Beth Orton The Ground Above Review: Her Best Album and the Most Important British Folk Record of the Year

[NightHarbour91]

Beth Orton released The Ground Above on June 26 and the response from critics has been extraordinary, with the album appearing on several early-year best of lists and NME describing it as her most focused and emotionally precise work since Central Reservation in 1999. Orton, now 53, has spent her career weaving together folk, electronica and orchestral elements in ways that resist easy categorisation. The Ground Above strips the formula to its essence: voice, guitar, minimal production and songs about grief, time and the strange consolations of the natural world.

The album was largely written in the aftermath of bereavement and the writing shows every mark of that experience without being weighted down by it. Orton has always had the ability to take devastatingly specific emotional situations and find the language that makes them universal, and The Ground Above is her most accomplished application of that talent. Tracks like the opening Unravelling, the stark midpoint Autumn Burial and the closing instrumental sequence are described across reviews as some of the finest music she has produced. NPR Music placed the album second in their New Music Friday picks for the week ending June 26, behind Cecile McLorin Salvant.

Orton first came to widespread attention through her collaborations with Chemical Brothers and Terry Callier in the 1990s before establishing a solo career that won a Mercury Prize. The Ground Above is being discussed as a late-career peak comparable to what Joni Mitchell achieved with Hejira in 1976 or what Leonard Cohen reached with You Want It Darker in 2016. Whether those comparisons hold over time is a matter for future critical assessment, but in June 2026 the consensus is that this record is something exceptional.

New Music Friday: The best albums out June 26 : NPR Musicwww.npr.org

[Policy Wizard]

The Joni Mitchell Hejira comparison is a serious claim and the kind that gets walked back later if the album does not sustain repeated listening. But the description of a stripped-back folk album with minimal production and precise emotional language does match what made Hejira so enduring

[RogueDepot]

Beth Orton's career arc is one of those stories where the general music public lost track of her between Central Reservation and now. For people who followed her through the whole arc this late-period peak is enormously satisfying

[Emma29]

Grief as the subject matter of a folk album is as old as folk itself. What distinguishes the best grief albums is the specificity of the language. Orton has always been a precise lyricist and if The Ground Above reaches that level of precision it will be an important record

[QuantumToken57]

The Chemical Brothers and Terry Callier collaborations from the 1990s were so different from what she does on a stripped-back folk album that it is easy to forget how versatile she has always been. The Ground Above is one mode of a multi-faceted artist

[Lion42]

Mercury Prize winner decades ago and now making what critics are calling her best album is the career trajectory that the music industry does not accommodate enough. Orton never went away, she kept developing, and this is where the development arrived

[HeartbreakKidJason71]

Leonard Cohen's You Want It Darker being the other comparison alongside Hejira is interesting because both those albums were made by artists in their seventies and Orton is 53. If this is truly her best work at 53 what does that imply about where she goes next

[Reacher Erin]

The NPR New Music Friday placing of second behind Cecile McLorin Salvant is its own interesting commentary on the quality of the week. Both records in the top two positions being by mature women artists making their most important work is not something that happens every week