LP – Limited Edition Silver Vinyl Repress with 24×24 Poster housed in a Gatefold Sleeve. Includes download code.

In September 2022, The Beths released their third album, Expert In A Dying Field. The response was immediately positive and earned them a place on a great deal of Best-Album-of-the-Year lists like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Stereogum, to name a few.

On The Beths new album 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 theyre 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 youve become in a person, once theyre gone from your life?

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.

Most of Expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearces studio on Karangahape Road in Tmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) — and sometimes in the building’s cavernous stairwell at 1am — toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown. They traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone, the first time theyd written together in such a way. The following February, The Beths left the country for the first time in more than two years to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road. That latter half felt more collaborative, with everyone on-hand to trade notes in real time, until it all culminated in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. There, Expert finally became the record they were hearing in their heads.

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 isnt 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, theres 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.

Tracklist:

A1 Expert In A Dying Field
A2 Knees Deep
A3 Silence Is Golden
A4 Your Side
A5 I Want To Listen
A6 Head In The Clouds

B1 Best Left
B2 Change In The Weather)
B3 When You Know You Know
B4 A Passing Rain
B5 I Told You That I Was Afraid
B6 2am