The Beths Turn Up the Brightness

If there’s a single word that comes to mind to describe the music of the Beths, the indie punk-ish, power-pop band from Auckland, New Zealand, you can’t go wrong with “bright.” Listening to its music feels like stepping into the midday sun after being voluntarily stuck in a basement for a while. You can almost feel the sonic Vitamin D running through your body upon contact.

Bright could also describe the collective tone of the band, whose members are, both in conversation and in their music, palpably intelligent. They are both brash and bashful, bookish and badass. The sunny vibrance of the music doesn’t mean it’s without intensity, though, or even pain. The pristine vocals and the razor-sharp riffs are equaled by the clarity of lyrics, which shine an unrelenting beam on themes that don’t often see the light of pop music’s endless summer day. Mortality, self-loathing, and depression all get their time in the sun on each of the band’s four albums.

The Beths describe its genre as “power pop,” though the only thing commercial about the music is the presence of earworm hooks that possess you to jump and shout along like an angsty tween, only to realize that the lyrical intensity aligns more with Eliot Smith than Taylor Swift. Whatever you call it — and Kiwi-punk is right there — the Beths and its most recent record, Straight Line Was A Lie, sound and feel like riding a bike down a steep hill, falling off, sustaining an injury, and getting right back on to do it again.

Calling from somewhere in Europe on a sweeping tour that arrives in Denver at the Ogden Theatre on November 19, singer Elizabeth Stokes and lead guitarist Jonathan Pearce describe the difficult but illuminating process of creating the latest record. “I was struggling to write after some furious touring,” Stokes reflects. “I was coming out of a real mental health crisis point that coincided with a physical health crisis point, after I was diagnosed with Graves disease. I went through a period of getting help—I started an SSRI, therapy, and I was going to the doctor all the time. I started to get out of the hole, and I was like, ‘I think I’m fixing myself. I think I’m gonna be fine.’ And when you’re moving upwards and out of the dark place I was in, I was filled with a kind of optimism that I was like, ‘Maybe we’re gonna be okay.’ Then yeah, it came crashing down to earth, and I realized that wasn’t really the way things work.”

Whether working on an album or yourself, growth isn’t linear. That’s apparent on the record, which swings back and forth between sparkly rippers like “Roundabout” and “Metal” to quiet odes to longing and loss like “Til My Heart Stops.” Stokes writes for the mind as well as the ear, lending a depth that borders on literary. To begin work on the latest album, the band spent several months in Los Angeles on an urban writing retreat.

The Beths have sustained a positive chemistry since forming over a decade ago, in part because the members seem to actually like each other, but also because they give due respect to the complexities of the creative process. They read books together, like Stephen King’s On Writing and How Big Things Get Done. “We’re nerds for this stuff,” says Pearce. “We think a lot about touring, and we think a lot about being a band. We’re real process people. Because that’s how you make things–by doing it one step at a time.”

Consequently, Straight Line Was A Lie is the band’smost mature record to date, in that the musical arrangements feel intentional yet still spontaneous. Pearce’s guitar playing has a frenetic yet organized intelligence; the riffs are fast and heavy, but never fuzzy or over-the-top. Stokes’s vocals are as energetic as ever, though the slower, more poignant songs don’t let the listener easily off the hook. “With the medication, it was the first time I’d experienced having a quieter brain,” she says. “That slowed the writing process down some, but I think because I was a bit more level emotionally, I was able to look at and process the stuff that I wouldn’t have before. It’s a big part of why this album goes deeper into things that I don’t normally like to think about.”

Even as the Beths gain new listeners and sustain devotion from longtime fans through their consistently excellent output, they don’t take anything for granted. “We love playing live so much,” Stokes says. “We love putting together a set of music. Some of these songs invite a new feeling into the set that we haven’t had before. There’s still a lot of drive and euphoria with some of the older songs, but there’s more breathing space from the new songs. There are some new sounds and different tempos. We’re trying to bring the energy back from when we were playing 100-person rooms.”

“The concept is basically like, jump-cuts between the slickest power pop nuggets and uncompromising babble from four dry-witted New Zealanders,” Pearce adds. Self-deprecation aside, the Beths can’t hide its radiance. “We’re going to talk shit for three minutes, and then we’re going to play ten minutes of the tightest power pop you’ve ever heard.”

The Beths, 8 p.m. Wednesday, November 19, the Ogden Theatre, 935 East Colfax Avenue. Tickets start at $40.