Lives Outgrown is the debut solo studio album by English musician Beth Gibbons, released on 17 May 2024 through Domino Recording Company.[1] The album was produced by Gibbons, James Ford and Lee Harris.[2] It was preceded by the singles "Floating on a Moment", "Reaching Out", and "Lost Changes".[3][4] The album received positive reviews from critics, and was nominated for the 2024 Mercury Prize.[5]
Background and composition
Gibbons wrote the album over a decade, with topics specific to her walk of life nearing age 60, including "motherhood, anxiety, menopause, and mortality".[1] Gibbons said that the album was directly influenced by the deaths of family and friends over the preceding several years and she "realised what life was like with no hope".[6]
Release
On 7 February 2024, Gibbons announced the album alongside its lead single, "Floating on a Moment".[7][8] She released the album's second single, "Reaching Out", on 10 April 2024.[3][9] The album's third single, "Lost Changes", was released on 15 May 2024.[4][10]
Lives Outgrown received a score of 88 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic based on 22 critics' reviews, which the website categorised as "universal acclaim".[11]Uncut felt that "Lives Outgrown is a quite different prospect to Gibbons' previous work – more intimate, more personal, coloured by the grief and goodbyes she has weathered in recent years. But it is still possible to find a thread that runs from here to Out of Season, and back to Portishead".[20]The Wire called it "timeless and considered" and "a complete, but still complicated, portrait of the intersection of grief and life",[21] and Mojo wrote that while it can "all sound bleak[, ...] Lives Outgrown is also very beautiful".[14]
The Skinny's Patrick Gamble described the album as "a haunting collection of torch songs" as well as "a record about departures and the transition to a new equilibrium".[18] Charles Lyons-Burt of Slant Magazine said that it "picks up where Portishead's 2008 album, Third, left off, with detail-rich orchestral chamber pop backing a stunning exploration of aging and grief" that is "as captivating as it is devastating".[19]Record Collector's Johnnie Johnstone concluded that Lives Outgrown is "an album to fall deeply in love with. If you allow them to, these songs will envelop your soul."[17]
Reviewing the album for AllMusic. Heather Phares described the album as being, "steeped in the emotional and physical realities of living long enough to bring life into the world and to see it leave" and concluded that "Lives Outgrown reveals Gibbons' music is only getting richer as the years pass."[12]Alexis Petridis from The Guardian also highlighted the level of growth displayed on the album, writing: "A dispatch from the darker moments of middle age, Lives Outgrown is occasionally challenging, frequently beautiful and invariably gripping."[13] Ben Cardew at Pitchfork noted the eclecticism of Gibbon's music, saying that "Leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons' album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight."[16]
Year-end lists
Numerous critics and publications listed Lives Outgrown in their year-end ranking of the best albums of 2024.
