In recent times, we’ve tended to place great faith in late-life albums by revered artists – think Johnny Cash, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan for example – for the light they seem to cast on our callow years

We give less fanfare to music that addresses the thoughts and sensations of midlife. And this is odd, because midlife can prove a fascinating shift for those once caught up in the hedonism of the music world – they are, in effect, break-up records of the self. Consider Paul Simon’s Graceland, Frank Black’s Honeycomb, Bonnie Raitt’s Nick Of Time; their push away from youth, their sense of recalibration in the face of detour or disappointment, is every bit as compelling as the oak-aged material of the older musician

The middle years can also be a distinctly illuminating time in a woman’s life; the stage at which she often becomes more like herself than whatever others expect her to be. Out of this, great songwriting grows. On Lives Outgrown, Beth Gibbons explores precisely this terrain, its sweep of motherhood, anxiety, menopause, mortality; its sometimes bewildering trajectory. “When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out,” Gibbons has said of the 10 songs on the album. “You think: we’re going to get beyond this. It’s going to get better.” But this isn’t always the case. “Some endings are hard to digest”

Gibbons has worked on the songs in this album for a decade, and they come with a sense of depth and distillation. The album begins with Tell Me Who You Are Today, a glowering song of eerie strings and pagan drums, and of Gibbons’s opening lines: “I can change the way I feel/I can make my body heal” – a reckoning of sorts with the physical self

For three decades, Gibbons, 59, has made herself a voice of melancholy yearning and shattered hopes. With Portishead in the 1990s and 2000s, and on her own very occasional solo projects, she has sung about alienation, grief, doubt, loneliness, fear, betrayal and tormented love. Now, on “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent. “The burden of life just won’t leave us alone,” she sings in Burden of Life

Lives Outgrown is full of reflections that sound hard-earned; there’s new grain in Gibbons’s voice. “Forever ends, you will grow old,” she admonishes in Lost Changes, a slow-strummed march with echoes of Pink Floyd’s Hey You. In Beyond the Sun, a modal drone that gathers an increasingly insistent drumbeat, she wonders, “If I had known where I’d begun/Would I still fear where I might end?”

Lives Outgrown isn’t a narrative, but its music is built to be heard as an entire cycle. It works its way through doubt and need and despair to find a chastened but worthwhile perseverance. The album begins and ends with pastoral guitar ballads, but drums smolder and boil over along the way. In Reaching Out, with a beat and bass riff that hint at Moroccan gnawa music, Gibbons rides a crescendo of frustration and longing: “I need your love to silence all my shame,” she sings

The albumends with Whispering Love, a freak-folk waltz with a fingerpicked guitar, a flute and creaky violin glissandos. Gibbons sings, with acute awareness, about how love promises to hold back mortality. “Moon time will linger through the melody/Of life’s shortening, longing views,” she intones. The track continues well after her final chorus, winding down with guitar and ending with a full half-minute of birdsong and chicken clucks. In the longer view, she suggests, human lives are fleeting

The album is a despairing portrait of growing old, dotted with bursts of hope and still-fiery conviction. Occasionally, joy bubbles up to the surface and Gibbons is able to resuscitate the vitality of her youth. “Don’t pretend you were unaware/Realize the tenderness/Appreciate the sweet caress,” she reminds herself and an estranged partner on Lost Changes

Lives Outgrown showcases an artist whose capabilities have been sharply honed, with the skill to convey all of life’s complicated, thorny emotions