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Apr 10, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Netti Habel

Beth Gibbons of Portishead is releasing her debut solo album, Lives Outgrown, on May 17 via Domino. Now she has shared its second single, “Reaching Out,” via a music video. Weirdcore (Aphex Twin, Arca) directed the song’s interactive video. Watch a static version below or check out the interactive version here.

A press release describes the video in more detail: “The video features 4D models of Beth freefalling through a kinetic sci-fi spacescape. As the video progresses the models of Beth change to represent the different stages in her life, echoing the Lives Outgrown of the album title. If you click and hold down on your mouse button this allows you to interact and rotate the models to have a sense of trying to reach each other in impossible ways.”

Previously she shared its first single, “Floating on a Moment,” via a music video. “Floating on a Moment” was one of our Songs of the Week.

Portishead’s last album was 2008’s Third. In 2002 Gibbons teamed up with Rustin Man (aka Talk Talk’s Paul Webb) for the collaborative record Out of Season. In 2014 Gibbons teamed up with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki, to perform Henryk Górecki’s acclaimed 1977 symphony, Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). An album and film documenting the performance, simply titled Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), was released in 2019. In 2022, Gibbons collaborated with Kendrick Lamar on the song “Mother I Sober,” from his Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers album.

Despite her decades-long career, Lives Outgrown is her first true solo album. Gibbons produced the album with James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, The Last Dinner Party), with additional production by Lee Harris (Talk Talk).

The album was inspired by a decade of change, as she entered middle age and the vitality and hope of youth started to fade. As loved ones started to pass away much more regularly than when she was younger.

“I realized what life was like with no hope,” says Gibbons in a press release. “And that was a sadness I’d never felt. Before, I had the ability to change my future, but when you’re up against your body, you can’t make it do something it doesn’t want to do.”

Topics on the album include motherhood, anxiety, menopause, and mortality.

“People started dying,” Gibbons says. “When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out. You think: ‘We’re going to get beyond this. It’s going to get better.’ Some endings are hard to digest.”

Gibbons adds, more hopefully: “Now I’ve come out of the other end, I just think, you’ve got to be brave.”

Read our rave review of Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs).

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