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Acclaimed UK singer-songwriter Beth Orton announces a North American tour in support of her astounding new album, The Ground Above. Stereogum calls the just released eight and a half minute title track “an honest-to-god epic... building from swirling impressionism to percussive meditation.”
A pioneer of the "folktronica" genre (mixing elements of folk and electronica), Orton has long been regarded as possessing one of the most unique and expressive voices in music — a voice that has grown evermore rich and wise over time.
For more than 30 years, Beth Orton has been our antenna to the cosmos, the poet laureate of forces too vast to take in all at once. Her records arrive patiently, unified by emotional focus rather than any single musical style. From the pioneering folktronica of 1996’s Trailer Park to the earthy classic-rock miniatures of 2006’s Comfort of Strangers through 2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, she has built a catalogue that exists proudly out of time, each album its own planet in an ever-expanding solar system.
If Weather Alive lived underwater, spectral and dreamlike, The Ground Above marks a resurfacing. It is her most direct and unapologetic music to date; profoundly urgent, embodied, and powered by a hard-won strength. Where the previous record unfolded in a suspended dreamscape, The Ground Above finds Orton firmly back on land, taking a giant intake of air. It documents survival, integration and renewal without denial, acceptance without resignation.
“All the songs on the record are looking through the prism of the years from many directions at once,” Orton says. “If writing songs is therapy, it’s hallucinogenic therapy. It’s working with the unconscious, it’s lucid dreaming.” The album represents independence and authorship, while being deeply collaborative at its core. Working with trusted musicians including multi-instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily and Vernon Spring’s Sam Beste, drummers Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet, The Smile) and Chris Vatalaro, and bassist Tom Herbert, Orton reaches new heights as a producer, songwriter, singer, and bandleader.
Split into two distinct halves, The Ground Above offers a life-affirming reckoning with grief and love as parallel certainties. “What kept me alive, and sometimes nearly killed me, through most of my childhood and all the way through my early 30s was a kind of feral invincibility, barrelling through. I said yes to life, over and over again, embraced and devoured all that I could, propelled magnetically in a flying dream that didn’t allow for time to catch up with me, except for when it did of course.”
Orton says of the title track: “Love and grief are intrinsically linked. Eventually both come to stop you in your tracks, we are all vulnerable beings living out an invincible existence.” The opening tracks arrive as direct transmissions from the subconscious — raw, searching, volatile — while the latter half settles into some of Orton’s most timeless melodies, evoking Great American Songbook forms refracted through spiritual jazz and improvisation. Each song unfolds as a suite of moments, rooted in lived experience rather than nostalgia.
Throughout the album, Orton navigates aging, motherhood, ambiguous grief, political unease, and the ongoing choice to stay — in love, in art, and in the world. As the world crashed ever deeper into political chaos during the making of the record, that urgency seeped into the music. The Ground Above does not offer solutions, but it insists on presence. It holds a belief in art as a personal revolution, one that asserts humanity, feeling, and connection when truth feels increasingly weightless. As with Weather Alive, Orton self-produced the album to foreground the collective spirit of the room, supported by collaborators whose emotional intelligence and generosity run through every note. Where
the previous record felt like a ghostly conjuring, The Ground Above reaches outward, to connect, to insist on presence, to hold eye contact. It is about standing in earned strength, honouring what was, and building new ground beneath your feet as you step out into worlds where there is often no road map but the one you make step by step.
