Shapes, Sounds & Sensibilities: The Beths’ Liz Stokes In Conversation

This article was originally published on Clash

More often than not, bands struggle to retain interest following their debut album. The Beths, contrarily, are making it increasingly difficult to look away with each release. Over the past few years, group mascot Liz Stokes penned a fresh batch of songs that demonstrate a consistent ascension in her creativity. Funnily enough, these ten tracks have now been bundled into an LP titled 'Straight Line Was A Lie'.

A decade into the game, the Kiwi four-piece have chosen to challenge and reinterpret the true and tested formulas that earned them a loyal fanbase. It is perhaps because they refuse to get too comfortable with what has worked so well for them thus far that they’ve managed to secure longevity unlike others with similar aspirations. On their fourth studio album, which is also their most mature package yet, the group once again step out of their comfort zone while craftily shielding their core identity.

A month prior to the album’s release, Liz Stokes sat down with CLASH to talk about piecing together raw material, traversing uncomfortable themes and translating sound to imagery.

Is there a story or a concept behind the words ‘Straight Line Was A Lie’, or is it not that serious?

Most of the songs were written during a particular period, and then we kind of tracked them. We were halfway through learning all the songs when we began to feel the album taking shape, and so we started looking for through lines. I could feel this emerging theme of a circular journey with things happening and then failing, so I came to this realisation that life isn’t a linear progression but a bunch of loops. Sometimes, you end up going backwards, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing … well, maybe it is a bad thing, but that’s also just the way things are.

Our previous record felt cautiously optimistic, like things are going to get better because we were coming out of a dark period with the pandemic. This new album is realizing that things don’t just get better — they get better and then they get worse, and sometimes, you stay in the same place for a while. I feel like I’m still in the middle of whatever it is I’m going through because the narrative is never as easy as, “Well, I went through this difficult phase and now it’s over and things are better.” Ultimately, the line doesn’t always go up.

That optimism from 'Expert In A Dying Field' isn’t really there on this one, which makes it sound like a sad album, but that isn’t true either — it’s more like all these other emotions you feel when you’re not optimistic. I think it just is.

Considering the album title was an afterthought, did the title track also take shape late in the process?

Yeah, I wrote that one way later than all the other songs. I was on the bus and thinking about the theme, and it just kind of fell out. The track is in fact circular and loops back on itself and is quite simple, with weightless words that I normally use. I wasn’t like, “This will be the title track,” but I did want it to be on the album. Names are hard and album titles come pretty late to us, but that one was at the top of the list because it just made sense to everybody. We’ve always just picked a song from the tracklist.

It’s never really like, “I’m going to make an album about this.” You just start making something, and as you get further into it, you can step back from the canvas and be like, “I’m starting to see this image.” Even after the release, you keep learning more and more. It’s a quirk of making albums the way we do and then promoting them — you kind of do have to look at your own work. Some people just choose not to, and that’s okay. I do think it’s fun because you’re looking at your own work like it’s a book report, and then you sort of go, “What were the themes of my life over the last few years?”

Photo Credit: Frances Carter

Let’s talk about the cover art. Where does that imagery come from and how important is it for you guys at this stage of the digital era, when music videos seem to matter more as far as visuals go?

As someone who’s never done visual art, I enjoy it the more I learn about it. However, it’s not something I feel confident in like I do with music, where I have more of a taste and direction. With music videos and merch and cover art, we have collaborators who we’ve worked with for a long time. 

It feels really good to find somebody whose eye you really trust. For the last two albums, we’ve worked with someone called Lily West. She’s also from New Zealand and plays bass in a band called Mermaidens. She’s just incredible and amazing, and she does a lot of posters for bands but also works in fashion. She’s a great artist and designer, and extremely creative.

The conversations that we’ve had with her about album art and the poster campaign were very conceptual. It was really nice to be able to say, “Here’s the album, Lily. Let’s talk about some of the themes of the album.” And then she sort of went away and looked at the lyrics and came up with a bunch of concepts. It’s beautiful to be able to say, “I’m not going to suggest anything, and instead just show you the songs and talk to you about them.”

It’s interesting seeing someone metabolize your work and come up with their own creative interpretations. On the subject of time, she came up with these images of wonky clocks that just sort of clicked when we first saw them. I don’t feel confident enough in visual art to explain why something works, but for me, it was just a feeling. She had all these other beautiful concepts as well, but for whatever reason, the wonky clock just felt fun and silly.

We also talked about how everything is overthought and overdone; that we spend a lot of time making things and how we like to hear our hands on the things we make. She was ultimately trying to create a visual representation of something that requires a lot of work, so all the things on the cover are physical objects and have been made with paper-mâché. Even the text would usually be quite effortless, but in this case it’s dotted so you can actually see the work. Whatever we made, she wanted you to be able to see the work, similar to how you can see thumbprints in claymation.

Does the vision you have for cover art extend to music videos?

Sometimes it does, but often, it’s just timing. We shot at least one video before the album art was finished, but it all seems to tie in together. We’ve been around long enough and I think we’ve got a sort of visual language that everybody’s drawing from. It’s nice to feel like you have a palette of stuff to work with visually — some colors or themes to pull from.

Each of your singles give listeners a taste of the different types of sounds on the album. Are these your favorite songs or ones you think will do well commercially, or is your thinking behind the rollout something else altogether?

That’s a very practical question. Choosing singles is something that I find very difficult. I don’t know how you feel as a listener, but I very much like albums. I’ll listen to a single, but I mostly end up hearing through word of mouth that an album is good and so I’ll check out the whole thing. People consume music differently, so I’ll check out the singles if I’m a big fan of the band to hype myself up for the album. At the same time, singles feel like they’re for people who’ve never heard you before.

I don’t really know what’s good to release as a single. I suppose it does make sense to put out a single that’s really, really different from the rest of the album, and I do think we have songs like that on the new record.

As someone who prefers listening to an album in its entirety, do you put a lot of time into arranging the tracks? Also, how well do you think an album like ‘Straight Line Was A Lie’ would work if you put it on shuffle?

The way we sequenced the album was by cutting out pieces of paper with a song on each, and we just kept rearranging them in different orders. We even had a spreadsheet with a bunch of variations because we overthink and take our time with these things. In the end, you just have to choose one, but I also don’t think the one we settled on is the only way it works. We very easily could’ve gone in a different direction.

We ended up with an arrangement that’s quite varied at the start and kind of ramps up toward the end in terms of intensity and tempos and stuff. The second half of the album almost moves faster than the first, which I think is unusual. Often, albums are driving at the start and then wind down toward the end. Having a vulnerable song like ‘Mosquitoes’ second is quite a big swing, but it felt good to reveal the extremes of the record right at the beginning so it doesn’t surprise you later on.

On average, the songs on this record have a runtime of over four minutes. Is that just a coincidence or was that a pattern you were molding from the start?

Yeah, we also noticed this pattern because we only have ten songs but the album is still like 45 minutes. You’ve probably asked me like five questions now, so you can tell that I say a lot of words and it takes quite a bit of talking for me to understand what I’m trying to say, and so our songs get a little wordy.

Also on this album, we messed around a bit with form. Normally, I quite like the limitations of verse–chorus–verse–chorus–bridge–chorus or something like that. This time, we were a bit more like, “Okay, maybe there’s just two choruses and an outro instead of there being a guitar solo plus another chorus.” We were letting ourselves be a little more free with form, though there are bands that have completely abandoned it. We’re still not a jam band; I have a real affinity for succinctness.

Do you walk around with ideas in your head till enough of them come together and you realise you have an album or is the process more structured when it comes to making an album?

It is quite structured, but that other part also plays into it. There were two years before I started writing in earnest and actually assembling the songs, during which it was mostly just me collecting little scraps. I feel like a lot of songwriters are like this — you just have a million terrible-sounding voice memos on your phone and your notes app is full of little bits … plus I’ve got notebooks as well.

When I started seriously writing and recording the demos for the album, I made about 23 of them over three months. A lot of that was collating previous ideas and scrolling through them till I found something. I was also going through this giant stack of paper from an exercise I had done a few months prior of writing ten pages a day on a typewriter, which sounds pretentious, but it was just stream-of-consciousness stuff. I was just pulling fodder from my brain because I hadn’t written any songs and I knew that I would have to eventually, so I wanted to have as much raw material to work with as I possibly could. That way, when I’d be sitting in a room not knowing what to write, I could scroll through my phone or go through my writing and find something that speaks to me.

I think most would agree that ‘Mother, Pray For Me’ is among the most evocative cuts on the album because it feels deeply personal. Do you take charge of the songwriting?

The songs are all written by me alone in a room and it’s a lonely process. I’m joking; it’s fun. The demos are all just me — I write all the lyrics and stuff — and so what I take to the band is pretty raw. It’ll just be me on a guitar, maybe with some budget drum sounds. The melodies are there, the chords are there, the lyrics are there and the form will usually be halfway there, which we then flesh out together to build the actual arrangement. 

Jonathan [Pearce] will be adding lead guitar parts, Ben [Sinclair] cannot be contained because he’ll be writing his basslines as crazy as possible and Tristan [Deck] just messes around with drum fills and everything. The final song we’ve all typically worked on together, but the lyrics and chords are usually already decided by the time I put a demo together.

Are there any songs on the record that you hold particularly close to your heart?

I could barely write ‘Mother, Pray For Me’ because I was crying the whole time, even when I was recording the demo. We actually made a full-band arrangement of it, but then we were listening back to both versions while playing them for some friends and found that the one with just me on the guitar spoke better. The other version is still floating around somewhere and we might even put it out some day.

Are you comfortable talking about the background of that song and why it was so emotional for you to compose?

There are some things that I just haven’t looked at too closely because they’re just difficult to look at. Everybody’s got parents and the way you feel about them is so complicated because in some ways you owe them everything. With intense love comes intense complexity, which is covered a lot in song when it comes to romantic relationships.

As for my mum in particular, there is a gulf of understanding between us because we just grew up in such different environments — she grew up in Indonesia with not a lot of money and we moved to New Zealand when I was four. Like a lot of immigrants, it’s not just my relationship with her but also with this culture that I kind of come from but am not that closely connected to. There’s also her relationship to her faith, which is very important, as well as her relationship to her mother, who I’ve never met. The song goes deep into a lot of stuff that I struggle to talk or even think about, so it was hard to write and it’s weird that it even exists.  

After a year and a half of being terrified after writing it, I actually played the song to my mum and she was very supportive. Obviously, the language barrier is still a thing because English isn’t something that she can pick up straight away. More than anything, she was like, “It’s impressive that you wrote this song.” She appreciated being included.

The Beths are set to hit the road this fall. Are there any songs from the new bundle that you’re stoked to reproduce on stage?

I feel like I talk a lot about the meaning of the songs while discussing the album, but I forget that there’s all this other stuff to do with the making of it as well as the music that’s different. It’s fun because we love to make things as complicated as possible for ourselves. I wasn’t really a guitarist and none of us were really singers when the band started, but we were all still set on singing and learning how to play all these different parts that we would keep making more and more difficult as we became better musicians … not in like a proggy way, but just like, “Oh, now I have to play this line while playing this rhythm.”

Didn’t you guys all go to school for music?

Yeah, Tristan went for drums, but the rest of us were all doing different things — I did trumpet, Ben did saxophone and Jonah did piano, so we are all kind of on our second instruments and also singing at the same time. I still don’t feel like a singer singer, but I’ve gotten a lot better.

With these songs, there are new tempos. When we first started as a band, we played fast songs with power chords. We had rules, but as the albums have gone on, we’ve kind of relaxed the rules a little bit, but it still hopefully sounds like us. ‘Best Laid Plan’ is a song I’m excited to play live because it’s really fun. It’s not a feel that we’ve ever done before since we usually fill every space, but this one’s a bit more groovy and sparse. 

Photo Credit: Frances Carter

Your Zoom name is DJ Lizard. Do you DJ?

I don’t release music under it, but it is my DJ name. I picked up DJing as a hobby about two years ago, but “DJ” can span from people making art to just like me, which is at the very bottom of that spectrum. You know, just like choosing songs and beatmatching between them and playing with the stems function on Serato. So far, I’ve done a Halloween party and a house party for my friends.

Are there any cities or countries you have an affinity with that you’re excited to visit on tour?

The United States is definitely like our bread and butter now. We play there the most and it’s really heartening to see the enthusiasm for music. You can’t generalize about an entire country, but there’s a real effusiveness in the people who come to our shows. That’s really refreshing coming from New Zealand, where people are still as passionate but the culture is a bit more reserved, which I recognise in myself and my fellow country people. It’s quite nice when you go to America and it’s a bit more open, though it was hard to get used to at first.

When you scroll down an artist’s page on streaming platforms, the algorithm suggests other musicians based on the one at hand. What names would you be flattered to see on your page or whose page would you like your name showing up on?

Probably some of our friends from New Zealand who I think are really great, like Hans Pucket and Dateline. Also Princess Chelsea, who just did two nights at this venue and it was like fancy dress … swords and sorcery was the theme, so everyone was dressed like princesses and wizards. There’s a power-pop element in our music, so I’d love to show up under The Buzzcocks or Big Star. Then there are bands like Momma and Alvvays, who have this modern power-pop approach to melody. I guess I just like guitar bands.

Your page on TIDAL recommends Soccer Mommy, Charly Bliss, Snail Mail, illuminati hotties and Indigo De Souza.

Those are all amazing. I’ll take that. I remember we first met illuminati hotties at South by Southwest in … 2019? We got to see them play a couple of different times in these tiny venues with no soundcheck, and they just really brought it with these dance moves and stuff. I really love their first record, ‘Kiss Yr Frenemies’.

Finally, who are you listening to right now and are there any artists you would recommend to your fans or our readers?

Oh god, it’s like when someone asks you what you had for lunch earlier in the day and you have no idea. I’m just going to look at my phone. Oh, I love the new Momma album, ‘Welcome To My Blue Sky’. There’s a band from New Zealand called Womb that has a really great album called ‘One Is Always Heading Somewhere’ with beautiful songwriting and arrangements.

Then I’ve also been going back a bit. Tiny Ruins got this album called ‘Ceremony’ that came out a couple of years ago. They’re a New Zealand band as well with some really beautiful stuff. There’s also a Disq album called ‘Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet’ that I’ve been listening to again. I really like that record.

I started listening to Neil Young for the first time. I’ve been listening to ‘Harvest’ and getting there slowly. I have a lot of gaps, but I don’t feel ashamed of that.

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