New Zealand quartet The Beths are on a headling tour after 2023’s opening slot for Death Cab For Cutie’s tour across the US. Their last album, Expert In A Dying Field,  on Carpark Records. On Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life?

The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun — to hear, to play — in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope. Expert is an extension of the same sonic palette the band has built across their catalog, pop hooks embedded in incisive indie rock.

The result is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum. “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “The song is about stress and anxiety manifesting as an intolerance to noise,” says Stokes. “Where each new sound makes you more and more stressed.” 

There’s a certain chaos across Expert’s 12 tracks, the palpable joy of playing music with long-time friends colliding with the raw nerves of pain. Stokes strings it all together through her singular songwriting lens, earnest and self-effacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball. Did I do the wrong thing? Or did you? And are we still good people at the end of it? She isn’t interested in villains, but instead interested in just telling the story. That insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016. In the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish – instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. And Expert In A Dying Field is the most tactile that tenderness has been.

The band is known for its use of vocal harmony, using the voices of all four band members.