The New Zealand-based quartet of vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck have announced the arrival of their new album “Straight Line Was A Lie“, which is out on the 29th August on ANTI with a string of UK dates. Tickets for the tour are available here and the album is available for preorder here.
The album follows 2022’s “Expert In A Dying Field” and, according to the band, was anything but straightforward. For the first time, lead singer 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 this album, Stokes and Pearce broke down their typical 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’s intentional deconstruction and rebuilding of her relationship to writing, however, has resulted in a complete renewal.
The band has also released a new song following last month’s single, ‘No Joy’. ‘Mother, Pray For Me’ is stripped-down and intensely personal. “I cried the whole time writing it”, Stokes reflects. “It’s not really about my mother, it’s about me —what I hope our relationship is, what I think it is, what it may be actually is, and what I can or can’t expect out of it. My mother is a first-generation Indonesian immigrant and very Catholic. I was born in Jakarta, and we moved to Auckland when I was four. I think this song is me trying to understand my relationship with my mum, and her relationship to her faith and with her own mother. It was hard to write. We came up with a full band arrangement for the song, but in the end it seemed to feel the clearest with just me and the guitar. And a bit of organ.”
The Beths 2025 Tour Dates:
Thu. Sept. 18 – Dublin, IE @ Button Factory [SOLD OUT]
Sat. Sept. 20 – Manchester, UK @ Albert Hall
Sun. Sept. 21 – Glasgow, UK @ SWG3 TV Studio
Mon. Sept. 22 – Leeds, UK @ Project House
Wed. Sept. 24 – Bristol, UK @ O2 Academy
Thu. Sept. 25 – Birmingham, UK @ XOYO
Fri. Sept. 26 – London, UK @ Roundhouse
Sat. Sept. 27 – Brighton, UK @ CHALK
