The Beths Release New Album ‘Straight Line Was A Lie’
The Beths – the Auckland based quartet of Elizabeth Stokes (vocals/guitar), Jonathan Pearce (guitar), Benjamin Sinclair (bass), and Tristan Deck (drums) release their new album Straight Line Was A Lie today via ANTI-. Just two weeks ago, they gave fans an electrifying preview of the record with a high-energy performance as part of Infinity Sessions at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios in Tāmaki Makaurau. Now stateside, the band are celebrating the release with sold-out shows at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom and Los Angeles’ Bob Baker Marionette Theatre.
The path from The Beths’ New Zealand #1, critically celebrated and year-end-list-topping 2022 album Expert In A Dying Field to Straight Line Was A Lie was 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.
With Straight Line Was A Lie, Stokes and Pearce broke down the typical Beths writing process, opening themselves up to a wave of creative input, with Stokes’ free-flowing writing routine proving to be therapeutic. Already a celebrated lyricist, Stokes has long impressed fans and critics with catchy, instant-classic turns of phrase that capture the personal and ladder up to the universal. But Stokes’ intentional deconstruction and rebuilding of her relationship to writing, however, has resulted in a complete 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.
Next month, The Beths will embark on their 55 date northern hemisphere tour starting in the UK and Europe. Come October, they’ll headline some of their biggest venues to date in the U.S, including The Wiltern in Los Angeles, The Fillmore in San Francisco, The Salt Shed in Chicago, Brooklyn Paramount in New York City, Union Transfer in Philadelphia, 9:30 Club in Washington, DC and more. A full list of dates is below, and tickets are now available here.
Photo Credit: Frances Carter
