Liz Lawrence made a grief album that breaks the angry male rock mold
Liz Lawrence's new album Vespers is a quiet, frank record about losing her sister—and it breaks every rule of how grief albums are supposed to sound.
After her sister Jessie died in a holiday accident in Ireland last year, Liz Lawrence couldn't touch music for months. "That's in the past and I don't know what's going to be asked of me now," she remembers thinking. Work felt pointless. Playing felt impossible.
Slowly, though, she found her way back through other women's voices — Lisa O'Neill, Adrianne Lenker, Joanna Newsom. The kind of singers who didn't scream their pain, who sat with it instead. And as grief got squeezed out by the noise of ordinary life, Lawrence realised she needed something specific: songs about sadness that didn't need to rage.
So she searched Reddit for the best grief albums ever made. What came back was predictable. A long list of loud, angry records. Mostly rock. Mostly metal. Almost entirely men.
"I was just looking for open and frank sadness," she says. Not fury. Not the kind of anguish that roars. Just honest, quiet devastation.
That's what Vespers became. Her fifth album, and maybe her most personal — a straightforward memorial to Jessie, who was on holiday with her partner and two small kids when she died. There's no artifice here, no metaphor hiding the wound. Just Lawrence's voice, her words, and the space between them.
The record sits apart from most albums about loss you've probably heard. It doesn't perform sorrow. It doesn't make grief look noble or transformative. It just lets it breathe, which turns out to be the thing nobody was really making.
