Liz Lawrence’s Vespers approaches as a different kind of grief album

Liz Lawrence’s upcoming Vespers remains one of the most moving indie songwriter stories to carry into 24 May. The album, due 5 June, was shaped by the sudden death of Lawrence’s sister Jessie in 2024, and recent coverage frames it as a stripped-back, folk-influenced departure from her more upbeat indie-pop work.

What makes the story powerful is that Lawrence does not seem to be treating grief as a dramatic aesthetic. She describes the difficulty of finding words for loss, and then finding that there are in fact thousands of them: hospital rooms, routines, impossible wishes, ordinary moments that suddenly become unbearable. Vespers appears to be an album made not because a release cycle demanded it, but because music gradually became possible again.

That gives the record a very different kind of weight. For indie readers, this is a strong 24 May preview item because Lawrence’s work sits in a tradition of songwriters using plain detail to reach complicated emotional territory. Grief albums can easily become grand and generalized. Vespers sounds smaller, more specific and therefore more human. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/may/21/liz-lawrence-grief-vespers-interview