The Beths Announce New Album 'Straight Line Was A Lie' & Release New Single 'No Joy'

Scoop

24-06-2025

The Beths — the Auckland based quartet of vocalist Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck — announce their new album, Straight Line Was A Lie —their first for their new label ANTI —out August 29th, and share the new single/video, 'No Joy.'
The Beths know the futility of straight lines. Existential vertigo serves as the primary theme on the indie heroes' fourth album. 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,' Stokes explains. 'What life really is is maintenance. But you can find meaning in the maintenance.'
The path from The Beths' 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. ' 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.'
While Stokes felt a huge relief from taking an SSRI, she articulates the emotional trade-offs on today's single, '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. She wants the feeling back. " 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 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 very literal.'
In writing Straight Line Was A Lie, Stokes and Pearce broke 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.'
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 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.
Following Liz Stokes's recent, sold–out solo show at Largo in Los Angeles with special guests Roz Hernandez, Courtney Barnett and Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Conchords), The Beths announced a world tour across North America, the UK and Europe this fall. They'll headline some of their biggest venues to date, 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.