The Beths have written some of the best power-pop in recent years. The band from Auckland, New Zealand — consisting of Liz Stokes (vocals/guitar), Jonathan Pierce (guitar), Ben Sinclair (bass) and Tristan Deck (drums) — has so far put out three albums of perfectly crafted, insanely catchy guitar music, headed up by Stokes’ conversational and introspective lyricism. It’s been a pretty straightforward formula, and while they’ve gotten better and better, they’ve rarely strayed very far from it.

But for their fourth album, Straight Line Was A Lie, the process was different. Dealing with a diagnosis of Graves’ disease, a chronic autoimmune disorder, Stokes had started taking sertraline to manage her mental health. She found that the medication-influenced change in her brain chemistry affected her ability to write songs from the immediate, emotional place she had before. Trying to get through her writers’ block, she used a technique which was influenced by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Stephen King’s On Writing, in which she wrote 2,000 words on a typewriter every day. Then, she and Pierce spent a couple of months in LA, digging stuff out of the compiled pages and turning them into songs.

“There’s definitely a part of me and Jonathan that has a soft spot for toil or something,” Stokes says, on a Zoom call from a pre-album release US tour. “We have this idea, which I think is probably toxic, that if you can push yourself through something, there’s this satisfaction that comes from doing a hard thing. And having to write that much, it means that you don’t just write about what’s top of mind, what you’re feeling emotional about, what you’re feeling passionate about — which is normally what I do. I feel like you go past that into kind of like the mundanity, and then you go past that even more into the deep parts of your brain that you don’t normally like to think about or look at.”

Given this new writing process, Straight Line Was A Lie is a slightly new kind of Beths album. It’s still got those pop smarts, but it’s also a softer and rangier record. As she’ll discuss below, Stokes pushed herself to make the songs do more than just transmit as much energy as possible. This is the Beths’ vision of a studio album, as opposed to one meant to translate to a live show; while they still have a “no synthesizers” rule (more on that below), there are more instrumental flourishes (some piano and organ, some hand percussion) and some of the prettiest and most vulnerable songs The Beths have ever made. Below, we go in-depth with Stokes on every song on the album.

1. “Straight Line Was A Lie”

LIZ STOKES: This one came last, I didn’t write this when I wrote all the other songs. We were back home and starting to play the songs with Ben and Tristan and build them all together. And we were starting to figure out which songs were gonna be on the record, ’cause I came home with 23 or 24 demos. I’d spent so much time writing them with this weird method of like, writing a demo, putting it away for six weeks, then keeping on writing and coming back to it after it hit the six-week mark. And so having done that with the album, being able to kind of see it as a whole, it was like, what’s the throughline, what’s the theme? What’s my brain been trying to tell me over the last two years with this body of work?

And that was when “Straight Line Was A Lie” came. I’ve kind of wrestled songs from my brain sometimes, and it feels really difficult, [but] that song I, like, coughed it out on the bus. I think there was a feeling of seeing the journey of coming out of a dark place, falling into the folly of believing that everything would keep getting better and that progress is just inevitable and you just keep improving, and really it’s more just finding meaning in the work, finding meaning in the maintenance, and just going through until… until you die.

It’s not a complicated song. It’s about as simple as I’ve ever let a song be. I normally can’t be succinct, as you can probably tell. It feels like my emotions come out as big, huge word clouds and that’s part of what songwriting is for me, is condensing it into an idea that I myself can understand. Whereas this one was just like, ah yeah, it makes sense to just sing the first verse again, because it makes sense thematically. I’m allowed to do that. If “Mr Brightside” is allowed to do it, I’m allowed to do it. There’s something about the kind of six-bar sequence that feels like it’s prematurely ending and starting again or something. It just kinda felt right.

I always think it’s fun when a song starts with someone messing the intro up, which this song does, or just hearing those little tastes of what was happening in the studio.

STOKES: Yeah, “Straight Line” was like, the tape was on and we just played that version which had the false start, which was just really funny and felt on-brand for that song. It was one of those ones where we got to the end of the song and I think Tristan had some tears in his eyes and we were just like, I think that was the one. And we were done. Which of course doesn’t mean that we stopped, of course we did like two more, because we’re incorrigible. But we knew that that was the one.

It also feels like the rest of the band are really going ham on those backing vocals, and I feel like there’s a few different spots on the album where that’s the case.

STOKES: Yeah, that was fun. There’s a lot of songs where the backing vocals are in the demos that I make, but I always end up adding more and more and more because they’re just such a fun texture for me to add. I feel like I can kind of just hear them in my head. Whenever I hear a gap I’m like, “Okay, there’s like a melody here,” or, “There’s some texture we can add.” Especially in a band where we have arbitrary rules like “no synthesizers,” it’s like, being able to add a pad texture or something that’s a countermelody, the voice just feels like the right thing. Even though none of us are pro singers, I end up giving everybody really hard stuff to sing, and they take it on the chin and they give it a red hot go. But yeah, that one was the loosest we’ve let ourselves get. There was just a lot of improvising, and then kind of building a kind of chaotic melange of backing vocal stuff, and trying to keep it feeling organic.

I wanted to go back to what you just said, that there’s a rule of no synthesizers. Is there like a list of the Beths rules?

STOKES: Yeah, rules is a funny word, but yeah, they’re probably rules. It feels like the band started as kind of a band with rules. We all studied music and were coming from jazz school or whatever, and the Beths was like, “Okay, I’m starting a rock band so that I can write songs.” I want them to be guitar music, they’re going to be upbeat, they’re going to be catchy, they’re going to be as succinct as I can make them — which is not that succinct. That was like [first album] Future Me Hates Me and the first EP, and then we’ve kind of relaxed those rules a little more.

But we still like to keep that structure. ‘Cause I feel like when you have these limitations, it breeds more creativity than it stifles. If you can do absolutely anything you want, I find that kind of a little bit paralyzing. So before making [Straight Line Was A Lie] we wrote some things on big cards and put them on the wall. And one of them was like, we’re allowed to make a studio album, we’re not gonna think about how we play live, we’re just gonna figure it out, which is different from previous albums. And yeah, one of them was no synthesizer. There’s a lot of sounds, but all of them have been made with guitar pedals, with Jon and Ben kind of tweaking ’til they’ve managed to eke out some sort of weird sound on a pedal. Sometimes it makes things harder, but I think you have to think about what problem you’re trying to solve when you’re trying to make a part for something, if you feel like something’s missing, and [find] a creative way to solve it.

2. “Mosquitoes”

I feel like “Straight Line Was A Lie” is a really classic Beths power-pop song, and then this comes in with kind of a slower, prettier vibe. There’s some acoustic guitar, some piano. Did you want to put a bit of a curveball in second instead of further into the album?

STOKES: Yeah, it’s a bit of whiplash. It’s kind of like, we wanted to start as we meant to continue, which is just to say, this is an album with some bigger extremes than we’ve had previously. There’s still kind of driving rock songs, but there’s a bit more space. Just so you know straight away, so you’re not later on like, “Oh, the album really fell off and got slow.” It felt good to finish the first song and have “Mosquitoes” kind of creep in underneath the rubble. “Straight Line” feels like the thesis statement or something, and then to kind of continue on with the story, starting quite gently, just felt fun.

Lyrically, you’re talking about this flash flood that happened in Auckland. How did you relate that to what was going on with yourself?

STOKES: Yeah, so it’s about Oakley Creek, which is these floods that happened in Auckland in 2023. It was this once-in-a-hundred-year flood or whatever, but they seem to be happening every year or every couple of years now, because the world’s changing.

I wrote the chorus prior to the floods happening. I had written it when I was walking around in Oakley Creek. It was something that I had in my head floating around for a long time, but it wasn’t connected to anything. And then when I was doing my typewriter writing, I had done, I guess, a few pages, just thinking about the floods like a year after they’d happened, and kind of processing the whole story.

And it wasn’t ’til I was in LA — I knew I really liked this chorus, but I had tried a bunch of different things, trying to work out what the verse was gonna be and trying to make it big and euphoric, but it wasn’t working. And then I found that section, talking about the flood. And it’s not something I normally do, like a narrative song. I really like them, I just never thought I could do one. And then I kind of put together that they were the same story and combined them, and it suddenly just worked and it was like my new favorite demo. And yeah, it just feels like they tied together this feeling. It feels like a song about trauma, and how something big can happen. And this place, one day it was one thing and it had been that thing for such a long time, and the next day it was just something completely different. It’s not gone, it’s still there, but it’s never gonna be the same place. You have personal connections to things and then they change, and they’re different.

I feel like the lyrics in this song about “only skin, only blood” and ‘I’m only here to feed mosquitoes” feel a little linked to what you sing about on “Metal” a few songs later. The idea of being in tandem with the world and not just being you alone. Does that feel like a linked idea to you?

STOKES: Yeah, totally. My body was on the brain for the last few years, because of the health stuff I had with Graves’ disease, and also noticing all the other changes to my brain which I feel like is part of my body. It all feels tied together. So yeah, it was something that clearly I was thinking about a lot. There’s a lot of themes there. This feeling of the body as this vehicle that I’m in and kind of trying to drive around, and wanting to feel connected to the world. That feels like, in “Metal” and “Til My Heart Stops,” it’s kind of wanting to live in the world. But I guess in “Mosquitoes” it was kind of also this feeling that the world just eats away at you until you are gone.

And on that note…

3. “No Joy”

I think the almost classic rock riff on this one is really fun. Tell me about writing that guitar part.

STOKES: I think I might have had the drums first, the drums and the melody. Which is not really a melody — in my head it was nearly spoken word, but I couldn’t bring myself to do spoken word, so I made a melody for it. It was just like the rhythm of the statements, which was just kinda silly and kinda flippant, and it came quite early. And later I [remember] finding the guitar riff and being like, “Okay, this is it.” It’s such a tense, neurotic guitar riff. It doesn’t go very high, it doesn’t go very low. It all feels kinda bunched up in a way that the notes feel kinda muddy, in a way that just made sense. It’s a song about not feeling super highs or super lows and just feeling kinda stuck in this anhedonic state, where you can’t experience joy. And so it just felt like the right riff.

Thematically, this song feels like it’s the most direct one about being on SSRIs and feeling like your brain chemistry changed with that. Tell me more about how that became, firstly I guess a physical block to the writing process, but also how you wrote about it on the album.

STOKES: So I had been in this pretty big hole, because I got this Graves’ disease diagnosis, and then that comes along with kind of worsening mental health. I guess like anybody who has a chronic thing, you just have to kind of get it under control, and then manage it indefinitely. And there’s these wild swings at first trying to figure that out, and my mental health was really… yeah, I was in a terrible place. And then trying sertraline for the first time, I was just like, ah! It was amazing at first. It was like, is this what life is like for a lot of people? The kind of like, constant churning voice in my brain was just not there, or it was really quiet. So it was really, really great for a long time, and I was able to kind of build these routines and work on things. I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna fix everything, everything’s gonna be great, I have done it.” And I think a lot of people find it’s a bit of trial and error. So after being on it for a year and a half, I was kind of feeling numb. Where you’re just, like, depressed, and you’re the kind of depressed where you’re not sad but you’re kind of floating through the world. So that’s when I weaned off and started writing. But I’m sure I’ll be back on one at some point, and I feel relieved that there’s things that I can do to help me if I’m stuck in a hole again.

How much did that back-and-forth link in with the new writing process that you had on this album?

STOKES: It was interesting for different reasons. When I was on sertraline, I think that was part of what was affecting my internal emotional compass. ‘Cause when I write emotionally, it feels like I just kinda know what I want to feel and what I want to make, and I wasn’t able to do that. [But] then I think it was also being on that and feeling less anxious that allowed me to look at and write about things that I don’t normally write about because my brain is too scared. So I think I was able to write, like, “Mother, Pray For Me” because I was able to look at this thing that feels so sacred and so difficult to parse, because I was less scared. So that song [was written] a little earlier than the other ones, for the most part. And then later when I weaned off it, just having this big stack of stuff where I had already kind of processed some stuff was really helpful.

To go back to the musical side of “No Joy,” I wanted to ask about that break in the song, where it’s just kick drum and harmonies and flutes. Tell me about that, I love that part.

STOKES: To me it’s like, the drum part feels like you’re banging your head against the table out of frustration, and then you get to the bridge and you finally knock yourself out. [Laughs] And you’re just lying there with the little birds flying around your head. Often my urge is just to write more words and more fully explain what I’m feeling, and I was trying to actively trust the music itself to portray some of the emotion. I was just letting myself get a bit silly with the demo, and then everybody ran with it in such a great way. We got Ben, who’s a very accomplished flute player as well, to come in and play all the flute stuff. And then the recorder was just sitting there at the studio, ’cause Jon has a recorder, and the recorder came out, which wasn’t part of the plan, and now the recorder is a big part of the identity of the song. Recorders are so shrill, I feel like they really provoke, like, a frustrated response.

I like how you said you got a bit silly, ’cause that was exactly what I was gonna ask. It feels like a lot of the time on this album you’re really having fun and getting a bit silly with the choices. Is that how it felt throughout the record?

STOKES: Yeah, we were giving ourselves a little more freedom. It’s our fourth album, which feels so crazy. And it feels like with [last album] Expert In A Dying Field, we managed to do the thing we had been trying to do, and it felt like some closure. We felt confident that we sound like us. When we play a live set, those songs are always gonna be there, and they’re always gonna be part of what we sound like. We love touring and we love playing live, but often that feels like we’re trying to keep things simple and keep it as the rock band thing so that we can then tour it. But we were letting ourselves a little bit out of the box. Within reason, ’cause we still had these limitations, like no synthesizers. But yeah, it was fun to just be like, we’re off the leash. We’re allowed to make a studio album. As long as it still feels like a guitar album, as long as it still feels like us. I think we’re more confident that we’re gonna sound like us, because it’s our hands on the instruments and it’s our brains making the music.

4. “Metal”

I guess I already asked about this song and the idea that we as humans are in collaboration with everything else in the whole world in order to be alive. What got you thinking about that and writing these lyrics about that?

STOKES: I feel like a lot of songs, you start writing them and you don’t know what they’re about. And I had this guitar riff and this phrase, “So you need the metal in your blood.” I was kind of leafing through all my words and this writing, and I was like, “What does this phrase mean that my brain’s come up with?” And it was kind of really landing on the idea of the body as a vehicle that you’re operating, that you have this dual relationship with. I really love learning about it and learning about the world, and I never did science in school, but I feel like I have an amateur enthusiasm for learning about how things work, so there’s kind of an amazement at how it all works. But then there’s the duality of that with the way I perceive my own body, which is sometimes just awful, you know? Like my relationship with it is sometimes just angry or frustrated. I am trying to reckon with the fact that I am grateful and amazed that I exist, [and] I also am my own worst enemy, and hate my body and my brain sometimes. It was just, yeah, bouncing between those two things. They seem connected because they’re opposite sides of the same coin.

5. “Mother, Pray For Me”

Obviously this song is so striking as this really personal, raw ballad. You said in the bio that you cried when you wrote it. Tell me more about writing this song, and it being new territory for The Beths to have such a stark, raw song.

STOKES: I had been thinking a lot about my relationship with my family, and trying to improve it I guess. And during writing the song, I was really processing something. I wrote a lot of verses, and we ended up having to choose which verses to use and which order to put them in to kind of tell the story.

The song has a lot of longing, right? It’s asking the question of like, “We love each other so much, but why isn’t our relationship the way that you perceive mother-daughter relationships should be?” or something? And I can sense that she does want that but doesn’t know why we don’t have that, and I also was like, “Do I want that, and why don’t we have that?” Trying to kind of understand each other and see each other from across that gulf. And I feel like it’s helped me to accept the relationship for what it is, rather than trying to push it towards something that I feel like it should be.

And yeah, I’m just trying to understand her. ‘Cause our lives are so different generationally, but then also culturally. She grew up in such a different environment, and then there’s a language barrier, and I don’t really speak very much Bahasa [the national language of Indonesia, where Stokes’ mother is from] but I’ve been kind of learning it to try to close the gap. But there’ll always be that kind of communication breakdown a little bit, which I feel like people experience with their parents even without a language barrier. That does feel universal. And yeah, it’s just the relationships where we have real conflicts, [but it] doesn’t mean that there’s not deep love there. It’s just kinda confusing.

I wanted to ask specifically about that idea of the language barrier that’s in the song, the line “I don’t know the tongue in which you dream.” I feel like that’s such a real and meaningful sentiment for anyone who is a second generation immigrant in trying to connect with their parents. What’s your relationship with that idea?

STOKES: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of it, right? Especially me, I feel so connected with words, they’re the lens through which I see the world and approach the world and try to make myself understood. And even the song itself was an example of me trying to make myself understood by both myself and by other people. But of course it’s not the medium through which I can actually communicate with my mum. So even showing her the song, I was kind of like, this thing that feels like it’s kind of crystallized something for me, it doesn’t mean the same thing when I play it to her.

What’s the significance to you of the ideas in this song about prayer and religion? Were you raised in religion, is it something you’ve kind of grappled with as an adult?

STOKES: Yeah. It feels all tied up together with me. My mum’s Catholic and I was raised Catholic, but I kind of lost my faith quite young, when I was 14, 15. And that came with a period of grief and anger and all these things. Whereas for my mum, she lost her mum [when] her mum was quite young, and her mum was the most important person in her life, they were so close. Her faith feels like it’s tied to her relationship with her mum, and this idea that they’ll see each other again. And I don’t share that with my mum, and that was part of maybe even the grief of losing my faith at the time. That’s part of the crux of the song, is like, I know that she prays every day and it’s a very important part of her life, and even though I don’t believe, it’s like, I don’t want her to stop.

I’m interested in how you approached the production of this song. It’s such a delicate song, but it has these background touches going on that I think are really nice.

STOKES: The demo was just me on guitar, and we recorded that version. And then we ended up making a full band arrangement, which was very sensitive and a beautiful arrangement. I think we all did really well at creating this really sensitive version. But just going back and forth between the solo version and that, and playing it to people we know and trust, it felt like there was something about just vocals and the guitar that felt right. Having to listen to the words because there’s not much else to listen to, and having to really engage with the story felt important. And then Jonathan ended up adding some kind of organ on there, which felt appropriate. It sounded similar to the little crappy church organ that we had when I was growing up and going to church.

6. “Til My Heart Stops”

Again, it’s that whiplash sequencing. This has a kind of euphoric feel after the poignancy of “Mother, Pray For Me.”

STOKES: Yeah, this is the first track of side two. Side one is like, for us it’s a weirdly somber side. We’re normally pretty upbeat. So it feels like side B kind of ramps up, and “Til My Heart Stops” kind of bridges those two sides in a way that is really fun, and opens up the second half.

I feel like I want to connect this song with the numbness that you talk about in “No Joy.” It feels like kind of a twin to that, like it’s about wanting to break out of that numbness, and I guess visualizing it before you can actually do it, right? Is that an accurate interpretation?

STOKES: Yeah, totally. It’s like a longing song, right? It’s like, wanting to be in the world, wanting to feel like a part of it, when I feel like so often I’ve walled myself off from the people that I love, or from experiences that I wanna have. And I don’t like that about myself, I don’t want that. I wanna live in the world, I wanna be close to the people I’m close to. And yeah, it’s like, wanting to experience that euphoria of connection.

I feel like musically the textures in this song at the beginning feel interesting. There’s something a bit more synthesized going on – although as we talked about I guess it’s not actually a synth – but then later on it comes in with that heavy guitar and drums. So tell me about sculpting this song.

STOKES: So I wrote the chorus for this song ages before the rest of it. And I tried to make it into this big kinda song and it just wasn’t working. And so Jonathan was like, “Well, why don’t you just make it a small song?” And I was like, “I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that.” But I was thinking about fhe Cars. I was thinking about how the band that wrote “Just What I Needed” also wrote “Drive.” So I was like, “Okay, I’ll treat this like ‘Drive.’ I’ll give it as much space as it wants in the demo” — which was even more space. The demo was really sparse. But then it opened up at the end, and I was having fun with making crack-up beats on Ableton for the end of the song. Which felt a little bit Postal Service or something, to kind of let it go wherever it wants to go. But yeah, it was scary to be like, can we be this sparse? Then bringing it to the band and us trying things, and it’s comforting to know that just by it being us playing it, it sounded so different from the demo, and it still feels like us.

I think we’re imagining as well the feeling of having that much space as a part of the live set, [which] will be really fun. ‘Cause usually our songs are so dense, and it’s eighth notes and fast tempos, and it feels like every moment is filled with sounds and filled with ideas. So allowing a little bit of breathing space on the album and in the live set will be really nice. And Jonathan’s making like a crazy loop, he made this beautiful loop on a Chase Bliss Blooper pedal, and it sounds good.

I think there’s something interesting in the idea of writing a song about wanting to feel something and then trying to make the music match that feeling. Does that feel like a kind of challenge?

STOKES: Yeah, yeah. It was an active choice to, like I said before, try and let the music speak a little more. Just kind of letting the music bring more of a feeling, rather than just an energy. And yeah, that song, wanting to feel the end of it, to kind of personify that feeling of being alive that is so missed in the first half.

There’s also some bongos towards the end, if I’m hearing correctly.

STOKES: Yeah. I couldn’t believe it when I thought about it — we have so many beautiful, amazing musician friends in Auckland, and this is actually the first time we’ve had people who aren’t in the band play anything. So we had our friend Ruby, who is great, and they’d been getting really into hand percussion. They played the congas on this one, and bongos in “Best Laid Plans.” It feels allowed, in the universe of if you can make it as an organic sound then it can be on the album. The original demo ending that I had for that song was full of crazy percussion, and it was almost like a dance beat or something. It brings a kind of lightness to the ending I think that’s really fun.

7. “Take”

This one has this really badass, intense vibe musically.

STOKES: Yeah, this was really fun to make. I think it was really melodically driven. It’s a sister song to something like — there are these kinds of guitar parts that I can write that are like “Not Running” or “Out Of Sight” on previous albums. You just kind of keep repeating them, and they’re simple but they roll over each other and create a feeling. And we love to write a fast rock song, but Tristan ended up coming up with this really great 16th-note beat, and the song is exactly as fast as he could play that 16th-note beat at the time. We could probably make it faster now if we wanted to.

Do you want to?

STOKES: [Laughs] We always like to play things faster, but we try to resist that feeling. But yeah, the melody just kinda kept rolling out. And I really loved it, but I was like, “Is this allowed?” Like, it doesn’t really have a traditional chorus. I kept trying to write one, and in the end I was like, “Maybe we just don’t have a traditional chorus.” It’s kind of like A-B-A-B, and then it kind of cascades at the end in a way that reminds me of the song “Little Death” [from Future Me Hates Me], that is an important song for us. And I love the way that playing that song feels, the momentum of playing really fast all together as a group. It feels like you’re all just running down a hill at full tilt and you kind of arrive at the bottom. And I really love the feeling of playing that live, I love the feeling of listening to it and feeling like everything’s building and building. And it was fun to be able to bring that kind of song in again. But it’s almost like if instead of it being eighth-note punk-influenced or something, it’s like Hot Fuss-era early-2000s kind of driving sixteenth-note feel.

What’s going on in this song lyrically? Particularly that chorus part which is just two words, “oblivion” and “take.”

STOKES: It was kind of meditating on “take” as a word. It’s dealing with the way that I feel the pull, like a lot of artists do, of like, feeling overwhelmed and wanting to experience oblivion with whatever that is for you. For me it’s often been drinking. I think it’s just like, that craving, what feels like the bliss of nothingness, which is often an illusion of what that’s actually gonna be like. But wanting to kind of like mute the things in your head that you kinda can’t turn off. And it’s pulling from, I think, imagery in my brain from periods of time when I was much more in it, and just drunk all the time, because I was trying to numb something. I was searching for that oblivion, is what I wanted. And “take” is — it’s not the traditional word for drinking in English, but it is in other languages. It just felt like the right word, for the multiple things it does. ‘Cause when you do it it’s an inward-looking act, and it felt like a selfish thing to do, because you kind of just like… disappear.

I don’t know if this means anything to you, but for me this song feels a lot like Jimmy Eat World, the album Futures.

STOKES: Ah! Yeah, I really love that record.

Yeah, it’s such an underrated record. But yeah, it’s like that darkness and that grittiness, but also that just driving rock, sixteenth-note kind of thing.

STOKES: Yeah, yeah. I’m thinking of “Pain,” and that does have that 16th-note thing. It’s of an era. And obviously that record for him is working through substance abuse and stuff like that, right? So yeah, that’s a great reference. I should have thought of that at the time. Should have been on the reference playlist.

What were the references for this one?

STOKES: It was hard to find them. That would have been a really good one. I don’t know, what was on the reference playlist? For some reason the Veronicas were on there. It felt like an imagery thing. I was like, it feels like it’s from this time, and I can’t think why. I just knew it needed that really driving bass, combined with the really delicate vocal.

There’s also a fun solo on this one. Is that you or is that Jonathan?

STOKES: That’s me. That was my demo solo, which… you know, that’s the danger. You put something in the demo and you’re like, “But we’ll put a real thing in.” And then you just get attached to it. So it’s kind of the exact solo that I played when I made my crappy demo of it initially. And then I was like, “Well, Jonathan’s gonna play the solo, obviously.” But no, I play the solo. That’s one of my rare solos. And it’s mostly one note, which is fun.

It’s awesome though. How do you feel about solos as a band?

STOKES: Oh, I mean, we’re a big guitar solo band. Jonathan has a lot of guitar solos. I feel like the role of them has changed. It felt like for a long time they were like a celebration. It was like, you get to that part of the song and you’re like, “Now it’s time to just celebrate.” We got here, and it’s time for the guitar solo. I find bridges really hard as well, so being able to be like, “Now finally I can shut my mouth, and we can just experience this guitar solo together.” But this felt like — not a celebration, but similarly, there’s a catharsis, I think, to a guitar solo that just is unlike anything else. It’s like — this is so uncool — in a musical when people stop singing and all you can do is dance. That’s the guitar solo. You just have to let out a primal scream. And we’re a melodic band, you know? Joanthan loves to write like a Cars-style, “This is the solo and I’m gonna play it every time.” But this one is just kinda like, a scream.

8. “Roundabout”

This feels like a nice, upbeat song after the darkness of “Take.”

STOKES: Yeah. You get a bit of whiplash from how dark “Take” feels into “Roundabout.” But I feel like it’s good to have a bit of levity in there before “Ark Of The Covenant,” which is also quite dark. But yeah, “Roundabout” is kind of about old friends. We’re all a bit older now, we’re all in our 30s, and I’ve known people and been friends with people for a really long time. And our relationships feel meaningful even when they kind of ebb and flow. I think I was feeling comforted by the idea that these relationships are sturdy enough now that I can kind of make the promise — which maybe I’ll break — but like, I’ve known you for a long time, and however we both change, ’cause we will change, I’ll still love you.

I thought that sentiment on the bridge is really sweet: “Never change, unless you do, unless you want to.” It feels so hard to come to that place of not needing to hang on really tight to exactly what this is right now. Is that something you’ve come to with age, with time?

STOKES: Yeah, totally. You reach an age where you’re like, you have already changed, we are now both different people than when we met, and we’re gonna change again. But there’s a part of you that’s like, never change, because you’re always gonna be you. But also, it doesn’t matter if you do. We’ll still be here.

9. “Ark Of The Covenant”

STOKES: This one feels like a little bit meta, I guess. In not just the songwriting, but in the process of trying to sort my shit out over the last few years. There’s a lot of introspection, a lot of examination of my life, my habits, my brain, why I do things the way that I do. And in that self-examination, I was kind of getting archaeologist imagery, of like, just digging and overturning things and finding things hidden underneath things. And just being so intrepid but then being terrified sometimes of looking at certain thoughts, certain memories, because you assume that when you look at them your face is gonna melt like in [Raiders Of The Lost Ark]. But then often once you actually shine some light, it’s not so bad. But yeah, Jonathan was like, “Is this a Biblical reference?” And I was like, “No, it’s an Indiana Jones reference.” And so we were having fun with the kind of cinematic sound for the song, and the movie trailer kinda like “bwahhh” that you get when something dark is coming. Like horror movie noises.

There’s also other cool stuff going on in the song, like that kind of screechy guitar going on behind that whole thing, and there’s piano in it. Tell me about putting this song together musically.

STOKES: The main guitar part, we ended up recording on a Dobro guitar, ’cause something about it was feeling kind of twangy. It feels like that keeps it kind of grounded. It’s like, that’s the reality, is the kind of bluegrassy sounding guitar, underneath all of the driving and strange and kind of scary darkness, which is coming from the screechy guitars, and Jonathan’s kind of “skreeee.” It was just a one note part [that] kind of brought the song to life. The demo was much more simple, and was just that kind of twangy guitar part.

10. “Best Laid Plans”

STOKES: I think I had the drums first, and then this kind of spooky-sounding picked guitar part. And then with that kind of simple bassline, it was just such a feeling. Then the chorus came, and I was like, “So what is this song about?” And I think I worked out it was kind of a fantasy song, like fantasizing about giving up, and how great it would be, how nice it would be. ‘Cause I feel like sometimes you just sit there and you’re like, what if I just gave up? And you can’t, and you never should. This is why it feels like a fantasy. It’s letting myself go to the place where it’s like, what if you did?

We were listening to more dance music, I think we had LCD Soundsystem as a reference. It’s not a sound we’ve done before, it’s not a tempo we’ve done before, letting ourselves kind of groove and sit on a feel for a while and create a kind of hypnotic feeling. And the bridge I built together with Jonathan at first, the chord progression, and it was just instrumental for a long time, which is something that we would never have allowed ourselves to do before. But I ended up adding lyrics in the bridge to kind of keep that feeling going. Yeah, it’s really fun. It was really fun to make, and we’ve never made anything like that before.

When it comes to closing songs, I always think it’s fun when opposed to being the most intense song or the most emotional song, it’s a song that feels almost like the theme song. The intensity is over and we’re just gonna have some fun on this one. Why did it feel like the closing track to you guys?

STOKES: I think because it has a little bit of a — not jam-out, but it’s got some space to just kind of sit and be. It’s almost like sitting in the afterglow or something, and you can just kind of float I think. For me it’s a heavy album, and it’s quite a journey, there’s a lot of ups and downs. And I feel like, yeah, you get to have a little treat at the end, and just… rebirth yourself back into the world.

What’s the sample that’s going on towards the end?

STOKES: I wanted a New Zealand voice, and it felt like a song that we could have a sample in. I really like that as a concept, but we always struggle with what to put in, and we leave it last minute. But I stayed up late one night when I was making vocal demos and I found some stuff on the New Zealand archival website, and if it was made before 1946 then it’s out of copyright. I found this woman who was in World War 2 making like medical bedpans and stuff out of papier-mâché, like slings and things. And she feels kind of like the voice of — when I say that you actually shouldn’t give up, she’s kind of that voice reminding you that you gotta keep going.

Straight Line Was A Lie is out now on ANTI-.