Portishead’s Beth Gibbons has finally announced her long-elusive debut solo album — Lives Outgrown is arriving May 17 on Domino, and today, we get a first taste of the record with “Floating on a Moment.”
The song is a far cry from Portishead’s nervy, film-noir trip hop (though it shares a bit of DNA with the more folk-indebted, organic sounds of 2008’s Third), and features Gibbons’s inimitable voice over a sinewy, acoustic baroque arrangement.
Lives Outgrown features 10 songs recorded over a period of 10 years and was produced by James Ford and Gibbons with additional contributions from Talk Talk’s Lee Harris.
“I realized what life was like with no hope,” Gibbons said in a statement. “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.”
“People started dying,” she continued. “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.”
The video for “Floating on a Moment” was directed by multi-media artist and director Tony Oursler, who said of the video:
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.
Check that out, plus the Lives Outgrown tracklist, below.
Lives Outgrown:
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