A few years ago, someone gifted Liz Stokes a typewriter for her birthday. The singer, songwriter, and leader of the Beths was immediately struck with a thought.

“I was like, ‘I’m never going to use this,’ ” Stokes told the Boston Herald.

The Beths had been rising for years (and continue to rise with Dec. 1 and  2 shows at Royale). Between 2018 and 2022, the New Zealand indie rock band made three albums — all Album of the Year contenders — powered by punk energy, garage rock noise, and sweet harmonies. But after 2022’s “Expert in a Dying Field,” Stokes struggled to write.

“I thought, ‘Well, this is the tool that writers use to write,’” she said about the old typewriter. “If I can’t write songs, I thought I could at least write words like a writer. And it’s the best tool for the job for all the reasons that everybody talks about. You can’t erase things. You just have to keep adding on. It’s tactile, fun, and you can get on a roll and type a lot faster than you can write by hand.”

She committed to writing ten pages a day for almost six weeks. When she felt stuck, she would just describe places or memories. One of the standout tracks on new album “Straight Line Was A Lie,” “Mosquitos” came directly from this process.

After getting piles of pages together, Stokes went to Los Angeles to put together new tracks. As she worked up demos, she would go back to the piles for lines, ideas, inspiration. “Mosquitos” had a chorus but she was about to give up on the rest when she hit upon a memory she’d typed out about a favorite creek ravaged by flooding back home in Auckland.

“I was in LA and trying to figure out what to do with this chorus that I liked,” she said. “I said, I’d give it one more day. The next day I picked through my notes and found the pages where I wrote about the flood. I had never really written a narrative song like that where I combined (the chorus and notes) into one song.”

The new approach to writing led to new styles and detours. “Straight Line Was A Lie” has more ballads than past records. It has more tenderness — check out the song she wrote about her relationship with her mom, “Mother, Pray for Me” — and more nuance, sonic poles, and jagged edges.

But while finalizing the track list, Stokes wondered if the album was too far removed from the Beths’ past sound — a sound she and her bandmates were very proud of. After reinventing her writing process and a bit of the band’s aesthetic, she felt the album needed something more and wrote the title track more or less from start to finish on a city bus.

“We usually have one two big crises recording an album where (producer and guitarist) Jonathan (Pearce) and I will be like, ‘Oh, no, are we making a good album?’ ” Stokes said with a laugh. “I was trying to find the through line between everything we had… and I ended up writing most of (the title track), the verses and chorus anyway, in my head on the bus.”

She rushed home from the bus stop and “quickly smashed through a demo” of “Straight Line Was A Lie.” The song is very Beths — big hook, power pop sunshine, simple and smart lyrics about why life takes around in circles. Turns out there’s a couple different ways to write a killer song. And Stokes now knows how to get the most out of them.

For tickets and details, visit thebeths.com