• News

• All

Feb 07, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Netti Habel

Beth Gibbons of Portishead has announced her debut solo album, Lives Outgrown, and shared its first single, “Floating on a Moment,” via a music video. She’s also announced some tour dates. Lives Outgrown is due out May 17 via Domino. Check out the single below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as the tour dates.

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.”

David Bowie collaborator Tony Oursler directed the “Floating on a Moment” video and had this to say about it: “When I first heard ‘Floating on a Moment’ it literally transported me from place to place, filling me with kaleidoscopic emotions and visions. If possible, I wanted to capture that psychic liquid in this video. Beth’s work is so powerful it can lead us through life’s forests and fires, revealing glimpses of possible futures. With a voice and music like that I knew we had to make images which are open, somehow speculative.”

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

Lives Outgrown Tracklist:

1. Tell Me Who You Are Today
2. Floating On A Moment
3. Burden Of Life
4. Lost Changes
5. Rewind
6. Reaching Out
7. Oceans
8. For Sale
9. Beyond The Sun
10. Whispering Love

Beth Gibbons UK/EU Tour Dates:

5/27: La Salle Pleyel - Paris
5/28: Theater 11 - Zürich
5/30: Primavera Sound Festival - Barcelona
5/31: La Bourse Du Travail - Lyon
6/02: Uber Eats Music Hall - Berlin
6/03: Falkonersalen - Copenhagen
6/05: Tivoli Vredenburg (Main Hall) - Utrecht
6/06: Cirque Royal - Brussels
6/09: The Barbican Centre - London
6/10: Albert Hall - Manchester
6/11: Usher Hall - Edinburgh

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.