Like their Kiwi predecessors The Clean and The Bats, the Beths seem to come by their earworm melodies naturally: To jangle is their national birthright. Since 2018’s Future Me Hates Me, the Auckland band has built a catalog of anthemic choruses as forceful as a global weather event. The ice caps melt, the Beths rock: this is the way, and never more so than on Straight Line Was a Lie, the group’s most incisive album, where life feels less like going to a party and more like being thrust down a steep hill.
Straight Line forgoes the nail-biting, lovelorn angst of the Beths’ earlier releases and jumps straight to existentialism. Written in the aftermath of frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes’ new SSRI prescription, it interrogates the heady relationship with the self: part mirror (oh, so that’s how I am?) and part chasm (am I unknowable?). “Til My Heart Stops” might sound like a conventional love song until you map the lyrics to the antidepressant on-ramp: out-of-body calm, detachment, questions about how deeply it’s possible (or advised) to feel. It’s tonally hopeful, a self-aware admission of dysfunction and desire. Elsewhere, the title track tacks towards Superchunk’s college radio shred, an electrified shrug at the notion of linear progress. “No Joy” marks both a sonic and tonal shift, veering into Devo-style new wave and a deadpan depiction of medicated anhedonia.
Nature is often the path back to embodiment, as on the sunny “Metal,” an album highlight whose call-and-response chorus acknowledges that to be alive is to be a “collaboration of bacteria, carbon, and light.” “So you need the metal in your blood,” you might sing along, hips wiggling while the planet’s polarity keeps you anchored to your shower floor. That the melody itself is so magnetic only emphasizes its cheeky fusion of form and subject. On “Mosquitoes,” Stokes describes visiting a nearby creek when her “house felt like a locked room.” There, she’d “watch the eels playing cool” before walking down a dirt path to “the biggest waterfall/My city limits could produce.”
It’s a duality the Beths have perfected: what seems cheerful is tinged with a creeping sadness. In the end, no matter the vista, Stokes—like all of us—is frail and mortal, “only here to feed mosquitoes.” The album’s best songs mask weighty existentialism under a chocolate coating, cloaking universal truths under hooks that sell out rock clubs. “It could be worse than this,” Stokes admits on “Ark of the Covenant,” “it’s hard to imagine it.”
These revelations are harder to swallow when they’re plated without jangle. “Mother, Pray for Me” attempts to tackle emotional inheritance under an earnest finger-picked riff and quiet, plaintive vocals. Stokes’ accented intonation charms, but the intimation of conflict remains frustratingly vague: some sort of loss, a “her” whose absence prompts the mother to be “battered by the waves of grief.” Melodically, the song loops a few too many times. Thematically, it never lands with the same specificity and texture that makes other tracks shine. The band’s tight, canny songwriting is so winsome on most of the album that weaker tracks, or trite phrases like “I’ll always be addicted to your energy” on the otherwise charming “Roundabout,” momentarily break the spell.
Straight Line Was a Lie proves that it’s possible to sandwich life’s gnarliest realities between hooks that could take up permanent residence in your auditory cortex. It’s a balm to know that even if we’re just a constellation of atoms or glorified mosquito fodder, we have nature to make us feel small, drugs to bring us up for air, and anthems to howl back at the void.
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