How The Beths Found Clarity By Resisting Life's Intrusions

A quiet but frantic energy has replaced the typically bustling basement bar of the Bowery Ballroom. It’s the afternoon before the Beths’ album release show in New York City, marking the band’s first international tour date in well over a year. An ice machine clatters as a bartender prepares for the 575 lucky people that will file into the show tonight, designed to preview a new setlist to a smaller room. The titular Beth, singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elizabeth Stokes, hustles into the room and apologizes for the absence of Jonathan Pearce, the band’s guitarist and producer. The Beths are preparing for their new album Straight Line Was A Lie’s live debut, so Pearce is putting some extra elbow grease into finalizing the stage arrangement, she tells me, as the whirring ice machine screams over her naturally timid voice. Sitting at a venue 10,000 miles away from home, Stokes is surprisingly comfortable, even as she weaves through difficult tales of her relationships, anxieties, and victories.

The nervousness of the road is nothing new for Stokes. After amassing a sizable following in New Zealand, the Beths’ debut record, Future Me Hates Me, became a rare international crossover from the island country. Critics lauded the band for broadly upholding the traditional sounds of New Zealand indie, even if they borrowed much from American and European bands of ‘90s and Y2K fame, like Weezer and Camera Obscura. They’ve spent as much time as humanly possible on the road since, sometimes visiting cities in Europe and the States multiple times a year. Back at home, Stokes, Pearce, bassist Ben Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck have remained community cornerstones; Pearce regularly records local bands in New Zealand, while Stokes will occasionally play on friends’ records, like Chelsea Jade’s Soft Spot. Constant touring slowly amassed goodwill for the Beths across the globe, especially in the press’ response to Jump Rope Gazers and Expert in a Dying Field. Even Barack Obama gave the band a share of praise, placing “Watching the Credits” on his 2023 summer playlist. It also ended up on Paste’s year-end best songs list, but who’s counting?

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But even as the Beths have found constant growth in a violent and stormy line of work, the band’s lives grew nevertheless complicated. Stokes began writing Straight Line Was A Lie, the band’s debut release with ANTI-, on the heels of nearly 200 shows in two years in service of Expert in a Dying Field, including tours with Alvvays and Death Cab for Cutie. As Stokes processed a case of undiagnosed Graves’ disease and weaned herself off of anti-depressants, a sense of stability returned. “Your lives become weird, right?” Stokes tells me. “Our lives aren’t really like other peoples, even our friends back home who are musicians. Their lives are really different from our lives.”

The pivot from their quaint lives as jazz students at University of Auckland to touring rock stars hasn’t become a burden on Stokes’ songwriting. Even in their earliest material, the Beths never relished in dense storytelling or intricate autobiographical narratives. Instead, whether writing about the risks and rewards of love (“Future Me Hates Me”) or the limitations of unreasonable and crippling fear (“Knees Deep”), audiences fell in love with Stokes’s broad writing style. “Whatever your specific and unrelatable circumstance is, there’s probably a more universal feeling within that that’s probably more interesting,” she says. “I don’t think I’d write a song about being on tour, but I feel like, within anything you want to write about, there’s a more specific and universal emotion that has to do with what’s hard and what it is that you’re missing.”

Straight Line Was A Lie marks the first time Stokes has included vivid details from her own stories, even if the overarching struggle in her recollections remains universally relatable. “Mosquitoes” tells the story of a creek destroyed during the devastating Auckland floods. The song mourns a loss of solitude and admits that Stokes’ sacrifices, whether on stage or in her personal life, have taken their toll. “Mother Pray For Me,” which details a difficult tug of war between her and her mother’s suffocating religious impositions, not only empathizes with complicated parental communications, but displays the grief associated with any burdensome yet necessary relationship. Though much of Stokes’ writing reads romantic, thus pushing many to interpret lyrics through the lens of her romantic partnership with Pearce, she finds inspiration from a much wider breadth of attachments “Everybody’s lives are filled with so many more relationships than that. Platonic, familial, work relationships that can still be as heartbreaking or euphoric as any of those worlds.”

To find some creative clarity, Stokes spent a few months living in Los Angeles with Pearce, her partner of ten years. There, she played a few rare solo shows, absorbed the busy cultural atmosphere, and worked to overcome any looming creative obstacles. “It’s a city where everybody’s on their grind, in a way that you don’t want all the time,” Stokes says. “It’s a cool place, with the amount of stuff going on. You need inputs to have outputs, and there’s so many inputs creatively.” There, she was able to focus on writing, committing to a ritual of doing ten pages on an analog typewriter everyday. She then highlighted sections of the old pages and treated them as new prompts, spurring entirely fresh ideas that eventually offered a direction for the songs. “Having to fill ten pages, you have to dig deep,” she elaborates. “When you’re five in and you’ve got five pages to go, you have to start asking yourself questions. It felt a lot like therapy.”

Stokes began seriously writing material for Straight Line Was A Lie on top of her ten daily pages at the beginning of 2024. The band had just finished their string of dates with Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service, two bands celebrating the 20th anniversary of their best albums (Transatlanticism and Give Up). Stokes’ health problems had reached a fever pitch and she was “on SSRIs, just going through it.” But she and Pearce stayed in LA after performing at Coachella in 2024, returning to New Zealand to record in the Southern hemisphere’s summer months, across the Christmas season. In their home country, they retreated to a small beach house where they were able to focus tirelessly on recording new material. “There was the kind of energy I remember having when I just started the band in my mid-twenties,” Stokes says. “As you get older, life and responsibilities start to intrude on your ability to chip away on things in a really hyper-focused way. This was getting that back, we did so much in such a short time.”

The band spent all of October jamming on songs and figuring out arrangements. The typically slow process was exacerbated by new sonic ground: “Mother Pray For Me” is the first Beths song performed entirely by Stokes. Before recording, her bandmates fleshed out the arrangement together but concluded that, in order to preserve the song’s emotional potency, it needed to be sparse. “It didn’t feel like a Beths song,” Stokes says. “I don’t think we would’ve put them on album two or three, but we got more comfortable putting them on four.” Pearce jumps in, noting that the band agonized over “Mother Pray For Me,” mentioning that “a lot of the time, we thought we were doing the wrong thing.”

In the fall, the Beths will return to America with Phoebe Rings, Crystal Choi’s Auckland dream-pop outfit, who released their debut album back in June. The band first met Choi at music school back home, and the members of both bands have all played together in various configurations and projects before the Beths became Stokes’ main thing. Thanks to the intense isolation of New Zealand as a cultural center, the Beths have become a marquee indie export for the island nation. Now, they’re paying that forward to the next band up. “When we have an opportunity to bring someone out, it’s just nice to bring a piece of home out to the world,” Stokes says.

Whereas the riotous Expert in a Dying Field was developed during the long tail of a pandemic shutdown with a missing live show top of mind, Straight Line Was A Lie is a studio product through and through. Now, on the eve of what’s sure to be another lengthy stint on the road, the band is still figuring out what the rhythm of the stage will be for the foreseeable future. “We were going to trust that we could figure out an arrangement and it didn’t have to be exactly the same as the recording, and that would be okay,” Stokes says. “The last couple months have been trying to figure out how to play the songs live, which has been really hard, so now we’re eating shit.”

Benny Sun is the managing editor at STATIC Mag with additional writing in Pitchfork and Hell Gate. Based in New York, he splits time hitting pavement at underground rap shows, back-of-bar punk rock gigs, and the Brooklyn club circuit. Follow on Instagram @bennysgreatesthits, X @bennysasianera_, and email at [email protected].

How The Beths Found Clarity By Resisting Life’s Intrusions

The Auckland band spoke with Paste about the therapy of writing routines, splitting time between Los Angeles and New Zealand, and prioritizing emotional potency on their great new album, Straight Line Was A Lie.