More about: The Beths

Out this Friday, Auckland quartet The Beths’ new album (Expert In A Dying Field) is their best and most varied yet. Where previous album Jump Rope Gazers found the group leaning into more reflective offerings to add to their by now signature bouncing riffs, Expert…builds on the more varied styles of song while expanding and harness their sound. Full of both indelible hooks and heart-wrenching inner thoughts, it’s their most complete album to date.

Denied the opportunity to properly tour Jump Rope Gazers after it’s release, the last few months have been an intensely busy period for The Beths as they’ve been balancing giving the second album it’s due while gradually and carefully turning the dial to focus on Expert In A Dying Field.

"This tour that we’re on has nearly finished and we’ve been playing the three new singles," explains main songwriter Liz Stokes to Gigwise via Zoom. "On the next round of touring of Australia and New Zealand, they’re album release shows so from then we’ll be playing much more of the new material." 

"We’ve been playing the new singles but I feel like, even though it’s two years after Jump Rope Gazers came out, it still feels like a tour for that. So we’re playing a mixture of those songs and songs from the first record. I don’t want to feel like we’re skipping over it!"

It’s been a stop-start campaign for Jump Rope Gazers, Stokes explains. "We were able to tour in New Zealand in late 2020 and we did some festivals. We opened up for Crowded House in early 2021. It was only at the start of this year that we started leaving the country again." Part of the tour included two shows at the Courtney Barnett-curated festival Here And There, which travelled around the US during the summer. "We played two of them in Massachusetts and the show in Chicago. Both were great. She’s a hugely inspiring person. She came to New Zealand quite early on, which not everybody does if they’re from Australia, and it’s been really cool seeing how she’s been able to have this amazing career but still feel just like Courtney. Onstage it’s just her and her drummer but it sounds so big and cool. It’s great."

While it’s a relief for the group to be back out playing (with hopefully no enforced breaks this time), Stokes has noticed differences to how touring life was before. "Everything’s very different! One thing that’s happened is that everything is more expensive now, but I think that’s just a thing that’s happening everywhere. We started touring in February and between February and March the vibe was pretty different. And between April and now, month to month and week to week, it feels like the temperature changes. It’s just the way that it is, I guess. But it’s really nice to be playing!"

Although it’s now fading from view, the pandemic has irrevocably changed the world. Better that than where we were two years ago, which Stokes remembers well. "It was a stressful time for all musicians! I was constantly comparing that year that we had to this hypothetical year which never happened and will never happen. To every musician on the planet! It was rough but it’s a tricky thing. We, and a lot of bands we knew, had reached a point of having toured a lot and having some momentum. Yes, some of that momentum may go away but for a lot of friends’ bands they were releasing their first record, whereas we already had an international fan base to keep in touch with. It was rough for us but we knew we had it better than some bands. We just had to let that year go."

After the initial period of shock, Stokes and her bandmates set to work on Expert In A Dying Field, as she explains. "Some of (the new songs) were written in 2020. That was when we had finished tracking the previous record and handed it in. That was at the start of March! I don’t think I wrote anything useful for about four months. It wasn’t a particularly creative period. Songs have multiple lives sometimes. They exist as Notes in your app. 'Knees Deep' existed as a previous song I’d written in 2018 that I didn’t like. The phrase ‘I want to be brave’ existed but the song itself was kind of boring, then it got a new life. It was one of the last songs for the album. 

"‘Passing Rain' was the last song I wrote for the album and that didn’t have any previous history. It was a song for that particular time. It’s about feeling like nobody wants to be around you but they obviously do. It’s about taking chances and taking care of the people that you love."

Eventually, as restrictions were gradually lifted, Stokes and her band mates were able to get into the studio to dig further into the new songs. "We started tracking in April 2021 and by about June we were at what we thought was the halfway point and we just weren’t happy. 'We could finish the album as it is now,’ but we had a real crisis of confidence. At the basis of that was that the songs were falling a little bit short. It needed a couple more songs to fulfil a role of being upbeat. I decided to take a week to write a couple more songs. At this point, I think it was early August, there was a lockdown. So we were, ‘OK, if it’s a couple of weeks long then that gives us time to re-evaluate and for me to write some new songs.’ That lockdown ended up lasting four months! We couldn’t really go back into the studio until late-November or something like that, and even then, it was still a bit cautious.

"But we managed to finish the record and add three songs and from that point onwards, it felt like the album we wanted to make. By the time we finished tracking it and went on the road, it ended up working."

What’s immediately apparent on first listen to Experts… is a bigger overall sound. When Gigwise puts this to Stokes, she acknowledges the change but feels any evolution has been natural. "We’ve beefed up the sound a little bit. It’s more varied, but it’s still been made in the same fashion: the four of us. Jonathan, our guitarist, is engineering and mixing us, and that’s been the case since our first EP. I feel like you can hear the progression of us as a band and Jonathan as a mixing engineer as you go on. He’s always getting better and better and we’re experimenting a little more. I say experimenting, it’s still very much guitar music. Within that spectrum of music there’s so much you can do. 

"It feels like, as a band…formula feels like a dirty word but we know what feels like a Beths song to us. That’s why we make the music that we make, it feels right. We’ve just pushed the boat out slightly on some of those things. Normally, there’s a tempo range which feels right but we’ve expanded it down, and up, a little bit. It’s got the fastest and slowest song in our repertoire now. Things that are so miniscule with some artists who have a range of what they do, but for us these small changes feel like they could change the colour of what the band sound like a lot. They feel like big changes for us!"

But Stokes is keen to stress that The Song is, and always will, be king. "The things that I like doing, and the things I have the most control over…it matters that the foundation of the song is strong, as much as I can. You can do things with production and arrangement that really make a song properly sing, but at the end of the day the foundation of the song, making sure that the lyrics and the melody are good, are important. We’re happy with where that is."

"I tend to write from experience but it’s not 100% non-fiction. But I do feel like I’m pulling from my emotions and experiences. Sometimes you flip the perspective and the song will be about the other person. I write about friends, family and people I know. I write with an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ and I’ve been both. It never feels like one specific situation. If you’re talking about a tenuous relationship you can always draw from a few different experiences."

As main songwriter, Stokes has a tricky balance between following her muse but always being aware that the songs will end up as group efforts. How much consideration does she give to her band mates in the writing process? "It’s always a thought in the demoing process," she explains. "Sometimes the songs turn out quite different from the demos but often they don’t, like the structure is in-built. The songs I write are quite straight forward. I like that form of songwriting; it feels the most natural when I’m writing. I intentionally tried to not finalise the form too much, but they ended up happening the way it was on the demo anyway."

One of the best tracks on the album, 'Silence Is Golden', is unlike anything else in the Beths’ catalogue. Like The Strokes playing pneumatic drills instead of guitars, it’s a skull-cruncher of a song. "I remember writing the guitar riff but I’m not sure how I came up with the verse melody over the top, this chaotic sound," Stokes explains of its gestation. "There are a couple of bands in Auckland who have songs with that particular drum feel and vibe to them. I really liked it so I thought, ‘what if I write something similar but a Beths song?’ I brought it in with a bunch of demos to show the band; ‘and then there’s this one, which is kind of weird and I don’t know.’ The chords are really dissonant and I thought it was maybe too weird but everyone was really excited about it. So then it was, ‘OK, I guess I have to finish it, learn how to play that riff and sing at the same time!’"

At the time of the interview, The Beths’ US tour was winding down but the autumn months will see more songs from Expert In A Dying Field added to the set. It’s a mean question, but which songs from the new album are they most looking forward to playing live? "The ones we’ve been playing have been really fun. 'When You Know, You Know' is one that we played a bit earlier this year, and it’s really fun to play and sing. 'I Want To Listen' is an acoustic song so that will be fun to add to that set if we can make it work."

The cliché of picking a favourite song being akin to picking your favourite child is a cliché for a reason. While a nice problem to have, Stokes acknowledges that picking a set-list gets harder every time. "It’s tricky, you just have to do it tour by tour. It was tricky to go from one album to two albums, because it went from being able to play our entire album to only being able to play half of each. So when you have three records out, you have to get very picky!"

Fortunate, then, that Expert In A Dying Field provides more weapons in what is becoming a formidable armour of songs. 

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More about: The Beths