Courtesy Frances Carter
Audio By Carbonatix
The Beths are ready to take on the world again. After the indie-rock band from New Zealand released Jump Rope Gazers in 2020, the four-piece’s touring was limited to the small island country.
“We had this weird thing happen where we put out an album in 2020, and we toured in New Zealand but not anywhere else,” says founding lead singer and rhythm guitarist Liz Stokes.
“We had quite a lot of momentum with the first record that we had [2018’s Future Me Hates Me], and we were touring a lot from 2018 to ’19, so we had this momentum that felt like it came to a very sudden halt,” she explains. “In 2022 we started touring internationally again, and it was like we were touring the album that came out in 2020 two years later. And for a lot of people, it was the first time we were playing that record anywhere that wasn’t New Zealand.”
While Stokes says that the band’s isolated home base added to feelings that “we could be easily forgotten,” the Beths have now been playing to bigger audiences than ever before. “To be able to come back in 2022 and all the audiences being bigger – because people had found those albums during the pandemic and connected with them – was a really huge relief,” she says, adding that the band has kept busy with “back-to-back touring since we have been able to.” And the music clearly hasn’t gone unnoticed: The newest single, “Watching the Credits,” a left-over B-side from the latest album, 2022’s Expert in a Dying Field, recently appeared on former president Barrack Obama’s annual summer playlist in July.
Following the release of that album, which prompted an NPR Tiny Desk Concert earlier this year, the Beths are back stateside while opening for the National this summer. The bands will play a two-night run at Mission Ballroom on Friday, August 11, and Saturday, August 12. Along with Stokes, Jonathan Pearce (lead guitar and backing vocals), Benjamin Sinclair (bass) and Tristan Deck (drums), fans can now also expect to catch a glimpse of the band’s unofficial fifth member and mascot – a giant tuna – that first appeared on the cover of Expert in a Dying Field before making its live debut last year.
The unnamed sea creature will “stick around for as long as it feels appropriate, until it’s time for the fish to retire,” according to Stokes. But American audiences are unexpectedly loving it so far, she adds.
The tuna backdrop just seems to fit with the dreamy, guitar-heavy offerings the Beths have become known for since forming in 2014 – a tad quirky, yet full-on poppy and captivating. Kind of like the feeling you experience while watching a Wes Anderson film. Overall, it makes for “a good time,” Stokes says.
“We like playing music together, and I think it’s a good energy,” she adds. “Hopefully, it’s a gig where you smile a few times.”
While there is a healthy alternative music scene in New Zealand, the Beths are “a mishmash of everything” the bandmembers listen to, whether it’s a Canadian dream-pop band like Alvvays or American yacht rock. Stokes outlines a fun game the musicians like to play while they’re on the road and how it relates to the songwriting process.
“We were in the van the other day, and we did something we call a baker’s dozen, where you listen to a song thirteen times,” she says. “We listened to ‘Hard to Be in Love With You,’ by Hall & Oates. By the end of it I was like, ‘I want the next album to sound like that.’
“But it won’t sound like that, because I’ll listen to a million other songs between now and then, and a little piece of everything will turn up in the new music,” she explains.
In that sense, the band’s progression seems “both natural and intentional,” Stokes adds.
“It feels like with each album, we kind of figure out a little bit more about who we are – or maybe now we’ve figured out who we are, and it means we can kind of explore a little bit further outside of that,” she says, adding that it’s not like “we’ve changed drastically the kind of music that we’re making, but from the other side of it, I hope that we’re better musicians and are still improving, or at least in the mindset of improving.”
Stokes says she is still “processing” the full schedule of globetrotting and gigs, but she’s grateful that Expert in a Dying Field has led to “a lot of new and different experiences.”
“Making an album kind of gives you a perspective,” she says. “I suppose when we stop touring toward the end of the year, maybe we’ll make some more music.”
The Beths, 8 p.m. Friday, August 11, and Saturday, August 12, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $55-$300.
