Portishead’s Beth Gibbons has finally announced her debut solo album. Out May 17, the decade-in-the-making LP is called Lives Outgrown, and, below, you can watch director Tony Oursler’s kaleidoscopic video for the single “Floating on a Moment.”
Plans were lain for Lives Outgrown way back in 2013. The songs address anxieties about ageing, according to a press release. “I realized what life was like with no hope,” she said. “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.”
It is also an album of goodbyes, she added. “People started dying. 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…. Now I’ve come out of the other end, I just think, you’ve got to be brave.”
The album follows scattered output from Gibbons since she, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley released Third—itself the product of an 11-year gap—in 2008. In 2019, she released her closest thing to a studio album since: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, a recording of the Henryk Górecki symphony, performed made with Krzysztof Penderecki and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
That aside, Gibbons has made sporadic appearances with other artists, the highest-profile being on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mother I Sober.” Others have ranged from a JJ Doom collaboration to a Black Sabbath cover with a metal band; she also sang Joy Division and David Bowie songs with Afghan girl group the Miraculous Love Kids. And, way back in 2010, Gibbons released a song called “Prospera’s Coda” for a movie of The Tempest.
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Lives Outgrown:
01 Tell Me Who You Are Today
02 Floating on a Moment
03 Burden of Life
04 Lost Changes
05 Rewind
06 Reaching Out
07 Oceans
08 For Sale
09 Beyond the Sun
10 Whispering Love
Beth Gibbons:
05-27 Paris, France – Salle Pleyel
05-28 Zurich, Switzerland – Theater 11
05-30 Barcelona, Spain – Primavera Sound Barcelona
05-31 Lyon, France – Bourse du Travail de Lyon
06-02 Berlin, Germany – Verti Music Hall
06-03 Copenhagen, Denmark – Falkonersalen
06-05 Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg
06-06 Brussels, Belgium – Cirque Royale
06-09 London, England – Barbican Centre
06-10 Manchester, England – Albert Hall
06-11 Edinburgh, Scotland – Usher Hall
