Introduction: Why The Beths Matter

The New Zealand indie‑pop quartet The Beths have long stood out for their sharp songwriting, earworm melodies, and the emotional honesty that pulses through their lyrics. With their 2025 album Straight Line Was a Lie, they arrive at a new peak — refined in sound yet deeply raw in sentiment. It’s a record that doesn’t just reaffirm what makes them special; it feels like a rebirth: more considered, more textured, and more vulnerable than ever. As the band enters this next chapter, it’s become increasingly clear that The Beths aren’t just good at what they do — they’re extraordinary.

I want to take a moment and explore how each member’s musical contributions blend to form the band’s signature sound, and how the lyrics on Straight Line Was a Lie carve out an intimate, unsettling, yet hopeful portrait of life, growth, and mental health.

First, a quick refresher on the lineup. The Beths consist of:

• Elizabeth Stokes – lead vocals, rhythm guitar, main songwriter
• Jonathan Pearce – lead guitar, backing vocals, producer/engineer (on this record)
• Benjamin Sinclair – bass guitar, backing vocals
• Tristan Deck – drums, cymbals and percussion, backing vocals

In past releases, The Beths were already celebrated for their “jangly” guitar pop, shimmering harmonies, and driving rhythm section.  On Straight Line Was a Lie, each member seems to lean more deeply into their strengths, and — crucially — into experimentation.

Elizabeth Stokes remains the heart of the band. Her voice — often conversational, sometimes aching — carries the emotional weight; her lyrical voice is sharper, more introspective, grappling frankly with themes of mental health, existential anxiety, familial ties, self-doubt, and the paradoxes of healing. The songs come from a place of personal upheaval, shaped by her experiences with health struggles, medication, and self‑reflection.

Jonathan Pearce wears dual hats on this record: lead guitarist and producer / engineer / mixer (on most tracks). That shift seems to have given the album a more cohesive, textured sonic palette: guitars (both his lead and Stokes’s rhythm) shimmer, sizzle, crash — sometimes jangly, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes dissonant. On songs like “Take,” the guitar solos ring with a fresh urgency; on “Ark of the Covenant,” guitar lines meld with subtle ambient touches to build something cinematic and haunting.

Benjamin Sinclair’s bass underpins the album with steady, often driving low‑end that grounds even the most introspective or experimental moments. While bass can be underappreciated in guitar‑heavy pop, here it anchors songs like “Take” with a muscular backbone that gives weight to the emotional landscape, and in upbeat numbers it drives the momentum forward, pushing choruses into sing‑along territory. The result is a rhythm section that feels both steady and alive.

Tristan Deck’s drumming and percussion complete the engine. On Straight Line Was a Lie, the drums don’t just keep time — they accentuate mood, shake loose tension, and steer transitions between jubilation and melancholy. Whether it’s propulsive beats on faster tracks or minimal, contemplative rhythms on the quieter ones, Deck’s playing adapts to the emotional terrain without overshadowing it. Backing vocals from Deck and Sinclair add subtle harmonic depth, reinforcing what has always been The Beths’ hallmark: layered vocal harmonies that linger.

Together, these four don’t just play instruments — they channel mood, memory, and meaning. On this record, the result feels less like a “band playing songs” and more like four people collaboratively mapping emotional terrain.

The sound of Straight Line Was a Lie: More than “jangly” pop

One of the defining qualities of The Beths’ earlier albums was that “jangly guitar + power‑pop hooks + emotional honesty” formula — and it worked beautifully. On Straight Line Was a Lie, they keep the hooks, but deepen the textures. The production (led by Pearce) emphasizes space, layering, contrast; songs can shift from bright, chiming pop to darker, atmospheric, even gritty territory. Critics note this album as “bigger, better and more complicated than they’ve ever been.”

The opening track and title song begins with a false start — a spoken “sorry I was thinking about something else” — a move that feels deliberate: it sets the tone for an album preoccupied with interruption, derailment, and return. The lyric “I thought I was getting better / But I’m back to where I started / And the straight line was a circle / Yeah the straight line was a lie” resounds as a central thesis. Life, the record suggests, is not a linear progression but a messy, looping, often contradictory journey.

Meanwhile, tracks like “No Joy” jolt with nervy urgency — the upbeat melody and driving beat bely lyrics that speak to anhedonia and existential stasis: “All my pleasures, guilty / Clean slate looking filthy / This year’s gonna kill me … Spirit should be crushing / But I don’t feel sad, I feel nothing.”

On “Metal,” they give form to something beautiful and strange: a metaphor about being alive as a “collaboration of bacteria, carbon and light,” needing “the metal in your blood to keep you alive.” It’s biological, cosmic, grounded, and dreamlike all at once — marrying emotion, science, and wonder in a simple but powerful package.

There’s also room for quiet minimalism. “Mother, Pray for Me” strips things back: gentle picking, soft vocals, aching longing. It’s a song about complicated family, grief, and generational wounds — and it lands not through bombast but through tender reserve.

Even the album’s final moments — on “Best Laid Plans” — feel bittersweet: jangly guitars and a buoyant rhythm, but implicit in the instrumentation and tone is a sense of unresolved longing, of “unfinished business.” It’s the sound of hope, but also of memory’s weight.

In sum: Straight Line Was a Lie isn’t simply “jangly indie pop with hooks” — it’s more ambitious: emotionally deeper, texturally richer, and willing to lean into shadows as much as light.

Lyrical worlds: Mental health, Memory, and the Myth of Progress

If the musical side is about textures, the lyrical work is about truth. On this record, The Beths — primarily through Stokes’s pen — interrogate themes of mental health, healing, identity, memory, and the uneasy breaks in between. The album’s title succinctly captures its philosophical impulse: that “linear progression is an illusion.” Life doesn’t follow a neat arc; healing does not happen on a straight line.

Much of that perspective comes from Stokes’s own life. In recent years she’s navigated serious health challenges (including a diagnosis with Graves’ disease), anxiety, and the disorienting effects of starting antidepressants for the first time. That upheaval forced a radical shift in how she writes: among other changes, she turned to stream‑of‑consciousness writing on a typewriter, exploring memories and feelings she’d avoided, and forcing herself to reckon with difficult emotions.

That kind of emotional honesty shows up throughout. On “Mosquitoes,” she wanders a creek near her home — a haven when “my house felt like a locked room” — only to find devastation: the same creek turned into a “raging sea” after floods. The song becomes quietly terrifying: an elegy to disappearance, impermanence, and the fragility of refuge.

In “Til My Heart Stops,” there’s a longing for simple embodied pleasures — riding a bike in the rain, flying a kite, dancing — even as the world feels heavy and weightless at once. According to one review, the song, with its unsettling distortion and ghostly atmosphere, “charts the fragility of life itself,” its abrupt ending like a heart’s final beat.

Elsewhere, “Ark of the Covenant” and “Best Laid Plans” explore inner excavation: digging through memory, confronting “fossilised nightmares,” searching for meaning — or closure — in the negative space of the self.

But it’s not purely despair or existential weight. There’s still wry humour, sharp imagery, and defiant tenderness. The need for “metal in your blood” in “Metal” — a call for grounding, resilience, a kind of elemental insistence on life — turns the personal and biological into something poetic and universal.

Taken together, the lyrics on Straight Line Was a Lie don’t just reflect mental health struggles or personal trauma — they interrogate the myth of constant improvement. They suggest healing is messy; growth is circular; humanity is fragile, often contradictory — but still worthy of wonder.

What this album means: Growth, Maturation, and a New Chapter for The Beths

For longtime fans, Straight Line Was a Lie may at first sound familiar: The Beths still write songs that stick in your brain. But this time, there’s a sense of expansion, of maturity, of ambition being reframed with nuance. Production is richer, the emotional stakes higher, and nothing feels simply disposable or background music. This is an album that rewards — demands — close listening.

Critically, the record has been widely praised. On aggregators it earns a strong Metascore, reflecting generally favorable to enthusiastic reviews. Reviewers note the band is “bigger, better and more complicated than they’ve ever been.” Others call it perhaps their “most incisive” album yet, one where existential anxieties and lyrical ambition meet pop hooks and evocative soundscapes.

Moreover, Straight Line Was a Lie feels like a milestone — not just in their discography, but in their artistic evolution. The move to have guitarist Jonathan Pearce handle production and engineering gives the album a more unified sonic identity. The decision by Stokes to overhaul her songwriting method — to face trauma, memory, and illness head‑on — brings a weight and vulnerability previously only hinted at. The whole band seems aligned: playing not just with precision and popcraft, but with emotional honesty.

For listeners, this album offers more than catchy choruses: it offers fellowship. It whispers that you are not alone if you’ve felt lost, stuck, or numb. It suggests that healing is not always about triumphs or tallies of progress, but about maintenance — about showing up, living, feeling, enduring. And it does all that while giving you songs you can dance to, or cry to, or sing loud at a concert.

Conclusion: The Beths as Emotional Architects

In a world that often feels driven by optimization, forward momentum, and constant productivity, Straight Line Was a Lie comes as a quiet, necessary reckoning. It refuses the idea that healing, growth, or life itself must follow a neat, linear trajectory. Instead, The Beths propose a different metaphor: life as cyclical, messy, and ongoing — something to be maintained, revisited, reflected upon, not “completed.”

As a band, The Beths have always been more than the sum of their catchy hooks or jangly guitars. On this album, they feel less like a pop act and more like emotional architects — sculptors of feeling, memory, and existential wonder. Each band member’s contribution is essential — from Stokes’s wrenching lyrics to Pearce’s layered production, from Sinclair’s grounding bass to Deck’s subtle but powerful rhythms.

Straight Line Was a Lie may end up being a soundtrack for an era — an album for when the world feels too fast, too forward, too relentlessly optimistic. It offers instead a different rhythm: patience, honesty, acceptance, and defiance.

If you haven’t listened to it yet — or haven’t listened closely — this is the moment: sit back, headphones on, and let The Beths guide you down the crooked, beautiful trail.