Liz Stokes

INFO

Name	Liz Stokes (she/her)
Also known as	Elizabeth Stokes
Born	1990
Country of Birth	Indonesia
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Indonesian, Pākehā
Artform	Music
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Liz Stokes is a songwriter, musician and lead vocalist for indie-rock and power-pop band The Beths, known for their “sweetly sung melodies and super-depressing lyrics”. The band have toured extensively internationally, opening for bands like The Pixies, The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, The Breeders and The National.

Born in Jakarta in 1990, Stokes started playing guitar at age 13, busking with best friend and musician Chelsea Jade at Botany Town Centre — “mostly Jenny Lewis covers” — before forming folk band Teacups with Jade and double bassist Talita Setyady. They opened for José González two years later, in 2009, following up with performances with Cat Power and Kimya Dawson.

While studying trumpet in the University of Auckland’s jazz programme, Stokes — along with high-school friend and future bandmate and partner, Jonathan Pearce — met musicians Benjamin Sinclair and Ivan Luketina-Johnston (who would later be replaced by Tristan Deck). They formed The Beths in 2014. “I turned 23 and realised I really wanted to play in a guitar band”. The name was inspired by Gilmore Girls’ Lorelei Gilmore, who named her daughter after herself. “I like that,” she recalls thinking. “I’m gonna name my band me.”

“The Beths is almost reactionary to jazz school and trumpet,” Stokes has commented. “It’s a guitar band. We make guitar music. I like it that way.” In 2018, they released their deadpan, self-deprecating, propulsive debut album, Future Me Hates Me. It was widely praised, with Rolling Stone naming their “blissy, pissy, breakup jam” ‘Happy Unhappy’ “the song of the summer” and Pitchfork describing it as “one of the most impressive indie-rock debuts of the year.”

They followed this up with the slower Jump Rope Gazers (2020) with its “stacked harmonies and girl-group-inspired call-and-response chants” and “slaloming vocal lines, taking strange side paths to their harmonic resolutions”. That year, the band received Best Group, Best Alternative Music, and Album of the Year at the New Zealand Music Awards.

“I feel like I overthink a lot,” Stokes has said, speaking about her songwriting process. “I’m constantly writing songs that are two or three steps overthought. Maybe there’s a situation but the song is about how I reacted to that situation – how I feel about how I’m feeling. I can spiral a bit.”

In 2022, the band released Expert in a Dying Field (2022), an album defined by Stokes’ “painfully bright and openhearted lyricism”. The band received the APRA Silver Scroll Award 2023 for the titular song.