The Beths are back with news of their fourth album: Straight Line Was a Lie arrives August 2. Featuring the previously released single ‘Metal’, the record serves as the follow-up to 2022’s excellent Expert In a Dying Field as well as their first record with their new label home ANTI-. Check out the new single ‘No Joy’ below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
“This year’s gonna kill me/ Gonna kill me,” Liz Stokes sings on ‘No Joy’, which isn’t about depression so much as the numbness that can filter any experience as a result of taking an SSRI – though it does little to drown out the Beths’ riff-laden, punchy songwriting. “It’s about anhedonia, which, paradoxically, was there both in the worst parts of depression, and then also when I was feeling pretty numb on my SSRI,” Stokes explained in a statement. “It wasn’t that I was sad, I was feeling pretty good. It was just that I didn’t like the things that I liked. I wasn’t getting joy from them. It’s very literal.”
While writing Straight Line Was A Lie, Stokes and Jonatha Pearce drew inspiration from Stephen King’s On Writing, How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and Working by Robert A. Caro. Writing on a Remington typewriter gifted to her by Beths bassist Benjamin Sinclair, Stokes ended up with several pages’ worth of stream-of-consciousness material. Writing so much down forced me to look at stuff that I didn’t want to look at,” Stokes said. “In the past, in my memories. Things I normally don’t like to think about or I’m scared to revisit, I’m putting them down on paper and thinking about them, addressing them.”
“Linear progression is an illusion,” Stokes added. “What life really is is maintenance. But you can find meaning in the maintenance.”
Revisit our 2022 interview with The Beths.
Straight Line Was a Lie Cover Artwork:
Straight Line Was a Lie Tracklist:
1. Straight Line Was A Lie
2. Mosquitoes
3. No Joy
4. Metal
5. Mother, Pray For Me
6. Til My Heart Stops
7. Take
8. Roundabout
9. Ark Of The Covenant
10. Best Laid Plans
