The BRIT Award-winning songwriter will perform four headline shows across Australia, bringing her acclaimed 2026 album The Ground Above to local audiences for the first time.
Beth Orton will return to Australia in March 2027 for four headline performances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, marking her first Australian shows since April 2024 and giving audiences their first opportunity to hear songs from her latest album, The Ground Above, performed live.
Presented by Frontier Touring, the four-date visit follows the release of The Ground Above, Orton’s 2026 album for Mushroom Music and Partisan Records. The self-produced collection represents another significant shift in direction for an artist whose career has been defined by an ongoing willingness to move between folk, electronic music, alternative songwriting and experimental arrangements.
The Ground Above follows 2022’s Weather Alive, an album noted for its atmospheric production and introspective songwriting. The new record takes a more direct and urgent approach, exploring the relationship between grief, love, motherhood, mortality and the uncertainty of the modern world.
Orton has described the songs as being viewed “through the prism of the years from many directions at once”.
“If writing songs is therapy, it’s hallucinogenic therapy. It’s working with the unconscious, it’s lucid dreaming,” she said of the creative process behind the album.
The record is divided into two halves, examining parallel emotional experiences through a combination of intimate songwriting, improvisation and spiritual jazz influences. Its musical contributors include multi-instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily and Sam Beste, The Smile drummer Tom Skinner, Chris Vatalaro and bassist Tom Herbert.
The album has attracted strong critical responses, with MOJO describing it as “vast, atmospheric and moving”. Pitchfork observed that “thirty-three years in, Beth Orton is making some of the best music of her life”, while The Guardian awarded the record five stars, praising the “battered optimism” of an artist continuing to develop her songwriting.
That response reinforces Orton’s position as one of Britain’s most distinctive alternative singer-songwriters.
Her career began attracting international attention during the mid-1990s through collaborations with electronic music producers and groups including William Orbit, Andrew Weatherall, Red Snapper and The Chemical Brothers. Those early associations helped establish a musical identity that brought together acoustic folk songwriting and the emerging electronic sounds of the period.
Orton’s 1996 debut album, Trailer Park, became a defining release of that era. Combining traditional songwriting structures with electronic production, it earned Mercury Prize and BRIT Award nominations and introduced her to a much wider audience.
Its follow-up, Central Reservation, arrived in 1999 and secured Orton the BRIT Award for Best British Female Solo Artist. The album further established her ability to combine personal songwriting with arrangements that drew from folk, jazz and electronic music.
Daybreaker followed in 2002, reaching the UK Top 10, before Orton began exploring more stripped-back musical territory with albums including Comfort Of Strangers and Sugaring Season.
She subsequently returned to electronic experimentation with Kidsticks before taking a more atmospheric and expansive approach on Weather Alive.
The Ground Above continues that pattern of creative movement without abandoning the emotional directness that has remained central to her work. Her voice, capable of shifting between understated intimacy and considerable intensity, remains the connecting element across an evolving catalogue.
Beth Orton Australian Tour 2027
Wednesday 17 March 2027, Sydney, NSW, City Recital Hall (Licensed All Ages)
Friday 19 March 2027, Melbourne, VIC, The Forum (18+)
Saturday 20 March 2027, Brisbane, QLD, Princess Theatre (18+)
Tuesday 23 March 2027, Perth, WA, Astor Theatre (Licensed All Ages)
Tickets: Frontier Touring
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