The Beths - Jump Rope Gazers

Everything changed for The Beths when they released their debut album, Future Me Hates Me, in 2018. The indie rock band had long been nurtured within Auckland, New Zealand’s 2ght-knit music scene, working full-2me during the day and playing music with friends azer hours. Full of uptempo pop rock songs with bright, indelible hooks, the LP garnered them cri2cal acclaim from outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, and they set out for their first string of shows overseas. They quit their jobs, said goodbye to their home town, and devoted themselves en2rely to performing across North America and Europe. They found themselves playing to crowds of devoted fans and opening for acts like Pixies and Death Cab for Cu2e. Almost instantly, The Beths turned from a passion project into a full-2me career in music. 

Songwriter and lead vocalist Elizabeth Stokes worked on what would become The Beths’ second LP, Jump Rope Gazers, in between these intense periods of touring. Like the group’s earlier music, the album tackles themes of anxiety and self-doubt with effervescent power pop choruses and rousing backup vocals, zeroing in on the communality and catharsis that can come from sharing stressful situa2ons with some of your best friends. Stokes’s wri2ng on Jump Rope Gazers grapples with the uneasy proposi2on of leaving everything and everyone you know behind on another con2nent, chasing your dreams while struggling to stay close with loved ones back home.
"If you're at a certain age, all your friends scafer to the four winds,” Stokes says. “We did the same thing. When you're home, you miss everybody, and when you're away, you miss everybody. We were just missing people all the 2me.”

With songs like the rambunc2ous “Dying To Believe” and the tender, shoegazey “Out of Sight,” The Beths reckon with the distance that life necessarily drives between people over 2me. People who love each other inevitably fail each other. “I’m sorry for the way that I can’t hold conversa2ons/They’re such a fragile thing to try to support the weight of,” Stokes sings on “Dying to Believe.” The best way to repair that failure, in The Beths’ view, is with abundant and uncondi2onal love, no mafer how far it has to travel. On “Out of Sight,” she pledges devo2on to a dearly missed friend: “If your world collapses/I’ll be down in the rubble/I’d build you another,” she sings. 

“It was a rough year in general, and I found myself saying the words, 'wish you were here, wish I was there,’ over and over again,” she says of the 2me period in which the album was wrifen. Touring far from home, The Beths commifed themselves to taking care of each other as they were trying at the same 2me to take care of friends living thousands of miles away. They encouraged each other to communicate whenever things got hard, and to pay forward acts of kindness whenever they could. That care and afen2on shines through on Jump Rope Gazers, where the quartet sounds more locked in than ever. Their most emo2ve and hearáelt work to date, Jump Rope Gazers stares down all the hard parts of living in communion with other people, even at a distance, while celebra2ng the ferocious joy that makes it all worth it -- a sen2ment we need now more than ever.

Tracklist

1. I'm Not Gexng Excited
2. Dying to Believe
3. Jump Rope Gazers
4. Acrid
5. Do You Want Me Now
6. Out of Sight
7. Don't Go Away
8. Mars, the God of War
9. You Are a Beam of Light
10. Just Shy of Sure