New single as New Zealand's The Beths play Brighton

They are a New Zealand-based quartet comprising vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck.

In the single, Elizabeth grapples with the lives her parents have led, their mortality, and how to see them as people who did their best even when it might not have felt like enough.

“I cried the whole time writing it,” she said. “It's not really about my mother, it's about me —what I hope our relationship is, what I think it is, what it maybe actually is, and what I can or can't expect out of it.

“My mother is a first gen 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 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, Elizabeth 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 Straight Line Was A Lie, Stokes and Pearce broke down the typical Beths writing process, opening themselves up to a wave of creative input, with Stokes’ free-flowing writing routine proving to be therapeutic.