One of the most successful and accomplished record producers in the world returns with his first new album in over eight years, and it sounds like a man fully reborn. William Orbit, the Grammy and Ivor Novello Award-winning producer behind landmark records from Madonna, U2, Blur, and All Saints, spent years away from music, holed up in a beach town in California, painting, writing, and reflecting on life. The discovery of adult art classes, a canvas, and cheap acrylics lit a spark that changed everything. "I felt as on fire as I last did in about 1996," he says of making The Painter. It shows. The album takes its name from that newfound passion, and Orbit himself designed and painted all of its artwork by hand, giving the record a deeply personal quality that runs through every track. Released in 2022 through Warner Records, The Painter is a refined, gentle, and beautifully colorful collection of electronica and ambient textures that is unmistakably, completely William Orbit, the kind of wistful, dreamy sonic world he has built across a career that accounts for over 200 million record sales worldwide. The vocal collaborations are as impressive as anything in his catalog. Katie Melua, Beth Orton, Polly Scattergood, Georgia, Ali Love, Lido Pimienta, Gloria Kaba, and Natalie Walker each bring their own distinct warmth to a record that wears its emotional honesty close to the surface. Lead single "Colours Colliding" with Polly Scattergood sets the tone perfectly, its delicate piano hook and angelic textures capturing the spirit of the whole album in a single, luminous piece. "I Paint What I See" with Beth Orton is equally stunning, a collaboration between two longtime creative kindred spirits that sounds as natural and inevitable as anything either artist has made. A work of self-recovery and creative renewal from one of British music's most enduring talents.
