The Beths

A jazz degree they mostly ignored

The Beths formed in Auckland in late 2014, out of the jazz programme at the University of Auckland. Elizabeth Stokes, Jonathan Pearce and Benjamin Sinclair had all trained in a discipline that rewards technical fluency and improvisation; the band they started instead was built on short, fast, tightly harmonised guitar songs. Stokes and Pearce had known each other since Macleans College in east Auckland before the university years, and the four-part backing vocals that became the band's signature are a direct inheritance of that shared training, even if nothing else about the music is.

Stokes writes the songs and sings them. Pearce plays lead guitar and produces and engineers the records, which is why the band has never really had an outside producer. Sinclair plays bass. The original drummer, Ivan Luketina-Johnston, left in the band's early years; Tristan Deck, who had been filling in, joined permanently in 2019 and has been there since. All four sing.

Three records on Carpark

The debut, Future Me Hates Me, arrived on 10 August 2018 through the American label Carpark Records and did the unusual thing of breaking a New Zealand guitar band abroad without much of a domestic runway first. Rolling Stone named Happy Unhappy its song of the summer that year. Jump Rope Gazers followed in July 2020, into a year with no touring attached to it, and won album of the year at the New Zealand music awards.

Expert in a Dying Field, released on 16 September 2022, is the record that consolidated everything. It was a finalist for the 2023 Taite Music Prize, appeared on Barack Obama's 2023 summer playlist, and took both album of the year and best group at the 2024 Aotearoa Music Awards — the band's second album-of-the-year win in four years. In April 2024 they played Coachella, which remains the largest stage they have worked on their own terms.

The three Carpark albums share a method: written quickly, recorded by Pearce, turned round on roughly a two-year cycle, and immediately toured hard. That method is what broke down next.

The long way round

Stokes was diagnosed with Graves' disease in 2023, and subsequently with thyroid eye disease — two autoimmune conditions that changed what her body could do on a stage and off it. She has spoken about anxiety and anhedonia, about being put on an SSRI and about coming off it because of the emotional flatness it produced. Her description of the album's opening single, No Joy, is precise about the problem: anhedonia was present both in the worst of the depression and in the numbness that followed a year of medication.

The writing had stopped. After Coachella in April 2024, Stokes and Pearce stayed on in Los Angeles for three months and set about manufacturing an album on purpose — daily stream-of-consciousness exercises on a 1950s Remington typewriter that Sinclair had given her, plus a diet of films, gigs and reading. Stokes has been blunt that this was a substitute for inspiration rather than a version of it: she was functional, she simply was not writing songs, so she tried to plan her way into a record. Twenty-three demos came back to New Zealand with Pearce.

The band learned the songs in October 2024 and started recording that November at Pearce's studio on Karangahape Road in Auckland. Straight Line Was a Lie came out on 29 August 2025 — ten tracks, forty-three minutes — and marked the move from Carpark to the larger American independent ANTI-. It topped the Aotearoa Albums Chart, reached No. 5 on the main New Zealand albums chart, No. 11 on the UK independent albums chart and No. 19 on Billboard's Top Album Sales. The gap between albums had stretched to three years for the first time.

What the fourth record actually sounds like

Reviews were broadly positive and unusually split on the same point. The fuzz and garage-rock compression of the first three albums is largely gone, replaced by something cleaner and more jangling; the lyrics are the most directly confessional Stokes has written, and the album's governing idea is that recovery does not proceed in a straight line. Writers who liked it heard poignancy and a band refusing to repeat itself. Writers who did not heard fewer hooks and less of the guitar-and-drum tension that made the band's name in the first place — a safer pocket than the one they had been operating in.

Both readings survive contact with the live show, where the new songs sit alongside the older, faster ones and the contrast is obvious in the room.

Where they stand in September 2026

The touring year has been the biggest of the band's career and almost entirely co-operative. A seven-date Aotearoa run in March 2026 took in Meow Nui in Wellington on 13 and 14 March, the Glenroy Auditorium in Dunedin on 20 March, the James Hay Theatre in Christchurch on 22 March, the Theatre Royal in Nelson on 23 March and two nights at Auckland's Powerstation on 26 and 27 March. Australia followed in April, billed as their largest headline tour there.

In the United States they spent the summer splitting bills rather than topping them. Nine dates co-headlining with Spoon ran from the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts on 20 June 2026 through 1 July, taking in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Louisville, with Squirrel Flower opening most nights. A western co-headline run with Beach Bunny then ran from Denver Botanic Gardens on 29 July to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle on 16 August, through New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and Oregon.

The current run is different again. Billed as the By Request tour, it started at Riot Fest in Chicago on 20 September 2026 and continues through Harrisburg, Hudson, Sayreville, Columbia in Maryland for All Things Go, Athens, Knoxville, Columbia in South Carolina, Tampa on 3 October, Orlando, Houston and Columbia in Missouri on 8 October. Chelsea Jade, a fellow New Zealander, supports. The premise is that the setlist is not fixed: the audience calls for songs on the night and the band plays them. These are their final American shows of the year.

The room

The staging has not changed much as the venues have grown. There are no props, no costumes and no lighting spectacle; the attention is meant to go to the songs, and Stokes talks to the crowd between them in a dry, slightly self-conscious way that has become part of the appeal. At the Royale in Boston on 2 December 2025 — the second of two nights after the first sold out — she told the room it looked beautiful, then immediately qualified it: they do not say that to all audiences.

The same night included a spotlit solo fingerpicked passage from Stokes, a pair of plastic recorders brought out for two songs, and lead playing from Pearce that the reviewer described as restrained rather than showy. The bars at the venue stayed empty for the best part of two hours, which is as good a measure of a crowd's attention as any.