Into The Music
Beth Orton returned this week with “The Ground Above,” her first new song since 2022’s Weather Alive, and it lands with the kind of quiet conviction that has defined the best work of her career. If you haven’t been paying close attention to what Orton has been doing since her late-90s emergence, now is a reasonable time to catch up.
Orton was always a strange kind of star. She emerged from a very specific corner of British music, one where trip-hop, folk, and electronic production collided in ways that should have been awkward but often weren’t. Her debut Trailer Park arrived in 1996 and felt genuinely original, a singer-songwriter record that also felt like it had been assembled by people who spent a lot of time around drum machines. The collaboration with the Chemical Brothers and William Orbit that surrounded her early work gave her an unusual background, and she carried it into records that kept getting quieter and more personal.
The later part of her career, particularly Sugaring Season (2012) and Kidsticks (2016), found Orton in different territory, the former almost entirely acoustic and folk-leaning, the latter reaching back toward something more experimental. Weather Alive, her 2022 return after years away, was widely considered her most fully realized work in a long time: an album built around space, silence, and a jazz-inflected looseness that let her voice land without anything getting in the way.
“The Ground Above” suggests she’s not done with that approach. The new track is patient, unhurried, structured around mood rather than momentum. It’s the kind of song that rewards attention and resists summary, which has always been part of Orton’s appeal. She doesn’t write for the impatient listener, and at this point she doesn’t seem particularly interested in starting.
What makes Orton a genuinely interesting figure in contemporary music is that she’s managed to stay vital across three decades without chasing formats or trends. She’s never made a bid for algorithmic relevance, never shifted toward whatever sound was moving that particular year. Her audience found her early and has largely stayed with her, which is a rarer outcome than it looks.
She’s also, chronically, a little underrated. The trip-hop era produced a handful of artists who got outsized credit for defining it, and Orton wasn’t always among them despite being as responsible for the sound as most. Her reputation has grown slowly and by consensus rather than by any particular moment of critical coronation, which may actually be the more durable kind.
“The Ground Above” doesn’t come with a confirmed album attached, but it would be surprising if it arrived as a standalone. Orton takes her time between records and tends to release them fully formed. For now the song does exactly what it needs to: it reminds you she’s here, and it gives you a reason to be glad about that.