Veteran UK singer-songwriter Beth Orton has never been afraid to play around with genre or to stretch her sound out in all kinds of different directions. Over the years, she's collaborated with people like the Chemical Brothers and Fuck Buttons' Andrew Hung. In 2022, she released Weather Alive, a stirring and powerful record that she recorded with a crew of jazz musicians like Alabaster dePlume, Tom Herbert, and Tom Skinner. Today, Orton releases her first proper single since that LP, and it's an honest-to-god epic.
Beth Orton's new song "The Ground Above" lasts for eight and a half minutes, and it builds from swirling impressionism to percussive meditation. Orton just took part in a Marianne Faithfull tribute concert, and her own voice has some of that same creaky authority, as she sings about the revelations and perils of joining yourself with another human being. In a press release, she says offers only this quote: ""We are all vulnerable beings living out invincible lives."
Orton wrote and produced "The Ground Above" entirely on her own, and she recorded it with another team of ace musicians. Orton herself sings and plays Fender Rhodes, and her band includes Shahzad Ismaily on bass, Vishal Nayak on drums, Sam Beste on piano, Christos Stylianides on trumpet, and Grey McMurray on electric guitar. The Invisible frontman Dave Okumu is credited with "backwards electric guitar." All these people are clearly here to serve Orton's expansive vision.
Imogen Knight and Joseph Lynn directed the misty, mysterious video for "The Ground Above," and it's a little less safe for work than you might expect. It's mostly languid, out-of-focus shots of Orton in a sheer nightgown. Check it out below.
"The Ground Above," a standalone single for now, is out on Partisan.
