Beth Orton : The Ground Above
Beth Orton is the rare artist to have managed a career in which every release that bears her name feels simultaneously like a reinvention as well as a record that only she could have made. After establishing herself in the ’90s as a troubadour whose songwriting paired seamlessly with electronic sounds, Orton stripped back the beats on more warmly organic records like 2006’s Comfort of Strangers and 2012’s Sugaring Season, and then rediscovered an electronic charge with 2016’s Kidsticks, recorded with Fuck Buttons’ Andrew Hung. Even her acclaimed 1996 worldwide debut Trailer Park was a kind of reset after her 1993 Japan-only, William Orbit-produced album Superpinkymandy, finding a proper balance between that album’s beat-driven sensibility and a more organic singer/songwriter sound.
With her ninth album The Ground Above, Orton’s music is driven by the patient, graceful approach of its predecessor, Weather Alive, but it’s farther along the spectrum—with more open space in its atmospheric arrangements and a delicate beauty binding its eight songs together. If it’s less of an act of reinvention than much of the material that preceded it, however, chalk it up to Orton arriving upon such fertile ground for exploration. Self-produced and featuring contributions from the likes of jazz drummer Tom Skinner, prolific bassist Shahzad Ismaily and Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley, The Ground Above finds Orton creating some of the most stunning sonic landscapes of her career while offering reflections from grief and the cultivation of scars.
Throughout The Ground Above, Orton never rushes anything and gives her collaborators ample room to explore the musical terrain. So when the misty opening of the title track lays down a delicate backdrop for the quiver in her opening lines, “I’m as invincible as grief/Violent as a blade of spring released,” they arrive with a more pronounced gravity. There’s a similar juxtaposition in “Cigarette Curls,” its haunting jazz-pop arrangement standing in spectral contrast to the urgency of a line like “time caught up with me.” There’s a little more spring in the step of “Waiting,” a fitting accompaniment as Orton reaches toward something more hopeful (“I’ve been waiting at the edge of a dream/To jump and fly and find my beautiful wings“) and acknowledges a need to shed some cynicism as well (“I was going to write a gratitude list/Just got to work out my resentment to it“).
The Ground Above comprises some of Orton’s most aching and elegiac songwriting, as evident in the nocturnal fragility of “Celestial Light” or the ghostly whisper of “I’ll Miss You.” The way these songs wrap that sense of grief in human warmth and some of her most gorgeously exploratory musical ideas likewise makes them some of her best. Given the versatility and inventiveness she’s shown over the past 30 years, what Orton creates next might take her far afield of these bittersweet dirges and lullabies, but The Ground Above leaves an enduring impression.
Label: Partisan
Year: 2026
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Beth Orton : The Ground Above
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