “a moment of joyful relief”, as the groom puts it. While they sat reeling on a couch, “like, ‘Wait, what the frick did we just do, bro? We’re married,’” their guests found their way to margaritas, pornstar and espresso martinis, and micheladas, before taking their seats at long, candlelit tables dotted with “Dr Seuss-style” flower arrangements by Concrete Stems, beneath strings of festoon lights and colourful paper lanterns. Abby changed into her second and final look for the alfresco dinner. “It took far longer than expected because the wedding dress was so heavy,” she says. “It took four people to get me out of it.” The couple then made their entrance to the sound of Alceu Valença’s “Belle de Jour”, taking their places at a sweetheart table from which they could watch their guests tuck into a West African-meets-Mexican menu of jollof rice, plantain and tacos, before the speeches began.“I learnt a lot about Abby,” Noah says. “She’s scared of insects now, but she used to steal Tupperware and fill it with dirt to make homes for insect families, a little bit like Noah’s Ark.”