‘The Sad Album’ is a powerful, exhilarating new music-theatre work by Laura Bowler and lovemusic collective. Blending raw personal stories with explosive sound, movement and dark humour, it transforms grief into a thrilling live experience. Through virtuosic performance and choreographed chaos, the show invites audiences into an intense, intimate and unforgettable journey through loss, laughter and survival.

The Sad Album is an excavation of the darker, stranger, and more tender aspects of grief. Composer and singer Laura Bowler and the musicians of lovemusic have shared stories, laughed, cried, and raged in an effort to understand – and dismantle – the masks people wear when confronting the loss of someone they love. This new show, premiered at Musica Festival in Strasbourg, offers a journey through the voids left behind, magnified frustrations, and celebrated mundanities, gathered over a year and a day of filling and amplifying grief’s silences and absurdities.

Slipping between the universal and the personal, the raw and the precise, the comic and the tragic, The Sad Album explores a permanently altered reality. Drawing from psychological and neurological research, but also deeply personal testimony from the artists, in this visceral and explosive new work, lovemusic are happy to talk about being sad.

The Sad Album pushes the performers to the limits of physical expression. A torrent of text pours from Bowler, while the musicians perform vertiginous loops. True to lovemusic’s performance style, the artists are physically involved in the performance, creating an hour of choreographed chaos that grapples with the impossibility of defining grief.

This event will last approximately 70 minutes, with no interval.

Reviews

‘With the Strasbourg-based collective lovemusic […], the British artist [Laura Bowler] has created a score that is torn, violent and almost chaotic […] It is a work that is both musical and literary, carried by an ensemble at the very highest level and by a remarkable author.’ Maurice Ulrich, L’Humanité

‘Strikingly contemporary, this musical theatre piece explores the experience of grief with an irresistible, whimsical lightness, elevated by beautifully inventive staging.’ Jérôme Provençal, Les Inrockuptibles

lovemusic

lovemusic is a Strasbourg based collective specialising in new music. At the core of its work is close collaboration with composers to create new works through shared artistic responsibility, challenging hierarchical and patriarchal models and fostering a safe, inclusive environment. Drawing on the diverse backgrounds of its members, lovemusic programmes across a wide range of contemporary aesthetics, foregrounding diversity. Performing un-conducted and working with lighting, video and scenography, the collective creates new concert experiences. lovemusic performs worldwide in international festivals and concert halls and is committed to supporting emerging composers. In 2025, lovemusic received the Ernst von Siemens Ensemble Award.

Laura Bowler

Laura Bower is a composer and vocalist working across music theatre, multidisciplinary performance, concert music and opera. Her work brings together composition and performance, often placing her own voice at the centre of theatrical musical forms. She has been commissioned internationally by ensembles and orchestras including BBC Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Goteborg Symfoniker, Copenhagen Philharmonic, Decoder Ensemble, Ensemble Phace, Basel Sinfonietta and lovemusic collective. Recent projects include several large-scale multimedia music theatre works presented at festivals across Europe, as well as a new 30-minute orchestral song cycle for Barbara Hannigan, setting text by novel prize-winning author, Han Kang. Laura is the Deputy Head of Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music.