Beth Orton – The Ground Above
I’ll say it plainly: this was one of the albums I’d been waiting for all year. We covered two of its singles as they arrived, and three songs in I still hadn’t heard a note that disappointed. So the bar was high. The Ground Above clears it.
For a long stretch, you got the sense Beth Orton wasn’t sure where she fit. The folktronica tag from the 90s followed her around like a smell she couldn’t shake, and the records that came after kept reaching in different directions without quite landing. Then Weather Alive arrived in 2022, built around a cheap upright piano she’d bought on a whim, produced herself, recorded with musicians from the London jazz scene, and suddenly, it was obvious. The thing she’d been circling for years was right there.
The Ground Above is the next chapter of that same story, and it might be the better one. Eight songs, none of them rushing, most of them stretching past five and six minutes. Orton produced it herself again, building it over the better part of a year out of live takes with a rotating cast of players. You can hear that process in the music: nothing here sounds programmed or assembled. It sounds like a room full of people listening to each other.
The title track sets the terms. Eight and a half minutes long, it opens on piano and a low drone, hanging in suspension for a couple of minutes before the band arrives and the whole thing starts to flourish. Orton steps in early with one of the most unforgettable openings she’s ever written, invincible as grief, tearing through the ground to the sky above, delivered in a voice that’s grainier and lower than it used to be. Like she ran across the room to say it and is saying it slowly anyway. The song keeps gathering force in waves, snare pushing, groove deepening, until it lands somewhere close to ecstatic.
That patience is the whole method. Before I Knew rises out of a dark, foreboding hum, brass hovering at the edges while the melody takes shape like a memory you can’t quite hold. Cigarette Curls moves on slow bass and a steady shaker before guitar and keys break it open in the final stretch, a hazy soul groove she sinks into completely: time caught up with me, eventually. These are songs that need their length. The small shifts in pressure and tone are the point, and they wouldn’t register if she rushed them.
Then, on the back half, the record quietly changes shape. Waiting is the turn, the shortest song here and one of her catchiest, a loose Motown-adjacent shuffle that reframes everything. Orton has talked about Laura Nyro and Carole King in connection with it, and you can hear that lineage, but what really comes through is how naturally she carries a soul song. The art-rock textures, the drones and atmosphere, start to feel like the dressing on what was a soul singer all along. She’s quiet and confidential one moment, then opening all the way up.
From there it loosens and warms. Celestial Light is blurry and dreamlike, all tom-tom patter and meandering piano. I’ll Miss You pulls in close, Orton singing like she’s across the table from you, circling the specific ache of missing someone at particular hours of the day, the way grief actually works, sudden and attached to small details. The album closes on Otherside, which started, by her account, as a song about not being able to sleep and grew into something much larger: resilience, freedom, the simple fact of making it through the night. It builds to the biggest, most open-throated moment on the record, tell me you made it out alive, and the journey from the shadowed opener to here feels earned.
What ties it together is the voice. It’s weathered now, cracked in places, and Orton has stopped trying to control every edge of it. That’s the revelation. Where she once kept a certain cool distance, here she lets the music decide how the words come out, and the result is something genuinely soulful: truth over polish, every time. The supporting cast is exceptional throughout, Shahzad Ismaily anchoring the low end and texture, Tom Herbert’s bass, Sam Beste’s piano, Christos Stylianides’ trumpet drifting through the edges, the drummers turning each song toward folk or jazz or something looser. But the sound is hers.
Nine albums in, thirty years past her debut, Orton has made the most direct and emotionally fearless record of her career. Weather Alive announced the resurgence. The Ground Above confirms it isn’t a random event. It’s where she lives now. Give it the time it asks for. It pays you back.
Already on Stereobar:
