Grief does not easily arrange itself into words. It can be a paralysing silence, uncontrollable anger, guilt, love, and the constant presence of another person’s absence—all at once. Music, however, can find a voice where everyday language is no longer enough.
1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen
Nick Cave’s fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, died in a tragic accident in 2015. Released four years later, Ghosteen is no longer an album about the first shock of loss. It is the music of a world in which absence has become a permanent part of everyday life.
The songs seem to drift, as though they were not entirely born of this world. Cave does not attempt to find an explanation. Instead, he explores the ways in which love endures, how faith can be shaken, and how it might slowly be rebuilt. Ghosteen is a profoundly sad album, yet it is not without hope: it suggests that those we have lost may remain part of our lives in another form. The album is one of the defining works of Cave’s creative life after loss.
Listen to Ghosteen on Spotify.
2. David Bowie: Blackstar
David Bowie’s final album was released on his sixty-ninth birthday, just two days before his death.
Blackstar is not a conventional album about grief; it is a deliberate confrontation with mortality. Its enigmatic imagery, jazz-inflected departures, and unsettling atmosphere reveal an artist who transforms even his own passing into art. After Bowie’s death, the songs rearranged themselves in the minds of listeners, taking on the quality of a farewell message. They do not offer reassurance. Instead, they remind us that even at the threshold of our own finitude, we remain capable of creating.
Listen to Blackstar on Spotify.
3. Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell
Sufjan Stevens lost his mother, Carrie, in 2012. Their relationship had been distant and painfully fractured: she lived with mental illness and addiction, and was absent for much of Stevens’s childhood.
Carrie & Lowell is therefore not only about the death of a mother, but also about grieving a relationship that never became what the child had longed for. Amid quiet guitars, whispered vocals, and fragments of family memories, love, anger, abandonment, and yearning all emerge side by side. Stevens himself has spoken of the songs as a way of working through his grief.
Listen to Carrie & Lowell on Spotify.
4. Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me
Phil Elverum’s wife, Geneviève Castrée, died of pancreatic cancer in 2016 at the age of thirty-five. Not long afterwards, Elverum recorded this album in the room where she had died, using some of her instruments.
A Crow Looked at Me may be one of the most direct and unguarded albums about grief ever made. It offers no consoling metaphors and no grand revelations. Shopping trips, empty rooms, clothes, and ordinary household objects reveal what it means when someone is no longer there, yet everything still carries their presence. The album does not aestheticise pain. That is precisely why it speaks with such extraordinary accuracy to those who already know the everyday reality of absence.
Listen to A Crow Looked at Me on Spotify.
5. Lou Reed: Magic and Loss
Lou Reed’s 1992 album was inspired by his experiences of the illness and death of two close friends. Magic and Loss traces something close to an entire journey through grief: from the shock of diagnosis and the helplessness of sitting beside a hospital bed, through death, and into remembrance.
Reed does not soften the realities of physical decline or fear. Yet he also shows how loss can transform the person who remains. The “magic” in the title does not mean taming death. It refers instead to the inexplicable force through which a relationship does not become nothing simply because the other person has died.
Listen to Magic and Loss on Spotify.
6. Japanese Breakfast: Psychopomp
Michelle Zauner’s mother died of cancer in 2014. Created in the aftermath of that loss, Psychopomp is not quiet or monochrome grief music: dreamlike guitars, indie pop, and melodies that seem almost liberating gather around the pain.
This duality is what makes the album so distinctive. Grief is not always slow and sombre; sometimes it is loud, colourful, and bewilderingly alive. Zauner used music as a form of personal therapy while re-examining her relationship with her mother, her Korean heritage, and her own identity.
Listen to Psychopomp on Spotify.
7. Arcade Fire: Funeral
While Arcade Fire were creating their debut album, several members of the band experienced deaths within their families. This is where the title Funeral came from, yet the record is, perhaps surprisingly, as much about the desire to live as it is about death.
Its songs evoke childhood homes, family bonds, and disappearing worlds. The music often swells into something anthemic, as though singing together might hold, for a little while, what is falling apart. Funeral reminds us that grief can also be a shared experience: pain does not only ask us to fall silent—it can also invite us to cry out and dance together.
8. Gang of Youths: angel in realtime.
Gang of Youths frontman Dave Le’aupepe began working on this album after the death of his father. In the midst of his grief, he discovered previously unknown family stories, the existence of siblings he had never known about, and his father’s Samoan heritage.
angel in realtime. is therefore both a farewell and an investigation into family history. Expansive rock music, strings, electronic textures, and quiet confessions meet within it. Here, grief is not only an act of looking back. It also carries the recognition that we can never know the people we love completely. Absence opens new questions, while remembrance redraws our understanding of who we ourselves are.
Listen to angel in realtime. on Spotify.
9. Lhasa de Sela: Lhasa
Lhasa de Sela’s third and final album was released in 2009. By then, the singer was living with breast cancer; she died on the first day of 2010, at the age of just thirty-seven. Inevitably, the album can now be heard as the quiet closing of a body of work, even though it is not a grief album in the conventional sense.
Lhasa’s voice holds both fragility and a deep, earthbound strength. Her songs speak of love, solitude, letting go, and our place in the world. Listening to the album, it is not the drama of death that comes to the fore, but the weight and preciousness of being present: the recognition of how valuable the brief time we share with one another truly is. In retrospect, the closing song, Anyone and Everyone, feels like an especially moving farewell.
10. Daniel Norgren: Alabursy and the Music of The Eight Mountains
The Eight Mountains is not built around a conventional film score. Much of its emotional world is shaped by earlier recordings from Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren, including songs from his album Alabursy.
The story follows the friendship between two men across several decades, their relationships with their fathers, their growing distance from one another, and the losses they endure. Norgren’s weathered voice, slow piano lines, and almost untouched recordings sound as though they were coming from an old house or a half-forgotten memory. The music does not try to explain grief; it gives grief a landscape. Mountains, silence, and time create a space in which absence can slowly be recognised. These songs remind us that some relationships continue to shape our lives even when the other person is no longer beside us.
Listen to Alabursy on Spotify.
11. Sinéad O’Connor: Universal Mother
Sinéad O’Connor’s 1994 album Universal Mother is a deeply personal work about motherhood, the vulnerability of childhood, faith, anger, and loss. It does not respond to a particular death; rather, it gives voice to the wounds that family relationships, rejection, and the absence of love can leave within us.
One of the album’s most beautiful songs is In This Heart. Its almost completely unadorned a cappella performance feels at once like a declaration of love, a prayer, and a lament. There is no instrumental arrangement to soften the vulnerability of the human voice. O’Connor’s singing carries the sense that love does not cease after loss: it continues to live in the body, in memory, and in everything we can no longer say to the person we miss. For this reason, In This Heart can speak with particular depth and tenderness at funerals and memorial ceremonies.
Listen to Universal Mother on Spotify.
What Music Preserves
Music cannot heal in our place, but it can sit beside us. It can give words to what we are not yet able to say, and for a few minutes, it can connect us with others walking the same profoundly human—and deeply solitary—path. In grief, sometimes even this can mean a great deal: hearing that our silence and sorrow have an echo in other souls.
Important to knowThe content on this website is intended to provide information, reflection and emotional support. It is not a substitute for personalised care from a psychologist, psychiatrist, psychotherapist or other qualified professional, nor for medical treatment when this is needed.
If the pain of loss feels increasingly difficult to carry alone, please do not remain isolated. Share what you are experiencing with someone you trust and consider seeking professional support. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, but an important act of care towards yourself.
