The Beths – the New Zealand-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 29, 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.”

Straight Line Was A Lie:

1. Straight Line Was A Lie
2. Mosquitoes
3. No Joy
4. Metal
5. Mother, Pray For Me
6. Til My Heart Stops
7. Take
8. Roundabout
9. Ark Of The Covenant
10. Best Laid Plans