The Beths - Straight Line Was a Lie

The Beths have always written songs that race ahead, neat and aerodynamic, as if forward momentum itself were the point. Their fourth album, ‘Straight Line Was a Lie’, opens by undoing that instinct. Instead of planting a flag, it circles back on itself, acknowledging that improvement isn’t linear, that the old story of progress was never true. From the start, ‘Straight Line Was a Lie’ admits the floor is uneven, then insists on walking it anyway.

Elizabeth Stokes wrote much of this record while reckoning with the fallout of illness and its treatments. A diagnosis of Graves’ disease left her body battered; antidepressants helped but came with their own complications. She found herself steadier, but dulled — days felt fine, yet the things she once loved no longer sparked. That estrangement from joy runs through these songs, not dramatised into breakdown or smoothed into triumph, but left in its strange, suspended state.

What makes the record fascinating is how the band wrap that unease in arrangements as bright as anything they’ve cut. ‘No Joy’ sounds, on the surface, like pure Beths: brisk guitars, a chorus that barrels forward. Listen closer, and the subject is absence itself, the hollowed-out calm of anhedonia. The dissonance is deliberate. A song about not feeling arrives as one of their most immediate, daring the listener to supply the emotion that its narrator cannot.

Elsewhere, the band turn to the body as proof of presence. ‘Metal’ is a hymn to chemistry and pulse, tracing life back to minerals and cells. Where ‘No Joy’ stares at the void, it also insists on the sheer mechanics of existence. Taken together, they form a diptych: numbness on one side, survival on the other, both set to melodies that refuse to flag.