‘I can't believe not everyone catastrophises!': Liz Stokes of Kiwi band the Beths on anxiety, ambition and being anti-optimisation

The Guardian

3 days ago

In January 2023, as flash floods hit Auckland, New Zealand, Oakley Creek was destroyed: trees upturned, bridges ripped out and dragged downstream, the riverbank collapsed. Like many locals, Liz Stokes, songwriter and guitarist in indie four-piece the Beths, had walked there often during the pandemic. 'It's jarring to see this place that's never going to be the way it was, the way you remembered it,' she says over video in late June.
She catches herself. 'I say the creek was destroyed, but the creek did the destroying also. It's just nature. It was interesting seeing change happen very quickly in real time.'
The collapse became the subject of Mosquitoes, a wistful track on the Beths' fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie. As Stokes observes the wreckage she concludes: 'The current has forgotten how it felt to break the world.' Even before you know the record's backstory, her delivery imbues those languid creek waters with a sense of defeat, something deeper than just a postcard from her neighbourhood.
Over four Beths albums, critics have singled out Stokes's sensitive observations about anxiety and connection: she perfectly characterised flailing in the aftermath of broken relationships as being an 'expert in a dying field', the title of their last album. On that record's Knees Deep, she expresses admiration for someone who always jumps feet-first into life while she's 'wading in up to the ankles' and fearing every second (although the whole band bungee-jumped for the video).
The Beths' magnetism comes from how these former jazz school students make jangly guitar pop as joyful and tender as Stokes's lyrics are knotted with self-doubt. Pitchfork called their first album, 2018's Future Me Hates Me 'one of the most impressive indie-rock debuts of the year'. The band's endearing image, including an excellently thorough blog run by bassist Ben Sinclair that documents their tour breakfasts, makes success seem like child's play.
Straight Line Was a Lie represents a levelling up: it's their first for US label Anti, home to Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman, heralding a tour of much bigger venues. It's a long way from their founding pipe dream of playing Auckland's 250-capacity Whammy Bar. 'We've had to rewrite some of our pipe dreams so they're a lot pipe-ier,' says Stokes. 'We're lucky that it's grown so consistently so far.'
Our time difference means that while I'm drinking a breakfast coffee, Stokes, 34, is having an early-evening White Russian. 'I was nervous about this interview,' she admits, 'so I made myself a cocktail, but with milk instead of cream.' She is a little shy, talking from the home studio she shares with her bandmate, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, also the band's producer and her romantic partner of 10 years. (Drummer Tristan Deck completes the band.) Stokes is a born catastrophiser. She has a sort of yeah duh laugh: 'And you know what? I can't believe that not everybody sees the world that way!'
The title Straight Line Was a Lie encapsulates Stokes's frustration at realising that life doesn't always progress in a linear path. Coming out of the pandemic and the acclaim for 2022's Expert in a Dying Field, she had hit 'a real mental low point'. She was dealing with undiagnosed Graves' disease, which affects the eyes, the thyroid gland and emotional regulation, feeling 'depressed and very anxious and falling apart'.
Being prescribed antidepressants was life-changing. 'The anxiety that had been this constant presence in my brain was just kind of gone,' she says. 'I started being able to make routines, the things you're supposed to do, like exercising. I was like, oh my gosh, all this potential: I think I can fix everything in my life, my family relationships, my health.'
Then the medication started to numb her out: 'All my pleasures: guilty / Clean slate looking filthy / This year's gonna kill me,' she sings on new song No Joy, a perversely upbeat anthem about emotional nothingness. She felt healthy but disconnected, and struggled to write. 'There's a compass that when I write, it's very instinctual and emotional to follow where the song wants to go,' she says. 'It felt like it was uncalibrated, not pointing very strongly in any direction.'
To kickstart the engine, she and Pearce went to Los Angeles. Stokes loves living in Auckland and never did the classic 'big OE' (overseas experience) that gives young Kiwis a visa to work abroad; she arrived in LA craving the sort of constant cultural stimulation of music, comedy and classic film screenings that's harder to come by at home. 'It made me want to write, and especially when the muscle was in action, it empowered me to want to do something better,' she says.
As well as feeling sparked by shows by Drive-By Truckers, Momma and comedians Margaret Cho and John Mulaney, Stokes read books on writing by Stephen King and Robert Caro, and used a typewriter she received as a birthday present from Sinclair to do 10 pages of free-writing every day. Sitting down at the analogue keys 'sounds incredibly pretentious', she says, 'but it was really fun. It makes a great sound. I'd be like, well, I have nothing to write about, and so I was digging into memories, emotions and relationships that I don't think about because they're very painful. Even now I'm struggling to look at it. It's why I think this album has gone the way it's gone, and I've been able to write about things that I normally would find too difficult.'
One of those songs, the moving guitar hymn Mother, Pray for Me, is about Stokes's mum, who is Indonesian. Stokes was born in Jakarta and the family moved to Auckland when she was four. 'I wanted to hurt you for the hurt you made in me,' she sings, wondering if they still have time to forge a connection. Stokes finished the song a year ago and finally played it for her mum the week before we speak. 'English is not her first language and that's part of why our relationship is complicated,' she says. 'There's so much love, but there's this gulf of understanding between us where we want to connect but we live in these separate planes.'
Showing her mum the song didn't necessarily offer a resolution. 'She was just like: 'It's very nice that you wrote a song for me',' says Stokes. 'She couldn't quite parse the lyrics. It's confusing – I've writtez n this thing about what I'm feeling, but it's made what I'm feeling able to be understood by people like me, rather than by people like my mum. It's one I'll keep unpacking, but it was a huge relief to talk to her about it. Like anything, you build these things up in your head to be terrifying or impossible, then they're actually fine.'
Stokes eventually came off antidepressants to a newly confronting understanding: you can't actually fix everything. Her Graves' disease is medically regulated 'but it affects you emotionally even once your thyroid numbers are under control,' she says. 'There's always going to be that kind of anxiety and depression – I'm reckoning with the fact that that's maybe not going to ever go back to the way it used to be.' Counter to the prevailing culture of optimisation that insists life can be hacked to perfection, she realised that 'everything is kind of maintenance. That sounds depressing but I don't think it is. Why is maintenance so unsexy? It's what you do for things that you love and you want to keep right, and I want to keep being me, so I have to keep on top of that.'
In April, Stokes and Pearce returned to LA, in part for Stokes to play a rare solo gig at storied music and comedy venue Largo (where Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple evolved their craft). 'We've done hundreds of Beths shows, but I've done like three solo shows,' she says. 'For me, music feels like it's something you do with other people. That's what I would tell myself, but I was also really scared of just doing something for myself. I reached a point where I was like, OK, because you're scared, you should probably do it.'
The show went great, though Stokes is gearing up to tour with her bandmates – her best friends – come September. 'You have to work at it, but we're lucky to have each other, and we all understand that being in a band is an exercise in sustainability,' she says. 'The moment it becomes unsustainable, you can't do it any more. So we have to keep communicating and making sure everyone's OK.'
She credits Pearce in particular with helping to pull her out of her shell. On new album highlight Til My Heart Stops she yearns for him to help her live with reckless joy. 'I'm sure a lot of people feel this, but I feel like I'm looking at the world as if I'm stuck behind something, like I'm not part of it,' she says. 'Intentionally or unintentionally, I'm putting out walls between me and other people and new experiences. I want to be living in the world, I want someone to yank me out. I want to yank myself out.'
Straight Line Was a Lie will be released on 29 August. The Beths tour the UK, Ireland, Europe, the US and Canada from September to December.