Liz Stokes of The Beths. Twelve years after forming, the Auckland indie band are in rarefied air. Photo / Dean Purcell
Twelve years after forming, Auckland indie band The Beths are in rarefied air.
Having won countless awards back home in New Zealand, they’ve achieved cut-through internationally too – packing out venues overseas and even capturing the attention of former United States President Barack Obama.
Obama has twice named The Beths on his annual Summer Playlist – most recently last year for ‘Metal’, a jangly, guitar-driven track from their 2025 album Straight Line Was a Lie.
Frontwoman Liz Stokes is somewhat sceptical of his fandom.
“If it’s him making those playlists, I don’t know!” she told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night. “It’s such another universe that it’s kind of hard to imagine.”
The Beths are about to go on another touring run, having played a mammoth 70 shows in the back half of 2025. For Stokes, touring is a mixed bag.
“It is such an extreme lifestyle – being in a different city every day, the travel involved in that and the jet lag and the lack of sleep,” she reflects.
“But then you do this thing every night where people come and sing your songs with you, and no matter how much energy it took to get through the day, or whatever problems came up that you had to solve, your cup gets filled.”
That said, playing live still brings a level of anxiety for Stokes.
“If the show’s good, it tops you up. And that’s why the show becomes so important, because if something goes really badly and you get into a bad headspace during it, you’re kind of running at a deficit then for the next period of time,” she told Real Life.
“Often these big shows, you get so nervous that it’s hard to just be present, and you start to get in your head and spiral if you make any mistakes.”
That performance anxiety came to a head for Stokes in 2024, when The Beths played in front of a crowd of thousands at Coachella.
“At the time I was dealing with some health stuff… I got diagnosed with Graves Disease and so I had this thing where my eyes were kind of bulging out of my head at Coachella, which is quite a visual experience with the filming and people taking photos.
“So I was not having a chill, great time … but it went well, it went great.”
Stokes has long been open about her health issues, including dealing with anxiety and depression over an extended period. She says success hasn’t insulated her from mental health struggles.
“Almost everyone you know and interact with, there’s that level of performance of normality, but you don’t necessarily know what’s going on behind the scenes. And it doesn’t mean that it’s a lie, you know?” she told Cowan.
“Playing on stage, I really enjoy it, and it does make me feel better. But I guess you never really know what people are dealing with – and having some level of success doesn’t magically make you happy forever.”
For Stokes, there’s been a realisation that looking after her mental health is something she’ll always need to do – that it’s less a “journey to the top” and more like “maintenance, and unromantic”.
This idea is one she explored in her songwriting for Straight Line Was a Lie.
“ The journey is kind of a winding road, right? With a lot of things, I feel like I’m quite a pragmatic person, and whenever there’s a problem, my instinct is to map out the way to solve it and move through it and past it.
“But I guess I’ve been alive for a long enough time – I’m in my mid-30s – that I’m now starting to notice the patterns in my own life where things have happened to me multiple times or I feel like life isn’t just progress in moving forward.
“And it’s not broken, you’re not doing life wrong when things happen and you are maybe facing a different direction than you thought that you would be, or you have to move what feels like backwards.
“It’s like, even when you’re moving backwards, you’re still moving forwards through life.”
Stokes said she’s learned that taking care of herself – doing “boring stuff” like exercising, going to therapy and learning to open up – is meaningful, “even though you have to do it every day, forever”.
“I was on medication for a while and that was helpful when I was very low, to help me build some of these patterns that weren’t established before, and that is harder to establish when we don’t really have a routine necessarily with our life.”
While writing the lyrics for Straight Line Was a Lie, part of Stokes’ routine was the use of a typewriter, given to her for her birthday many years prior by her bandmate Benjamin Sinclair.
Stokes had read a book by the author Stephen King in which he explained he would write 10 pages every day without fail, no matter how difficult. Inspired by his methodology and in a bid to overcome her own writer’s block, she committed to the same approach.
“Not forever, but I’ll do it for a couple of months,” she thought.
“ It [the typewriter] is from the ‘50s or ‘60s, and man it feels great and sounds great. When you get a rhythm going, it really feels like it pays you back in a great sonic experience.”
After many weeks, Stokes had a stack of pages “a decent couple of inches” thick, which she used when it came to write the music.
“I was just trying to write as many songs as I could, and it was just very useful having processed a lot of stuff and asked myself some kind of hard questions and things.”
Now back at home, and with no new album on the horizon, the pressure of songwriting is off for now.
But Stokes is still trying to get the creativity flowing; watching movies, reading books, listening to music and learning a new song on the guitar every day.
“It’s something I haven’t done since I first started learning guitar: learning songs, just trying to get inside them and figure out what they’re doing,” she told Real Life.
“Like, what chord progression are they using, and actually singing the words and seeing how they feel and getting better at guitar while doing it. It’s been really good.
“You have your hands on the instrument playing something that you love, it feels more likely that something inspiring will spring out of that than just holding the guitar and saying, ‘write something’.”
The Beths begin touring again later in February, with multiple shows scheduled around New Zealand in March.
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