Frontier Touring is delighted to announce BRIT Award winner and Mercury Prize nominee Beth Orton will return to Australia in March 2027.
Renowned for her mesmerising live presence, powerfully emotive vocals and singular approach to songwriting, Orton arrives following the release of 2026 release The Ground Above (Partisan/Mushroom) – a bold, deeply personal new chapter in a career spanning more than decades. Building on the spectral, dreamlike world of 2022’s acclaimed release Weather Alive, her latest work finds Orton on more direct and urgent terrain, exploring survival, renewal, love and grief with hard-won strength. Critics were united in their praise:
‘Vast, atmospheric and moving’ – MOJO ★★★★
‘A cohesive behemoth of an album’ – Renowned For Sound
‘Thirty-three years in, Beth Orton is making some of the best music of her life’ – Pitchfork
‘Battered optimism from an artist making the best music of her career’
– The Guardian ★★★★★
Across a catalogue that stretches from the pioneering folktronica of 1996’s Trailer Park to the earthy, classic-rock textures of 2006’s Comfort of Strangers and 2022’s acclaimed, self-produced Weather Alive, Orton has continually defied categorisation. On The Ground Above, she pushes further still, bringing together raw, searching compositions, timeless melodies, spiritual jazz and improvisation in music rooted in lived experience.
Split into two distinct halves, The Ground Above traces the parallel certainties of grief and love, navigating motherhood, mortality, political unease and the ongoing choice to remain present in the world. Self-produced by Orton, the album brings together a trusted circle of collaborators, including multi-instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily and Sam Beste, drummers Tom Skinner (The Smile) and Chris Vatalaro, and bassist Tom Herbert.
“All the songs on the record are looking through the prism of the years from many directions at once,” Orton says. “If writing songs is therapy, it’s hallucinogenic therapy. It’s working with the unconscious, it’s lucid dreaming.”
Long celebrated for a voice capable of moving from whispered intimacy to a primal howl, Orton continues to make music that feels both deeply personal and expansive – an invitation to connect, to reckon with what has come before, and to find the courage to begin again.
Don’t miss the chance to experience one of the UK’s most distinctive and respected songwriters live in Australia next March.