Beth Gibbons has always sung the blues. This remains evident on the Portishead vocalist’s tellingly titled new solo album, Lives Outgrown, recorded over the last decade with former Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris and Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford. Thirty years after Gibbons’ emotive voice was first laid bare on Portishead’s era-defining Dummy album, Lives Outgrown has her taking stock of motherhood, menopause and mortality.

‘People started dying,’ Gibbons is quoted as saying in the album’s press release. ‘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.’ Since Gibbons and Portishead co-conspirator Geoff Barrow took the leap from dole-queue Enterprise Allowance scheme to winning the Mercury Music Prize, two other Portishead studio albums saw the light of day. The most recent, Third, appeared in 2008.

Gibbons collaborated with Rustin Man in 2002 on Out Of Season, while her 2014 performance with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on an interpretation of Henryk Górecki’s ‘Symphony Number 3’ became a best-seller. In 2021, Portishead’s mournful take on Abba’s ‘SOS’ for Ben Wheatley’s big-screen adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel, High-Rise, was released online in support of mental-health charity, MIND. Lives Outgrown is a deeply personal record that suggests it is a release in more ways than one. ‘Now I’ve come out of the end,’ Gibbons says, ‘I just think you’ve got to be brave.’

Lives Outgrown is released by Domino on Friday 17 May; Beth Gibbons is on tour Sunday 9–Tuesday 11 June.