The Beths announce debut full-length for ANTI-, Straight Line Was A Lie

The path from The Beths' 2022 album, Expert In A Dying Field to Straight Line Was A Lie was anything but straightforward. For the first time, Stokes was struggling to write new songs beyond fragments she’d recorded on her phone. She’d recently started taking an SSRI, which on one hand made her feel like she could “fix” everything broken in her life, from her mental and physical health to fraught family dynamics. At the same time, writing wasn’t coming as easily as it had before.

“I was kind of dealing with a new brain, and I feel like I write very instinctually,” she says. “It was kind of like my instincts were just a little different, they weren't as panicky.”

While Stokes felt a huge relief from taking an SSRI, she articulates the emotional trade-offs on new single, “No Joy”. "It's about anhedonia, which, paradoxically, was there both in the worst parts of depression, and then also when I was feeling pretty numb on my SSRI,” Stokes says. “It wasn't that I was sad, I was feeling pretty good. It was just that I didn't like the things that I liked. I wasn't getting joy from them. It's very literal.”