The Beths have a new album on the way.
The Tāmaki Makaurau-based band will release Straight Line Was a Lie on August 29th, their first record for new label ANTI-.
This album title could also function as lead songwriter Elizabeth Stokes’ lyrical mission statement: that our lives are messy and complicated, and difficult emotions and experiences can be transformative. “Linear progression is an illusion,” she says. “What life really is is maintenance. But you can find meaning in the maintenance.”
According to a press release, there was no easy path between The Beths’ most recent album, Expert in a Dying Field (2022), and their forthcoming record.
For the first time ever, Stokes found herself struggling to write new songs beyond fragments she’d recorded on her phone. She’d recently started taking an SSRI, which on one hand made her feel like she could “fix” the broken things in her life, from her mental health to fraught family dynamics, but also made songwriting a more difficult process than usual.
“I was kind of dealing with a new brain, and I feel like I write very instinctually,” she explains. “It was kind of like my instincts were just a little different, they weren’t as panicky.”
In order to write new material, Stokes and guitarist Jonathan Pearce broke down their typical writing process. Inspired by works by Stephen King and Robert A. Caro, Stokes used a Remington typewriter every morning for a month, writing 10 pages’ worth of material — mostly streams of consciousness.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
“Writing so much down forced me to look at stuff that I didn’t want to look at,” Stokes says. “In the past, in my memories. Things I normally don’t like to think about or I’m scared to revisit, I’m putting them down on paper and thinking about them, addressing them.”
Existential angst colours new single “No Joy”, in which Stokes reflects on the trade-offs between one’s personal and artistic life when taking an SSRI.
“It’s about anhedonia, which, paradoxically, was there both in the worst parts of depression, and then also when I was feeling pretty numb on my SSRI,” Stokes admits. “It wasn’t that I was sad, I was feeling pretty good. It was just that I didn’t like the things that I liked. I wasn’t getting joy from them. It’s very literal.”
“No Joy” has all the hallmarks of The Beths: big feelings (or, in this case, lack thereof), bigger power-pop. Listen to the new single above.
Both “No Joy” and previous single “Metal” will feature on Straight Line Was a Lie, which will arrive ahead of a busy run of shows around the UK, Europe, and North America through September-December. They’ll be joined at various shows by Squirrel Flower, illuminati hotties, and fellow Kiwi acts Dateline, Phoebe Rings, and Bret McKenzie.
The quartet — Stokes and Pearce are joined by bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck in the lineup — will headline some of their biggest venues to date, including The Fillmore in San Francisco and Union Transfer in Philadelphia, on their upcoming world tour (ticket information here).
The Beths’ previous album was their most successful release to date. Expert in a Dying Field earned the band a nomination for the 2023 APRA Silver Scroll Award, and the album cycle took them across North America, Australia, the UK, and Europe, supporting the likes of The National, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Postal Service.
At the 2023 Panhead Rolling Stone Aotearoa Awards, they won the prestigious Rolling Stone Global Award, seeing off strong competition from the likes of Six60, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and BENEE.
The Beths’ “No Joy” is out now. Straight Line Was a Lie is out August 29th via ANTI- (pre-order here).
