Jump Rope Gazers, the upcoming album from The Beths, was announced in April. The album is a couple months away now, so in the meantime, the group has shared another preview of it via a video for “I’m Not Getting Excited,” an energetic indie-rocker that’s accompanied by a stop-motion video.
The band’s Elizabeth Stokes says of the song:
“People always ask ‘are you excited!?’ and it’s a fair question, because exciting things do happen to us sometimes. Support slots, overseas tours, music releases. Stuff we’ve dreamed about for years. So the correct answer is always ‘yes.’ But the truth is that deep down there’s a tiny Liz saying, ‘don’t get excited.’ She is certain that anything good that could happen will most likely not happen, because of a freak accident. Or because somebody finally realizes that we aren’t worthy, shouts ‘phony!’ and takes everything away. I wrote ‘I’m Not Getting Excited’ last year, well before everything really did get taken away. From everyone. It feels like the song has a new context, but we don’t know what it is yet. And now we all share a blurry, uncertain future.”
Directors Callum Devlin and Annabel Kean (collectively known as Sports Team) also said that while making the video, they “turned our laundry into a film studio and spent our inside time mastering the art of stop-motion animation. We animated old towels, all the cardboard in the house and The Beths themselves… frame by bloody frame. There’s a lot of scary imagery in the song that we wanted to play on. There’s a madness too, in the contradiction between what the song is about and its frenetic energy. It has defined the lockdown for us — being locked indoors but furiously busy.”
Watch the “I’m Not Getting Excited” video above.
Jump Rope Gazers is out 7/10 via Carpark Records. Pre-order it here.