New Zealand-based band The Beths detailed a new album, Expert In A Dying Field, due out on September 16 via Carpark Records. The quartet also shared the lead single, “Silence Is Golden.”
The Beths — guitarists Elizabeth Stokes and Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck — recorded most of the follow-up to 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers at Pearce’s studio in Auckland. Expert In A Dying Field “houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz,” press materials for the album stated. “With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves.”
At the end of 2021, New Zealand entered a four-month lockdown which saw The Beths sharing ideas remotely but also crafting arrangements alone, a new method of writing for the band. In February, The Beths left New Zealand for the first time in two years to tour the U.S. and finished the album in a whirlwind three days in Los Angeles.
The aptly named Expert In A Dying Field sees Stokes reflecting on “character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences,” the press release noted. “The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life?”
The Beths previewed Expert In A Dying Field with the LP’s third track, “Silence Is Golden,” which Elizabeth weighed in on. “The song is about stress and anxiety manifesting as an intolerance to noise,” she said. “Where each new sound makes you more and more stressed.”
“Silence Is Golden” arrived with an accompanying music video. Watch it below:
Expert In A Dying Field Tracklist:
- Expert In A Dying Field
- Knees Deep
- Silence Is Golden
- Your Side
- I Want To Listen
- Head In The Clouds
- Best Left
- Change In The Weather
- When You Know You Know
- A Passing Rain
- I Told You That I Was Afraid
- 2am
