The Beths know the futility of straight lines. This existential vertigo serves as the primary theme on the New Zealand indie heroes’ fourth album Straight Line Was A Lie (their first for new label ANTI-). The Beths posit that the only way round is through; That even after going through difficult, transformative experiences, you can still feel as though you've ended up in the same place. It's a bewildering thing, realising that life and personal growth are cyclical and continual. That a chapter doesn’t always end with peace and acceptance. That the approach is simply continuing to try, to show up. “Linear progression is an illusion,” lead singer and songwriter Elizabeth Stokes says of the album. “What life really is is maintenance. And finding meaning in the maintenance.”
The path from The Beths’ critically celebrated and year-end-list-topping 2022 LP Expert In A Dying Field to Straight Line Was A Lie, written in Los Angeles and recorded in the band’s hometown of Auckland, was also anything but straightforward. For the first time, Stokes was 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” everything broken in her life, from her mental and physical health to fraught family dynamics. At the same time, writing wasn’t coming as easily as it had before. “I was kind of dealing with a new brain, and I feel like I write very instinctually,” she says. “It was kind of like my instincts were just a little different, they weren't as panicky.”
Stokes and her longtime Beths bandmate, guitarist, and creative partner Jonathan Pearce responded by breaking down the typical Beths writing process. For inspiration, they read Stephen King’s On Writing, How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and Working by Robert A. Caro. Liz broke out a Remington typewriter (a birthday gift from Beths bassist Benjamin Sinclair) every morning for a month, writing 10 pages’ worth of material — mostly streams of consciousness. The resulting stack of paper was the primary fodder for an extended writing retreat to Los Angeles between tours, where Stokes and Pearce also leaned heavily into LA’s singular creative atmosphere, went to shows, watched Criterion classics from Kurosawa, and listened to Drive-By Truckers, The Go-Go’s, and Olivia Rodrigo. Opening themselves up to a wave of creative input, plus Stokes’ free-flowing writing routine, proved therapeutic. “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.”
Since Stokes, Pearce, and Sinclair started playing together (Tristan Deck joined in 2019), the four-piece have steadily risen through the indie-rock ranks, opening for household name acts like Pixies, The Breeders, The Postal Service, and Death Cab For Cutie; and they’ve garnered significant praise from pop and indie-adjacent heroes like Phoebe Bridgers, not to mention tastemaking outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. Over the last six years, The Beths have appeared at major international festivals, from Coachella to Primavera Sound to Newport Folk Festival and Bonnaroo, and Expert In A Dying Field has earned millions of global streams since its release in 2022.
Already a celebrated lyricist, Stokes has long impressed fans and critics with wryly knowing song titles like “Future Me Hates Me” and “Expert In A Dying Field” — catchy, instant-classic turns of phrase that capture the personal and ladder up to the universal. But Stokes’ intentional deconstruction and rebuild of her relationship to writing has resulted in a total renewal. Her songwriting has achieved startling new depths of insight and vulnerability, making Straight Line Was A Lie the most sharply observant, truthful, and poetic Beths project to date.
It’s immediately clear how far inward Stokes looked on the stripped-down, intensely personal “Mother Pray For Me.” Over plaintive finger-picked guitar, Stokes’ voice is childlike in its wistful plea for connection. “I cried the whole time writing it,” Stokes says. “It's not really about her, it's about me — what I hope our relationship is, what I think it is, what it maybe actually is, and what I can or can't expect out of it.” Reckoning with the lives your parents have led, and their mortality as they shift from guardians to full human beings, is bracing. The song is so moving because few people can look this in the eyes until there is no choice. How do you see your parent as someone who did their best, when it might not have felt like enough?
Cementing the album’s aharmonic theme is a loopy analog clock design by Lily Paris West, who also provided the artwork for 2022’s Expert In A Dying Field. West’s “wonky clock” plays right into The Beths’ notion of nonlinear progression and the machine-like ways in which bodies work (or don’t, as in Stokes’ case, amidst physical and mental health struggles). “The clock is always back in the same place, it's kind of a broken machine as well,” Stokes says. “The body and brain are these complex, complicated machines, ever-changing. Even when functioning in a less-than-optimal state, they're still amazing. But I’m still prone to completely dismiss that and see only the worst.”
Meanwhile, fans who have followed The Beths’ since their 2018 debut Future Me Hates Me will fall in love at first listen with the band’s latest title track. A clear-eyed, hook-stacked mission statement for The Beths’ new chapter, “Straight Line Was A Lie” is a Flying Nun-shaped instant anthem with a punchy, Salad Boys-inspired sing-along chorus about non-linear progression: I thought I was getting better/ But I’m back to where I started/ And the straight line was a circle/ Yeah, the straight line was a lie. In many ways it is the album’s thesis, with each consecutive song building a case for the idea that life’s casual disappointments are something we might not overcome, but hopefully won’t succumb to either. Scars may not heal, and lives (or ecological sites like Oakley Creek from “Mosquitoes”) may not be fully rebuilt. In a world of absolutes, Stokes is interested in the particulars of life. “We were right in the middle of writing the album, and I was metabolizing everything," Stokes says of the album’s title track. "I had held onto this idea that I was making progress in my life and that I was going to be able to fix everything. Like, this is great. Things have been really dark, but I’m getting help and I can keep working and then I'll be in this good place. And it just felt like this rude awakening. It's not like everything went really terrible, but it just wasn't the reality.”
While Stokes felt a huge relief from taking an SSRI, she articulates the emotional trade offs on “No Joy,” which thunders in with Deck’s vigorous percussion and drops another classic Beths soundbite: This year’s gonna kill me/ Gonna kill me. Ironically, though, the stress Stokes sings about can’t touch her, thanks to her pharmaceutical regimen. "It's about anhedonia, which, paradoxically, was present both in the worst bouts of depression, and then also when I was feeling pretty numb after a year on my SSRI,” Stokes says. “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 a pretty literal song.”
Stokes takes a more abstract approach to health and healing on the cheery “Metal,” where she grapples with dueling diagnoses of Grave’s and Thyroid Eye Disease and finds inspiration from Ed Yong’s book on animal senses, An Immense World. “Metal” finds The Beths at their peak, with its effortless meld of upbeat, sugar-rushing jangle-rock underpinning layers of pensive anxiety and optimism. “I was having all of these coexisting thoughts — feeling like my body's like a machine that's breaking down but feeling really incredulous that it exists at all,” she says. “I was like, the human body is amazing. Life is amazing, and yet...”
