INTERVIEW: The Beths' Liz Stokes on new album 'Expert In A Dying Field': "The meaning of living in the world is learning about the world, then the world changes and you just have to deal with it."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Frances Carter
New Zealand band The Beths have steadily attracted fans and critical acclaim since the release of their debut album Future Me Hates Me in 2018. They have since received global praise, streams in the millions and multiple New Zealand Music Awards.
They have recently released their third studio album Expert In A Dying Field and it solidifies their reputation as one of the top indie-pop bands in New Zealand. Across the 12 tracks, lead singer Liz Stokes creates songs that are autobiographical and look and relationships in all their form, and what happens once those relationships end.
The album is a collection of warm, guitar heavy indie pop with excursions into rock and power-pop. The premise of the album is summed up in the opening and title track where Stokes asks ‘How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? / And how do you know it's over when you can't let go?’. Stokes voice is a highlight on the track as she delivers an emotive vocal, moving into an upper register against a gentle guitar background.
‘Your Side’ has a gorgeous, summery feel to it with a hazy soundscape and a yearning vocal from Stokes as she tells a story of a relationship that has ended but where there is still an overwhelming desire to get back together. ‘Best Left’ starts off with the sound of shuddering guitar and synths before breaking out into a fierce drum beat and anthemic vocals as Stokes’ multi-tracked vocal chants ‘Some things are best left to rot’.
‘When You Know You Know’ is an album highlight with its rollicking, country tinged feel and uplifting chorus which echoes the cautious joy in the lyrics as Stokes sings about choosing love over pain ‘I can see a way to a new horizon…when you know / You know it’s meant to be’. ‘I Told You I Was Afraid’ is one of the album’s rockier tracks with a runaway beat and injections of punk into the soundscape, while the album ends on ‘2am’ which is the closest the album gets to a ballad. Starting gently and pared back, it gather momentum towards the end introducing a prominent drum and discordant, squealing electronic sounds before ending again on Stokes’ tender, unaccompanied vocal.
Expert In A Dying Field is another triumph from The Beths and is the type of album that works for moments you want to rock, and also for moments of reflection. We recently caught up with Stokes to find out more about the creation of the album.
Liz, it is lovely to catch a wedge of your time again. You are one hell of a songwriter, and Expert In A Dying Field is just another prime example of that. It's beautiful. How are you feeling about this gem of a third album?
We're feeling pretty good about it, which is a nice way to feel. We've made a third album and it's a different flavour again, from making a first or second. We've feel pretty happy with what we've made.
You started working on this right after this pandemic basically blocked your Jump Rope Gazers album tour, and you recently did that Jump Rope Gazers tour. How was it flitting between two albums and two motives and styles?
It's strange to be doing an album tour two years after it was released, but it felt really nice. It’s strange to do an album release tour where people have had the album for a while and have had those tickets for a while, but it means by the time you're playing those songs, people are really well versed in them, and they feel really at home with them rather than it being at a fresh new thing. We were playing some new songs and putting those into the mix. While we were on our first US tour this year, [guitarist and producer] Jonathan [Pearce] was finishing mixing the record and on the road, which is not something I recommend, but it was necessary to get it done in time.
Let's talk about your very, very uptempo, rock, stress head that is ‘Silence Is Golden’, because of course it's what you're looking for in the song. I love this track, but it's definitely gets you in the upper spine of nerves. Talk to me about the creation of this one.
It was kind of a strange song for me to write and it's a little bit less traditional than the kind of song forms that I normally use, like a basic verse, pre-chorus, chorus kind of thing. There's a few bands in New Zealand who have songs with this driving kind of feel a band called Wax Chattels and one called Lips they both have songs that I love that just feel really driving and really energetic. I was experimenting with coming up with a riff that was like that but sounded Beths-y to it, that still had some catchiness. I had the phrase ‘silence is golden’ and I wanted the verses to feel like they were just tumbling out in a chaotic way and couldn't be stopped. It’s pretty strange that the chorus doesn't have any chords, it’s just percussive strumming. Then I had this riff and it felt right to overlay these chords that are dissonant with the riff, but I felt that fit the tone of the song and was embodying the anxiety and chaos of when you're just feeling completely overwhelmed.
It's gorgeous, and it matches perfectly. We go from high energy and then for me, the real kicker of the album is your closer, ‘2am’, which is just perfect and very much the same in the sense that it's a new sound for you as well.
Yeah, certainly. That's when it's scary. Putting a song last, it kind of feels like ‘if you've made it this far, thank you and here’s something a little different’. I wrote it in the middle of the night, I kind of woke up and jotted something down half asleep and then got up and went to the other room and quietly made a voice memo. I had already been kind of playing around with that guitar line and it felt hypnotic and more of a story song than I normally do.
The recording of it was quite interesting for us. We're a studio band and there's an element of live-ness we're trying to capture but also we are in a studio, we are layering guitars, layering vocals and things like that. But there are a couple songs on this record where we were experimenting with just capturing a rawness and a live-ness that we don't normally do. For ‘2am’, we dragged all the instruments down into the stairwell behind the studio, which has got this beautiful reverb that we have always really liked. We took the drums down there and all the amps, and by the time we got everything set up and sound checked, it was after midnight, nearly 1am and we just played it like five times. The next day we listened back and I think it was the fourth or fifth one we were just like ‘that’s the one’. I added the vocals on top of that, and similarly that was just like one or two takes. There’s a rawness that we haven't really tried to make before. That song also gets to quite a cathartic place, it starts small and then grows in a way that's not hook based. It's a special song. I'm glad you like it.
It's a beautiful song and you're so right, it swells. It's a really beautiful closer and it's really nice to hear your vocals on a track like that. We're getting to hear more of them in their softness and it's really beautiful and I guess that’s because you're not used to doing it. There's confidence in vulnerability and you're very vulnerable on the album with your songwriting but I think on this song, I can hear it also in the performance and it's really it's quite something
Yeah, it just felt like a vulnerable song. It's hard doing anything sincere. You're like ‘this is a risk!’
You've also got that in title track ‘Expert In A Dying Field’. This is such a great track, the melody, the hook, your lyrics, the way you sing it, it's so good. Can you break down that song for me, its origins and its construction?
I had the idea of the song, the phrase, in my head for quite a long time, which sometimes happens like this. I wrote it in early 2021. I listened to my own demo for a while, which is always a bit dangerous, but I couldn't resist it. That's when I knew I really liked it because I was like, ‘I’m really in the car listening to my own song’! The verse melody was something that cemented the song for me, it’s the way it falls from that high point in the line ‘that the room still exists’ it felt so familiar to me that I was like, ‘I’ve definitely stolen it from something’, but if I have, I've not been able to figure it out, which is how I feel about a lot of my favourite melodies when I write them. It’s just when a melody feels so familiar to me, but hopefully, it's just because it's just a familiar sounding melody.
I think that's great. You must like it so much, if you're listening to it yourself in the car. Was it always going to be the title track?
No, our relationship with names in this band is one that is very much an after the fact thing. I'm quite practical when it comes to names, so when it comes to names of songs I feel like there's an art making a different name for a song that it's not in the title. For me, I want people to be able to hear the song and then look at the record and be like, ‘it was that one’. So when it comes to the record, it was just looking at what we'd made and looking at all the different lyrics that are on the record and seeing if anything really stuck out. It just felt like the right fit, because there's elements of coping with change and things like that, even though in the song itself it's got a specific meaning to do with relationships with people, it felt like you could stretch it out to cover the entire album. It was covering the meaning of living in the world is learning about the world, and then the world changes and then you have all this knowledge that you've learned, and it's not useless, but some of it is and you just have to kind of deal with it.
As a band, you guys are such a live band. The way you connect, you perform, the way your album sound, even you’re recording sounds like it happened just now. The audience always feel like they're with you straight away. I imagine having these breaks, as the whole world did, the way you create music must have shifted for you a bit, but I just don't hear anything but growth on this album, which is quite a testament to how strong you guys are as a band.
It's something that we really craved after everything and not being able to play as much. Playing live is important to us, it's existential for us, it's part of what makes us feel like musicians. Part of the building of the song for us is imagining how it would go live, but not limiting ourselves entirely, we do like to do the studio stuff which is really fun as well, like extending the song and layering things up. Something Jonathan [Pearce] brought up was being able to listen to the song and imagine the band playing it live, that it doesn't feel like it's cut and pasted together, which I really love as well, but for The Beths it feels like the right thing is for it to feel like a band is playing the song because we are a band and a lot of music we love feels that way. It was something that was important right in the start of the recording process.
It's gorgeous. People don't put a genre on you, and I know that you guys have avoided that. There's something about that which is testament to the way you perform. There's an era that no one can put their finger on, and there's a sound that no one could put their finger on. I love what you guys were aiming to do, it definitely plays out on the record. Tell me we have a beautiful new album, we're singing before audiences again, what else is coming up for you guys?
This album was pretty big in the windshield, it was hard to see past! It's very big. We are looking into next year, we're looking forward to doing a lot of touring, have a small break over summer after last year, we were furiously trying to get the record done after we had a four month lockdown, so everything was delayed. And we've been touring pretty much nonstop this year, so a little break, maybe start thinking about the next record in an abstract way. Because the fourth record is scary! It feels like you have to have to do something different or something but I don't know, maybe that is a fool's errand!
Expert In a Dying Field is out now via Ivy League Records. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things The Beths you can follow them on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
