Beth Orton Returns with “The Ground Above,” an Album of Erosion and Defiant Motion

Beth Orton has released The Ground Above, her eighth studio album and a marked shift from 2022’s submerged Weather Alive. Where that record pulled inward, the new one stays above ground—closer to earth, to erosion, to the accumulated weight of time and constant movement.

Across these self-produced tracks, Orton settles into a sparse, often jazz-touched setting. Her voice, windworn and immediate, anchors everything. Opening with just piano, percussion and vocal, “Cigarette Curls” gradually lets in barroom guitar and distant horns without overstatement. “Waiting” borrows the soft-groove warmth of Destroyer’s Kaputt—loping trumpet, flutes, a patient build—and makes the gesture feel naturally her own.

Lyrically, she touches on aging and an encroaching world but refuses to sink into despair. On the title track, the line “I’ve been here before I knew how” reads less like nostalgia than a declaration of presence: proof that she occupied each moment, from Trailer Park in 1996 to now. The album’s defiance is quiet, an insistence on continuing—on adoring, yearning, and finding footing while still in motion.