Straight Line Was a Lie

A key theme of The Beths’ fourth album is that linear progression is an illusion. “I feel like there’s a through line of difficult things happening, and the realisation that everything [is] not going to keep gradually improving, and that life is often a bit more cyclical, or more of an up-and-down that you’re constantly moving through,” vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes tells Apple Music. “Which sounds like a depressing thought, but it doesn’t feel depressing. It doesn’t feel optimistic either. It’s just what it is.”

In the years preceding the album’s creation, Stokes underwent several challenges that reinforced this notion. Having started taking an SSRI to address mental and physical health issues—she’d recently been diagnosed with Graves’ and thyroid eye disease—she found that the medication’s positive impact was countered by a clouding of her ability to write music. “I wasn’t able to write a song,” she explains. “I feel like I lost my internal compass. The SSRI was great for digging me out of the hole I was in, but my writing is so emotionally driven and my gut reactions were so different.”

To counter the writer’s block, Stokes read Stephen King’s On Writing, How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and Working by Robert A. Caro. At one point, she spent every morning writing 10 pages of stream-of-consciousness material on a typewriter. “I’d write about stuff I don’t normally like to write about because it’s too painful or close to home, or it makes me feel weird,” she says. “So, I was able to approach some of that stuff and ended up using a lot of that material. I’ve always written emotionally and from my own experience, but it feels like it’s going further than that. It’s definitely gone deeper.”

Whether addressing the numbing side effects of the SSRI in the ragged, frenzied “No Joy” or Stokes’ complicated relationship with her mother in the fragile “Mother, Pray for Me”, Straight Line Was a Lie maintains the Auckland quartet’s knack for pairing pop-infused melodies with spirited, jangly indie rock.