The Beths’ fourth record Straight Line Was A Lie opens with a fumbled first take, setting the tone for an endearing and incisive 40 minutes of Elizabeth Stokes’ sharp songwriting, wrapped in some of the most colourful and imaginative indie-pop arrangements around.

With lyrics circling futility, exhaustion, apathy, and the trudge of modern life, the band delivers a bright, sparkling sound with an electrifying contrast. Words that are so sad on the page are lifted into something joyous by the sheer creativity of the playing, with a knack for harmonies that sounds like way more than four people. With an arpeggio instead of a power chord, and a mandolin instead of another guitar, The Beths fill space with clever choices instead of brute force. Stokes’ delivery is often deadpan, but the music around her is so colourful it’s as if the band are nudging her along and cajoling her back into motion as she sings of weariness.

The third track No Joy is a perfect example, the chorus repeating “No joy” with flat affect while the drums bound forward with infectious energy. Some songs are intimate to the point of fragility, while other bloom into vast anthems. Metal shimmers with guitars that glint like sunlight on water, whilst Til My Heart Stops lists the small things that make life worth clinging to with gorgeous effect. The closer Best Laid Plans shows just how big The Beths can sound, swelling with huge guitars and groovy percussion, delivering massive emotions in direct, memorable lines, all carried on wonderfully inventive and imaginative playing.

One of the joys of Straight Line Was A Lie is the way its songs begin simply before blooming into something far more textured. A basic and breezy folk-rock chord sequence expands into a full canvas of banjo, mandolin, slide guitar, and layered harmonies, and yet despite the scope of these arrangements there’s never melodrama. Stokes sings with sweetness and sincerity, letting her insecurities and quiet observations swell into something that feels epic in scale without losing their intimacy. The record is powerful because it insists that the small things matter, as moments that might seem minor in the rush of modern life are treated with tenderness and blown up into widescreen nostalgic songs.

The chords are simple and sun-lit, but the arrangements are rip-roaringly inventive in how they dress them up. Every embellishment makes the album feel extraordinarily sincere and friendly in its insistence of the importance of life’s smaller details. The instrumentation is radiant enough to feel childlike and innocent, but it feels real rather than naïve and saccharine. It’s a reminder that rock music doesn’t actually need to posture and swagger with boozy recklessness to feel vital, and it can instead be warm, direct, and deeply human.

For all its talk of futility and exhaustion, Straight Line Was A Lie feels like a warm embrace. The Beths have made an ambitious, colourful, and incisive record that makes being alive in a world that moves too fast feel a little more bearable.