Obvious word of advice: don’t take a bottle of water to a concert at the Corner Hotel. You’ll have to face the misery of pouring out its entire contents onto the side of the road in front of security. Even still, I’m not sure I would’ve needed it—the performance by The Beths that night was more than enough nourishment for my soul, let alone my throat.

Before we get into that, we need to talk about the Corner Hotel itself: a whiplash coming from the grand and tall Northcote Theatre earlier in the week, the Corner Hotel was an expansive but dark bar setting. At the time I arrived, I was able to easily get to the front rows near the stage with enough wriggle room to peer around other people and photographers. That said, moving back through was a slog after the show, let alone to get drinks. If you’re someone wanting a close view while also having close access to the bar, I would either recommend getting better at pushing past people with no remorse or go for the raised concert platform on the west wing.

It also gets you easy access to the merch bar which included a ton of shirts, vinyls and totes among others for The Beths, and their opening act for the night, Phoebe Rings, another band hailing from Auckland. Despite their 6am flight here, the band had effortless flow with each other, with each member announcing songs (including ones they wrote specifically for the new album) and cracking jokes. It also helped that their set was full of some of the chillest vibes imaginable; ethereal, airy synths populated much of their catalogue. Particularly in a song like ‘Lazy Universe’, it felt plucked right out of the cosmos with its rising digital charms, grounded by the odd plucky woodblock.

On that note, the band had a lot more instrumental experimentation that I expected. ‘Drifting’ was full of maracas, and with its warbling synth, made me feel like I was slowly emerging from the water onto a desert island. While my position up the front really helped with my immersion into their music, it did not prevent the bass from exploding into my stomach and ears. While I expected this, it did make the lower tone vocals by Benjamin Locke during a later song a bit harder to hear. That aside, Phoebe Rings was one of the biggest surprises of the night for me, and I look forward to hearing more of them.

From the confusion of strobe lighting and MIDI instruments, The Beths erupt on stage with the crowd to the sound of, ironically enough, ‘Silence is Golden’, a song I wasn’t at all expecting to be played first. What surprised me more is that they just kept going—soon breaking out into the more chill ‘Great No One’, then immediately following up with ‘When You Know You Know’ under a haze of orange light and double guitar solos. With ‘Dying to Believe’, a whole four songs passed before the band even spoke to the crowd. This breakneck pace continued throughout most of the gig, which is admittedly a bit exhausting, not to mention disappointing not to hear more about certain songs. Though I don’t think the crowd minded too much. In fact, the crowd hung on to every lyric, a group next to me even belting out every song.

They do finally break at this point to shout-out the NZ comedians at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, before introducing a new song: ‘The Straight Line Was a Line’. Ironically, a kind of cyclical song lyrically, at least as far as conveying the metaphor of personal development is concerned. It was hard to care too much when the song was this catchy, especially with a killer bridge out of the chorus. As more songs play in sequence, it becomes clear that the lighting is the key to the show. There’s a lot of visual variety between each song; from the disco ball spray and static greens of ‘Jump Rope Gazers’ to the blinking white spotlights on red of ‘Head in the Clouds’, though a bit blinding for someone in front row. The way Corner Hotel’s lighting is set up also left the drummer Tristan Deck shrouded in darkness for a lot of the show. Kind of disappointing considering how all out some of these songs go on their percussion.

The band then reintroduce themselves, with bass player Ben Sinclair asking a totally mature Melbourne audience about the cost of public transport. This leads to the next new song: “temporarily titled” ‘Mosquitos’. This had a very nice acoustic focus at the start, before progressing into some twinkly electric guitar. The lyrics of this one were also very vivid in describing this outdoor landscape, and our speaker’s possibly dead body? Question for another time, as we go straight into ‘I Want to Listen’, followed with ‘Little Death’, back-to-back with my favourite song from the band, ‘I’m Not Getting Excited’. With some truly ascendant guitar and drum solos from both Pearce and Deck, it made me glad security passed around water— otherwise, I may have fainted on the spot.

With some confusion at people in the crowd yelling “Yippee” and “Fortnite und ein cola”, (“Are you guys meant to be like, the Aliens from Toy Story?”) the band rolls right into ‘You Wouldn’t Like Me,’ with some synchronised clapping from the crowd. Later, I found myself adoring the warbling of the guitar in ‘The Longest Day’. Then they introduced ‘No Joy’ which throws that guitar warble out the window. The drilling growl of the guitar buried its way into my skull in seconds, and that was before we got to the recorder solos. Singlehandedly the song I’m most looking forward to from the new LP.

As we begin to wrap up with a special Birthday performance of ‘Future Me Hates Me’ and ‘Expert in a Dying Field’, the obvious encore fake-out rears its head to bring us ‘Tell Me a Secret’. An unconfirmed title fits such a track; hypnotic with Elizabeth Stokes’ haunting vocals, yet explosive in its percussion and guitar. It already feels like the perfect song to crash out to at the gym. With a final, final for real this time guys, performance of ‘Happy Unhappy’, we leave the venue. It takes me a couple days to get the spotlights out of my eyes, and as always, the tunes out of my head.