'Sometimes you go what feels like backwards' - The Beths' singer Liz Stokes on doing life with depression and Graves' disease

"Facial expression wooden / Wanted to cry but I couldn't", sings Liz Stokes in 'No Joy' - a lively song about the inability to experience pleasure (aka anhedonia), which she's struggled with both as a symptom of depression and a symptom of SSRI antidepressants.

Also in the mix for Stokes were the symptoms of Graves' disease, an autoimmune condition affecting the thyroid gland that she was diagnosed with in 2023. After a "dark" few years of mental and physical health challenges, the Auckland musician hopes Straight Line Was A Lie can be some comfort to other people whose health struggles are ongoing.

"If that is what you feel, you are not alone," she tells Music 101.

While Stokes credits SSRI medication with helping her out of "a pretty big hole", the 34-year-old says the injection of hope it first delivered - "that things will just keep getting better and then I'll be better" - faded over time.

Feeling "very flat" and like her "emotional compass" wasn't calibrated, the musician struggled with writer's block before eventually "weaning herself off" the medication.

Now equipped with a deeper acceptance of the "cyclical" nature of life, Stokes feels sure that sometime in the future she'll have reason to go on it again.

"Sometimes you go what feels like backwards, but everything is still kind of moving through."

Liz Stokes first met The Beths' guitarist Jonathan Pearce, who is also her partner, at Auckland high school Macleans College. While studying jazz at Auckland University, the pair connected with Sinclear and Deck and in 2014 formed The Beths, named after a shortening of Stokes' full name, 'Elizabeth'.

In 2018, the band's first album Future Me Hates Mewas described by Pitchfork as “one of the most impressive indie-rock debuts of the year”. After touring the follow-up albums Jump Rope Gazers (2020) and Expert in a Dying Field (2022), The Beths now have many passionate fans around the world.

One city that's been especially supportive of the band is Los Angeles, where Stokes and Pearce lived for three months after their "nerve-wracking" gig at the Coachella festival last April.

During their stint in Los Angeles, Pearce says he and Stokes received "inputs" from movies and live comedy while working on songs for Straight Line Was A Lie.

"It's good to be in a place where everybody is working on [something creative] in kind of an industrious way," Stokes adds.

A six-kilo vintage typewriter gifted to Stokes by The Beths bass player Ben Sinclair was used to write the band's new collection of songs.

Knowing his bandmate was a very fast touch-typist who struggled to get her thoughts down "as fast as they were arriving in her brain", Sinclair thought a 1950s Remington Rand might be a "good tool for that job".

While playing bass all over the world with The Beths, Sinclair documents and reviews his many and varied breakfasts, including "local gems" recommended by fans, on his popular blog Breakfast and Travel Updates.

These diaristic breakfast updates from the world's cities now serve as something like a Beths tour diary, jokes Pearce.

"It's a huge justification for these swaths of time that we just disappear from and that can become such a blur.

"For the documentation of [The Beths' tours], as well as a reframing of the day through Ben's lens, is memorable and enjoyable and honestly justifies its existence."