Coming fresh off the group’s 2026 GRAMMY Award win for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance (for “Donnacha Dennehy: Land Of Winter”), Alarm Will Sound — the 20-member band The New York Times calls “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene,” and which has spent 25 years dismantling boundaries between genres — launch AWS 25, a series of album releases and live performances that serve as a yearlong celebration of Alarm Will Sound’s 25th year. AWS 25 serves as both a reflection on the group’s varied, form-breaking work over its quarter-century existence as well as a glimpse into the expansive possibilities for their future.

Since their 2001 debut performing the music of Steve Reich at New York’s Miller Theatre, Alarm Will Sound has treated the concert hall less as a sanctuary and more as a laboratory. Over the past 25 years, they’ve translated Aphex Twin’s glitch-heavy electronic masterworks into blistering acoustic arrangements on their landmark 2005 album Acoustica; collaborated with Dirty Projectors on The Getty Address; built multimedia explorations of cultural rupture with projects like 1969, reframing Lennon, McCartney, Stockhausen, Ono, Berio, and Bernstein through the lens of political upheaval; and joined Björk onstage at Carnegie Hall to launch her Vulnicura world tour. Along the way, they’ve championed a generation of boundary-pushing composers and artists — from John Luther Adams and Meredith Monk to Jlin, Tyondai Braxton, Eartheater, and Tyshawn Sorey — continually expanding what a chamber ensemble can be.

Alarm Will Sound has moved fluidly between iconic concert halls and experimental spaces — from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to Brooklyn’s Roulette and the Bang on a Can Marathon — appearing everywhere from Disney Hall and the Walker Art Center to underground festival stages across Europe. International tours have taken them to the Barbican, Holland Festival, and Sacrum Profanum, underscoring their unusual position: equally at home inside classical institutions and at the edges of contemporary culture.

Learn more about Alarm Will Sound’s unique 25-year journey here.