There is a particular electricity that gathers before The Beths walk onstage at Roundhouse. It is not swagger or spectacle. It is anticipation built on trust. This is a band people believe will deliver songs sharp enough to cut through the week and choruses big enough to carry everyone home. The stage itself feels warm and inviting, dotted with standing lampshades that cast the room in a soft domestic glow, as if the crowd has been welcomed into a particularly loud living room.
Before that, their fellow New Zealanders Womb ease the room into focus. Made up of siblings Cello and Haz Forrester alongside drummer Georgette Brown, the trio build slow-moving weather systems of shoegaze haze, soft percussion and spectral melody. Their set feels less like support slot housekeeping and more like being submerged. Tracks from their recent album One Is Always Heading Somewhere drift and bloom, with guitars blurring into synth mist while the crowd settles into a mesmerised hush.
Then the lights lift and The Beths arrive to a roar that clearly indicates that their return to Australia has been overdue..
Frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes has long mastered a rare trick: making anxiety sound exhilarating. Tonight, songs from new album Straight Line Was A Lie land with both precision and force. Metal glints with tension, No Joy turns self-doubt into propulsion, and Mother Pray For Me carries bruised vulnerability without ever collapsing under it. A notably young crowd sings along to every word, treating even the newest material like long-settled favourites.
The title track, Straight Line Was A Lie, arrives early and becomes one of the night’s defining moments. Its central idea, that progress rarely moves cleanly forward, lands hard in a room full of people old enough to know it already.
Around Stokes, Jonathan Pearce, Benjamin Sinclair and Tristan Deck play with the tightness of a band who understand exactly how much lift melody can take before it breaks. Every harmony is locked in. Every dynamic turn feels earned.
Older favourites are greeted like returning friends. Expert In A Dying Field material still sounds immaculate, its knotty feelings wrapped in sugar-rush hooks. The audience sings back with the kind of commitment usually reserved for songs people used to survive something.
What makes The Beths special live is their refusal to choose between intelligence and joy. They can write about spiralling mental health, family knots and the dread of stalled adulthood, but make it feel like your best night out in months.
The tour moves to Melbourne next, tickets HERE
For US and EU/UK tour dates go HERE.
Images Deb Pelser
