Beth Orton is back with her first new music since 2022’s revelatory Weather Alive. A new song, “The Ground Above,” reunites the singer-songwriter with Shahzad Ismaily—who played on that last record—along with drummer Vishal Nayak, pianist Sam Beste, trumpeter Christos Stylianides, and guitarists Grey McMurray and Dave Okumu. The song is out now via Partisan, with an album on the horizon. Watch a visualizer for “The Ground Above” below.
On Instagram, Orton shared a statement about the single: “Linear time has no place in music. I find myself trying to iron out my brain like a map, to show what started where, I could spend forever writing notes in the margins, notes to self, finding archaeological artifacts, layers of soil and magic, the strata of love, sorrow and joy in relation to time, all that goes into the architecture of any particular song.”
She added, “What has kept me alive is a feral invincibility, barrelling through life, propelled magnetically as in a flying dream that won’t allow for time to get hold of my ankles and catch up with me. Grief had me say yes to life, to embrace and taste and devour. I know life to be as pointless and as meaningful as I can make it. I wanted to write some of this into a dream, a confluence of meaning and feeling.”
Revisit Allison Hussey’s 5-10-15-20 interview Beth Orton on the Music That Made Her.
