"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."
"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."
"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."
The Beths deliver jangly, earworm melodies rooted in New Zealand indie-pop, pairing buoyant hooks with sharp emotional inquiry. Straight Line Was a Lie shifts from lovelorn angst toward existential questions after frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes begins an SSRI prescription, probing self-knowledge, detachment, and the limits of feeling. "Til My Heart Stops" reframes a love song as medicated calm and disconnection; the title track channels Superchunk-like college-radio grit to reject linear progress. "No Joy" adopts Devo-ish new wave to render medicated anhedonia deadpan. Nature imagery restores embodiment on "Metal" and "Mosquitoes," blending earthy detail with infectious melodies.
Read at Pitchfork
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