Beth Orton

Name: Beth Orton
Start: 2026-10-21T20:00:00+01:00
Location: Norwich Arts Centre

Wed 21 Oct 2026

A black-and-white, heavily blurred portrait of a person with braided hair and bangs. The image appears to have multiple overlapping exposures, creating a ghostly, distorted effect where facial features are doubled and smeared. The person seems to be wearing a light-colored shirt with a collar, but details are obscured by the motion blur and damage-like marks across the surface. The overall mood is eerie and abstract, with a vintage, degraded photograph quality.

PERRL presents Beth Orton + Special Guests

For more than 30 years, Beth Orton has been our antenna to the cosmos, the poet laureate of forces too vast to take in all at once.

Her records arrive patiently, unified by emotional focus rather than any single musical style. From the pioneering folktronica of 1996’s Trailer Park to the earthy classic-rock miniatures of 2006’s Comfort of Strangers through 2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, she has built a catalogue that exists proudly out of time, each album its own planet in an ever-expanding solar system.

If Weather Alive lived underwater, spectral and dreamlike, The Ground Above marks a resurfacing. It is her most direct and unapologetic music to date; profoundly urgent, embodied, and powered by a hard-won strength. Where the previous record unfolded in a suspended dreamscape, The Ground Above finds Orton firmly back on land, taking a giant intake of air. It documents survival, integration and renewal without denial, acceptance without resignation.

Beth Orton today announces her new album The Ground Above, out June 26th on Partisan Records. She also shares new single “Waiting,” a slow building, life affirming track with subtle influences of Laura Nyro, Carol King and Orton’s early collaborator Terry Callier. Orton says the song “is a celebration of moving out of the holding pattern fear keeps us in.”