The Beths share their growing spotlight with New Zealand

The Beths are just happy to be here. Hailing from Auckland, New Zealand, Liz Stokes, Jonathan Pearce, and Benjamin Sinclair recently released their first album, Future Me Hates Me, to critical acclaim. Its tracks flaunt a devil-may-care attitude, complete with catchy lyrics, raucous guitar riffs, and bursting drums. Hell, in one song, Stokes sings, “But I will go out tonight/I’m gonna drink the whole town dry/Put poison in my wine/And hope that you’re the one who dies.”

Rolling Stone declares the album “a true power-pop movement” and Pitchfork says it’s “one of the most impressive indie-rock debuts of the year.” But when we met over Google Hangouts (arranged with our 16-hour time difference in mind), Stokes and Pearce are gracious as can be, soft-spoken, affable, and relieved that they’ve made it this far.

. . .

Like many long-lasting friendships, the three bandmates don’t remember the details of how they first met over ten years ago. They do remember that they’d all gone to different high schools and had known each other within the Auckland music community, separately playing in R&B, folk, and “a lot more serious” guitar bands. The three of them moved on to study jazz in college, with Stokes focusing on the trumpet, Sinclair on the saxophone, and Pearce on the piano.

“I had a great time studying music,” Stokes recalled. “I really liked getting inside of it, getting into all of the nooks and crannies of how it works.”

This love for music continued as the three musicians picked up instruments that took them out of their comfort zones—with Stokes on guitar and vocals, Pearce on guitar, and Sinclair on bass—and formed a band.

The Beths started as “a fun hobby band,” Pearce said, a side project its members worked on while playing in other bands and pursuing other projects. After releasing their Warm Blood EP in 2016, they still didn’t consider it their main focus. They took their time when creating their first album, slowly chipping away at recordings, playing short sessions in the studio, and performing the occasional gig in New Zealand and Australia. It wasn’t until they were 75 percent done with the album that they made “a pretty big mental commitment to actually get it over the line, to decide that this is the main thing we should be doing,” Pearce said.

Part of this hesitation was a fear that the band might not work out, even though The Beths were important to its members.

“People would pull us aside and say, ‘This is special. Don’t fuck it up,’” Stokes said. She struggles to word what she says next: “It’s like that saying: You don’t want to look at it too hard in case it disappears. You don’t want to jinx it.”

It wasn’t until The Beths were signed to Carpark Records that everyone could breathe a sigh of relief.

“I was scared it was all going to crumble away at any second,” Stokes admitted. “And when [the signing] finally happened, it felt really good. It felt heartening to know that there were these people we really respected who were taking a chance on us.”

Even now, their realization that the band can really be something is still unfolding. Most of its members have a Plan B: Pearce runs his own unnamed studio, where he records and produces local bands. Sinclair teaches saxophone (which is what he’s doing during this interview), but takes breaks when the band is on tour. And Stokes only recently quit her day job teaching trumpet, in order to focus more on The Beths.

With their recent success, The Beths are bringing New Zealand’s talent to the masses. For their album cover, they enlisted Eleanor Barker, an Auckland-based watercolor painter who specializes in painting women.

For their music videos, the band kept their location in mind, knowing that it’s rare for touring bands to travel all the way down to New Zealand to perform. The closest thing to a live concert can sometimes be to watch a video on YouTube, which is why The Beths incorporate some sort of performance in their own music videos.

“People find a way to carve out some way to express themselves, some way to keep doing what they’re doing in music,” Pearce said, “even though we’re in a small place at the bottom of the world.”

The Beths recently released their first full album, Future Me Hates Me, and are heading out for an international tour this fall. Here are The Beths’ 12 songs.

I’m going chronologically with the songs on this list. My older sister came back to NZ from a summer being a camp counsellor in America bearing a handful of CDs that I’d requested. It was 2004 and I’m fairly sure we still had dial-up internet, so I was excited by the opportunity to listen to Fall Out Boy without waiting for songs to buffer on Purevolume.com.

I listened to Take This To Your Grave all through my early teen years, and downloaded the tabs from Ultimate Guitar. I would tune my guitar up to the powerful E-chord that came thundering out of the speakers when I pressed play on Track 1, “Tell That Mick.” There are a lot of albums from this time that I can’t listen to anymore because I feel like they don’t hold up. But I still get excited by the energy of this album — it bursts at the seams and I love the tightness of it.

I bought Lifted on CD and first hit play on a hot summer day during school holidays. I had brought my stereo to the backyard and put the record on repeat, and let it play it over and over. I was mesmerized by the way this person could write words and words and words that were funny and sad and sarcastic and sincere. “Bowl of Oranges” was one of my favourites. The way he tumbled from one verse into the next in a way that felt totally natural and conversational, but a much better conversation than I had ever had with someone. I learnt the songs on my nylon string guitar: Easy open chords, simple melodies, non-virtuosic singing. It really hit home to me that there is magic in lyrics.

I had finished jazz school and was working at a small suburban library. I started writing music for what would end up being The Beths, and when I was on shelving duty, I would try to finish the songs bouncing around in my head. I had never written for a “rock band” before, so I took advantage of free CD borrowing to do a lot of research while driving to and from the library. God, I sound just very uncool, and I am. Somebody returned Wave of Mutilation: Best of Pixies, and I jumped at it as a good intro to a band I’d only heard a little bit of. I fell in love with the sound of “Gigantic,” which I kept coming back to. It just felt so good, and I basically decided I wanted to make music that made me feel that same way. I dove into the Breeders straight after.

Hans Pucket is a Wellington band. The first time I saw them in Auckland, at the Wine Cellar, it was love at first sight. My friends were all in great bands that I loved, but this was different. When they released the Jalapeño EP, I was evangelical about it. Next time Oli (Oliver Devlin, lead vocals and guitar for Hans Pucket) was in Auckland, our friend introduced us and we managed to orchestrate a band friendship that I had wanted for so long, playing together whenever we can. They are still my favourite NZ band, and one of my favourite bands period. They just released their first album Eczema, and I listened to it a lot while we were on tour, as it reminds me of home. “Old U Vs The New U” is my favourite. I just love the way the melody climbs, and the way the arrangement progresses. No chorus is the same. It’s a beautiful piece of songwriting.

The colours and shapes of sound in this track are singular and hugely inspiring to me. I first heard it in my mid-teens and I’ve been trying to learn its secrets since. This song sounds like no other and I call that phenomenon a Hot Mix. You know what song you’re listening to from the first drop, and that’s fascinating to me.

This album is thundering in my life right now. It’s grown slowly on me. I just put it on once, and without really thinking about it, put it on again and again. Then… you know that feeling when you either want to listen to one album only or nothing at all? It’s good company, in any situation. “Mary” is a song with secrets, and it’s masterfully sung and produced. I love it.

This wild, amorphous collective comes together to perform and continually reinterpret the songs of Scott Kendall in Auckland, New Zealand. They can be baffling, they can be brilliant, a band whose best shows are the best you’ve ever seen. I recorded this utterly disarming rendition, but you have to hear their Miami-beach-cocktail-bar-band version. And their stoner doom version.

“Clumsily, we go

Trespass upon one another’s heart

It is an unwitting act of love

For the heart is a locked, dark place

That must be cracked apart”

And on he goes. This song kills. Steve is the master.

This song reminds me of those times you partied all night, maybe took acid, and by the morning you are surrounded only by the people you love and you watch the sunrise and everything is perfect. The lyrics are delicate and poetic, and the band sounds incredibly sensitive and innovative at the same time.

I love how energetic and live the band sounds on this song. Listening to it makes me want to make music. The backing vocal arrangements are really comical but amazing at the same time, and the arrangement from the band goes so many different places over the course of the song. Probably the single biggest influence on how I want my own music to sound.

I’ve been obsessed with Ryan Adams since I was fifteen and it’s difficult to pick a favourite track. I love “The End” because it recalls the romanticised version of the US I have in my head, filled with dirt roads and diners, pine trees and poets. I like to imagine what I could have become had I spent more of my mornings reading novels with a black filter coffee and a pack of American Spirits. I love how raw and emotional the performance of the song is. The lyrics are coarse but charming. I love how the imagery effortlessly sets up the backdrops to the thematic content of the song.

This song was introduced to me by my girlfriend Ruby and it is (arguably) the song of our relationship. It makes me think of all the best times we’ve had together. Although it’s quite a sexy song, I don’t feel like it’s a dirty song. It’s definitely more about the joy of wanting to be with another person. It goes without saying that the production of this track is insane and the band is incredible. They manage to keep the sound feeling lush while only using the sparsest of arrangements. And when they begin to build up, they never stop adding power and intensity right until the fade-out.

Listen to the Beths’ curated 12 songs playlist on Spotify.