A Hole In The Heavens is the second solo album by Liverpool-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Luce Mawdsley, and their first for Lost Map. Released on 19 March 2027 on limited-edition vinyl and digital platforms, its six instrumental compositions draw together sweeping Americana, baroque jazz and experimental folk, refracting the wide-open landscapes of a Western soundtrack through the shores and skies of England’s northwest coast.

Dedicated to Luce’s late mother, Anne, the album took shape following her sudden death in summer 2024. In the days afterwards, Luce began playing their 12-string guitar in the garden of the family home in Formby, finding the beginnings of a record that explores grief’s strange reshaping of familiar places, relationships and memories. Recorded primarily at home and in studios around Liverpool, it pairs their expressive guitar, lap steel and percussion with contributions from Rachel Nicholas on viola, Mikey Kenney on fiddle, Nicholas Branton on saxophone and clarinet, and Michael Paul Metcalfe on drums.

Opening with the majestic ‘The Blood of Flowers’, the album moves between tenderness and tumult: ‘Range Lane’ traces a childhood pathway down to the sea through delicately picked guitar and sighing steel, while ‘Escaping The Wreck’ unleashes cathartic squalls of drums and saxophone. The autumnal ‘A Mother’s Love, A Mother’s Grief’ gives way to the slow-burning improvisation of ‘Water (Is Speaking)’, whose title draws on Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, leaving the record on a soft, searching, unresolved note.

Following the acclaimed Northwest & Nebulous (2024), A Hole In The Heavens finds an expansive new expression for Luce’s wordless storytelling. Full of sorrow, wonder and flashes of awkward humour, it honours the love and courage passed from one person to another, and the ways that connection continues after loss.