In the months after her sister’s death, singer-songwriter Liz Lawrence couldn’t even listen to music, let alone play it. “I was very much, ‘That’s in the past and I don’t know what’s going to be asked of me now,’” she says. “I didn’t think about my work. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t have any appetite for it.” After slowly gravitating back to music via female vocalists such as Lisa O’Neill, Adrianne Lenker and Joanna Newsom, and as the time afforded to grieving was squeezed out by a life still ongoing, Lawrence realised she needed songs that allowed her to return to that “space of contemplation, reflection and sadness”.
She quickly searched out a Reddit thread of the best grief albums of all time, only to find a lengthy list of very specific rock and metal records chiefly made by men. “I was just looking for open and frank sadness,” she says, as opposed to the anger broiling within the suggested albums. That plain-speaking despair permeates Lawrence’s beautiful fifth album, Vespers, an unvarnished tribute to elder sister Jessie, who died suddenly in 2024 following an accident while on holiday with her partner and two small children in Ireland.
