The Beths Announce New Album and Share First Single, “Silence Is Golden”
Their third album Expert in a Dying Field is coming this fall
Photo by Frances Carter
It’s a big day for The Beths. The New Zealand-based quartet have announced their third album, Expert in a Dying Field, which will be out Sept. 16 via Carpark Records. They also dropped the zippy lead single from the forthcoming LP, “Silence Is Golden,” along with a music video.
Our first preview of the follow-up to 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers (unless you count February one-off “A Real Thing,” though that track doesn’t appear on the new record), “Silence Is Golden” maintains The Beths’ bright power-pop and guitar-driven song structures. There’s a palpable tension throughout the track, reinforced by the tight percussion and Elizabeth Stokes’ rapid repetition of “The sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound.” The unbearable level of noise getting under her skin, she compares it to a “building to a jet plane engine / Building to 6 a.m. construction / It’s building and building and building until I can’t function at all.”
“The song is about stress and anxiety manifesting as an intolerance to noise,” Stokes said in a statement. “Where each new sound makes you more and more stressed.”
The band set out to make an album intended to be experienced live, both for fans and themselves. In the “Silence Is Golden” music video, directed by Callum Devlin, listeners get a taste of their ear-splitting and infectious live act as the lights began to flash before everything goes deadly quiet. The Beths don’t mess around with theatrics—instead, they rely on the raw power of their sound to create a captivating live performance.
You can find a full list of The Beths’ summer tour dates further down this page. Tickets are available here.
Check out the video for “Silence Is Golden” below, along with the band’s 2019 Paste session and the details of Expert in a Dying Field.
