The shortest path between two points may be a straight line, but sometimes going in a straight line doesn’t actually move you forward. This realization serves as the central theme on the Beths’s fourth studio album, Straight Line Was a Lie, which was inspired, in part, by lead singer and songwriter Elisabeth Stokes’s struggle to write the follow-up to the New Zealand band’s critically acclaimed 2022 album Expert in a Dying Field.
Stokes’s songs have always been witty and self-aware, personal but relatable, and the lyrics on Straight Line Was a Lie offer even deeper, more vulnerable insights into her psyche. She sings matter-of-factly about her battle with depression on “No Joy” and candidly about her relationship with her mother on “Mother Pray for Me.” “I thought I was getting better/But I’m back to where I started,” she quips on the hook-filled title track.
Accompanied only by acoustic guitar, Stokes paints a wistfully charming portrait of the creek where she would go “when my house felt like a locked room” on “Mosquitos.” The peace and quiet, however, evaporate as soon as she recounts how torrential rain turned the stream into “a raging sea.” The rest of the band comes crashing in, bolstered by lush strings, before Stokes describes revisiting the site to survey the damage.
Live strings are also a welcome addition on “Roundabout,” a dreamy throwback to ’90s guitar pop in the vein of Teenage Fanclub. But the Beths still deliver plenty of the punchy indie rock they’ve become known for on tracks like the punk-infused “No Joy.” As a unit, the band is at its best on “Metal,” contrasting upbeat jangle rock with Stokes’s pensive, anxious lyrics, while “Take” is propelled by a heavy rhythm section complete with screeching guitar solo.
Though the Beths rarely venture as far into quirk as, say, Deerhoof, the bongos and congas that punctuate album closer “Best Laid Plans” nudge them outside their comfort zone. With the understated emotion characteristic of so many of her performances, Stokes expresses her longing “to feel a different gravity.” Perhaps the search was all she needed to move forward.
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