Globetrotting local four piece, The Beths are thrilled to announce their return home playing seven shows throughout Aotearoa next March in celebration of their recently released fourth album Straight Line Was A Lie.
Released in August this year, Straight Line Was A Lie is the first album released via American label ANTI- , debuting at #1 on the Aotearoa Album Chart and receiving glowing reviews from press around the world.
The Beths recently made their late night television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! performing Straight Line Was A Lie’s standout opening title track, praised by Stereogum as a “total slam dunk of an opener.”
This performance gives a taste of what to expect on the band’s homecoming tour which kicks off at Meow Nui in Wellington with two nights on Friday 13 and Saturday 14 of March 2026. Their shows come on the back of three solid months of touring the world, which kicked off last month in Europe.
The path from The Beths’ critically celebrated and year-end-list-topping 2022 album Expert In A Dying Field to Straight Line Was A Lie was anything but straightforward. For the first time, Stokes was struggling to write new songs beyond fragments she’d recorded on her phone. She’d recently started taking an SSRI, which on one hand made her feel like she could “fix” everything broken in her life, from her mental and physical health to fraught family dynamics. At the same time, writing wasn’t coming as easily as it had before.
With Straight Line Was A Lie, Stokes broke down the typical Beths writing process, opening themselves up to a wave of creative input, with Stokes’ free-flowing writing routine proving to be therapeutic. Already a celebrated lyricist, Stokes has long impressed fans and critics with catchy, instant-classic turns of phrase that capture the personal and ladder up to the universal. But Stokes’ intentional deconstruction and rebuilding of her relationship to writing, however, has resulted in a complete renewal.
Her songwriting has achieved startling new depths of insight and vulnerability, making Straight Line Was A Lie the most sharply observant, truthful, and poetic Beths project to date.