It’s difficult not to use the abundant language of nature when describing Beth Orton’s magnificent and much-anticipated new album, Weather Alive. The English singer-songwriter builds a wild and wonderful soundscape you could easily get lost in. Weather Alive is certainly her darkest and heaviest album yet, with eight pregnant tracks exploring themes of loneliness, grief and spiritual connection (and disconnection). But there are also shades of light here, like dawn dappling a dark lake, and there are times when the listening experience is almost meditative.

Orton emerged in the pre-millennial wee hours with her debut album, 1997’s Trailer Park, quickly becoming the definitive sound of 90s comedowns, via her own music and collaborations with The Chemical Brothers. She went on to win the Brit Award for Best Female Artist following her second album, 2000’s Central Reservation. Both those records went gold, and her next, 2002’s Daybreaker, made the UK top ten. Since then, she’s released a further six studio albums, each after a period of apparent hibernation, and with each one she has poked her head up in a slightly unexpected place, like a flower pushing through a new crack in the pavement.

Released on Partisan Records, this is the first album Orton has produced entirely on her own, in her garden studio in Camden, complete with what she describes in a statement as ‘a cheap, crappy upright piano’; it retains that organic, ragged quality, while never feeling underproduced. In this sense, Weather Alive is a return to form after her last album, 2016’s more software-centric Kidsticks, which, though critically acclaimed, felt somehow spiritually misaligned as though the electronicism filtered out something vital. But here, it feels as though we’re listening directly from the source.

Orton remains a wonderful collaborator, and there are contributions here from Mancunian jazz star Alabaster dePlume, Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, The Invisible bassist Tom Herbert and multi-instrumentalist and composer Shahzad Ismaily. But she has never sounded so fully in control of the overall sound (or so alone within it all). This sense of self-assurance bleeds into her lyrics too. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a woman long ago crowned The Comedown Queen (reigning over the dopamine-barren half-light following a drug-fuelled night, rather than the drug-fuelled night itself), ‘Friday Night’ is not about a night out clubbing. Instead, with characteristic poeticism, Orton seeks to capture the ‘pressure’ of someone’s absence (‘there’s a stillness left after you leave that will speak of what you left’).

In the song ‘Lonely’, this isolation takes on a physical form so that she might better grapple with it.‘Falling, falling, I can’t see / I don’t know what is good for me / Lonely, lonely, lonely / Likes my company.’ Here her voice reaches new depths, as when she elicits the ragged, almost bestial roar: ‘I’m too exposed / Honey, I’m rubbed raw.’

It’s in ‘Fractals’ where the drums of the album really kick in, a luminous and surprisingly dancey track in spite of the sad finality of the hook: ‘You stop believing in magic.’ It’s a song you’d imagine dancing round your kitchen to, more ‘alone’ than ‘lonely’.

Then there’s ‘Arms Around A Memory’, perhaps the album’s most atmospheric moment. Among other things, it’s about the shifting sands of unreliable memories, where in one fevered recollection it might be‘me, with my broken bottle smile’ and next ‘you, with your broken bottle dreams.’ Just like the disparate sounds emerging from this many-layered track, truth feels elusive, something hard to grab hold of.

Still, we are lucky that Beth Orton has spent time ‘wrapped with [her] arms around a memory.’ To use a final nature metaphor, there are moments when it feels like she’s succeeded in catching a bird between two hands; the evanescent listening experience akin to watching it take flight. And it’s the urge to watch that bird fly again and again that makes Weather Alive so ripe for repeated listening.

Weather Alive is released by Partisan Records on Friday 23 September.