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This will delight those who have come to love them over the course of their last three LPs, of which 2022’s ‘Expert In A Dying Field’ has been the most treasured. That album is stacked with hook upon hook; songs tinged with sadness which also seemed to give you the sugary cure. You could listen to singles such as ‘Head in the Clouds’ until your ears were buzzing, and definitely, there were periods of weeks or more where this band took over my life. ‘No Joy’ promises to do the same, only now, the sadness has turned into a more palpable angst.
Singer and lyricist Elizabeth Stokes uses a very particular brand of dry self-deprecation which never wears thin: lines like “All my pleasures, guilty / Clean slate looking filthy / This year's gonna kill me / Gonna kill me” are delivered through diamond-bright melodies, so pretty that you cannot help but listen again. But Stokes’ voice, in equal parts sweet and deadpan, brings out a worn-out, down-spirited kind of wit, lingering with you just as much as the earworms do. This is like if you took the supercharged sweetness of Throwing Muses and brought it down a couple of notches; you still get the hit, but it has a comedown.
It should not be shocking that The Beths are capable of this. From New Zealand, they have been influenced by a rich trove of indie pop, particularly from the ‘Dunedin Sound’ movement of the 1980s and 90s, named after the city on the South Island where it emerged. Though from Auckland, a fair way north, they seem to draw on all of it. Bands like Look Blue Go Purple made songs about cats (see ‘Cactus Cat’) with infectious harmonies and kitsch music videos - possibly an influence on the quaint style of The Beths’ artwork? On the darker side, bands such as The Chills made deliciously gloomy Goth pop, with songs like ‘Pink Frost’ and ‘House With a Hundred Rooms’ evoking the windswept Dunedin coastline; Tristan Deck’s propulsive drumming seems to echo them. ‘No Joy’ is newly aggressive territory for The Beths, and guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s walls of distortion would not sound out of place on a song like The Clean’s ‘Point That Thing Somewhere Else’.
Like a thorn, ‘No Joy’ gets under your skin and takes hold. When the band tours the UK in a few months’ time, I am sure that this song in particular will cause raptures. As for the title: quite the opposite! This is a treat for power pop fans and delivers hugely on the promise of the previous albums. Long live The Beths!
