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

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New single ‘Metal’ was born out of a time of rigorous touring, mental health struggles, and several diagnoses for Stokes. “In some ways ‘Metal’ is a song about being alive and existing in a human body,” she explains. “That is something I have been acutely aware of in the last few years, where I have been on what one might call a ‘health journey’. For parts of the last few years, I kind of felt like my body was a vehicle that had carried me pretty well thus far but was breaking down, something I had little to no control over. All of the steps in the Rube Goldberg machine of life are so unlikely, and yet here we are in it. I have a hunger and a curiosity for learning about the world around me, and for learning about myself. And despite all the ways that my body feels like a broken machine, I still marvel at the complexity of such a machine.”

“I can hold that knowledge in one hand, and yet with the other hand I can point to my reflection and just be like ‘you are shit’. Or ‘ugly’. Or ‘worthless’. I can reliably respond to any suggestion that I might be able to achieve any small thing with ‘no’. And these are variations of the ‘short word’ referenced in the song.”

Sonically, the track sees The Beths fully embracing jangle rock. Stokes says, “There was a propulsion to the acoustic strumming pattern on the original demo. Tristan’s drums meet that feeling so perfectly, the feeling of a train pushing up the tracks. Jonathan got to play his Burns 12 string guitar as sparkly as he wanted, and Ben as usual can’t be contained to the lower register. I think we ended up with an arrangement that embodies the frenetic intricacy of an engine in action. There’s a lot going on, until there isn’t.”

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Expert In A Dying Field is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a full spectrum of their sonic capabilities. ‘Knees Deep’ was a last minute addition to the record and features one of Expert In A Dying Field’s best guitar lines, courtesy of guitarist Jonathan Pearce.

Liz Stokes adds: “I’m the kind of person who wants to go swimming, but takes like ten minutes to get all the way into the cold water, slowly and painfully. I hate this about myself, and am kind of envious of people who can just jump straight in the deep end. In a shocking twist, this is also a metaphor?! For how I wish I was the kind of person who was brave and decisive instead of cautious and scared.”

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“I really do believe that love is learned over time,” explains Stokes. “In the course of knowing a person you accumulate so much information: their favorite movies, how they take their tea, how to make them laugh, how that makes you feel. And when relationships between people change, or end, all that knowledge doesn’t just disappear. The phrase ‘Expert in a Dying Field’ had been floating around my head for a few years, I was glad to finally capture it when writing this tune.”

Densely littered with melodic hooks and the incisive phrasing that Stokes has become known for, the driving verses of ‘Expert In A Dying Field’ intentionally contrast with a restrained, delicate chorus. Here, the stripped-back instrumentation acutely hones in on Stokes’ emotive vocals.

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