At some point I figured Water From Your Eyes were fucking with me. There are actually several times I’ve felt this way, but I’m flashing back to one specific memory from May of 2024, when I was sitting in a Salt Lake City taqueria with the duo — songwriter Nate Amos, frontperson Rachel Brown — at that juncture in tour when half a conversation might be a dense network of inside jokes cultivated during endless hours of van drudgery. Amos was telling me his one impossible goal, the loftiest dream for Water From Your Eyes, was making an album in which Red Hot Chili Peppers served as the backing band but with Brown on vocals instead of Anthony Kiedis. Considering I was eating tacos with a duo who had become Brooklyn’s experimentalist darlings, it could seem a classic bit of interview obfuscation. But then we spent 10 minutes talking about our mutual millennial love of Californication and By The Way.
With that conversation in mind, it’s only a few minutes into Water From Your Eyes’ new album It’s A Beautiful Place when Nate Amos ascends. Following the alien garble of instrumental opener “One Small Step,” “Life Signs” launches into a nervy and shifting arrangement suggesting the vitals in question sputtering awake on a previously flat-lined EKG. Upon its release as the album’s lead single, some characterized it as nu-metal; to me, the deadpan yet clouds-parting chorus feels like Stereolab if they were really into grunge. Before you’ve gotten your bearings, the song ruptures halfway through, and Amos launches into a smeared tangle of a guitar solo that plays out like the evil twin to John Frusciante’s solo in “Give It Away.” From there, Water From Your Eyes never come back down, instead offering an album that takes place up amongst vapor trails, then stars, then beyond.
Perhaps you, too, do not know whether to take Water From Your Eyes at face value when they return with an album called It’s A Beautiful Place. After all, the surge in attention around 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed partially derived from how effectively the duo’s frazzled art-rock summed up relatable bad feelings ranging from late-capitalist mundanity to a generalized angst at living in a 21st century shot through with a sense of impending doom. Last year, they told me they were determined to put something slightly more positive out into the world. There is both awe and horror woven in It’s A Beautiful Place: Working off the notion of how tiny we are in the scope of history or the universe, Water From Your Eyes favor accepting objective meaninglessness and making up our own meaning anyway.
Or, as Amos put it in the album’s accompanying press bio:
A song can feel like everything, communicating vast emotional landscapes, but your favorite album is less important than any person. That person is less interesting than any dinosaur. That dinosaur is less important than any mountain. That mountain is boring compared to any planet. That planet is only a part of a solar system. That solar system is microscopic next to any galaxy. If music and all other human practices are meaningless on a cosmic scale why does it still feel so important?
In the two years since Everyone’s Crushed, everything changed for Water From Your Eyes. Their Matador debut, that album took the band from the simmering blog respect that had greeted 2021’s Structure to widespread buzz. They toured constantly, ping-ponging between club gigs, festival stages, and playing in front of legions of Interpol fans in Mexico City. And as WFYE’s profile rose, so too did each of its individual members gain further notoriety for their other projects — Amos with This Is Lorelei, Brown with thanks for coming, live band members Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz with fantasy of a broken heart. [Full disclosure: Brown also recently took on a side gig making videos for Stereogum.]
While the core duo of Amos and Brown remains the driving force behind Water From Your Eyes, this is in many ways a fundamentally different band than the last time they released an album. Amos still labored away on his home computer, cutting and pasting, ripping songs apart and rebuilding. Yet it was the first time he was writing knowing there was an audience awaiting the next album, that there were expectations around Water From Your Eyes. It’s also the first time WFYE had been touring for real, so a writing process that previously wrought bedroom art-pop was reoriented to account for a full-band dynamic in increasingly large rooms.
It’s A Beautiful Place is a lean album: six full songs and four instrumental interstitials totalling 29 minutes of music. But it feels so much more expansive than that. Within that brisk running time, their music is overflowing with ideas, carefully calibrated to sit just right amongst each other. Water From Your Eyes are one of those Rorschach test bands — are they indie weirdos or are they really trying to make ’90s alt-rock, are they accessible or difficult, etc. — and that is partially by design. Amos once told me the band works best when “every song is a remix of a song that doesn’t exist,” and the kaleidoscopic blend of genres and eras is intrinsic to the whole point of It’s A Beautiful Place. “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip,” Amos said recently.
While their process remains largely the same, there’s a different kind of focus on recent Water From Your Eyes releases. These new songs are characteristically varied, simultaneously sounding like a million things and nobody else, but they also respond to the pressure of the dreaded breakthrough followup by rendering the band’s shape-shifting in bolder, more muscular, more confident ways. After “Life Signs” opens up the album’s world, “Nights Of Armor” crashes in like a scuzzy shoegaze track that thumps instead of blooms. Even in moments of distortion and grime, a new sense of brightness pokes through, with the song’s clamorous guitars mollified by celestial synths in the backdrop and Brown’s cooing chorus.
Tensions and dichotomies continue throughout, sometimes within the same song and sometimes in abrupt mood shifts. The noisy crescendo in the overdriven dream-pop of “Born 2” collapses into a strikingly beautiful interlude with “You Don’t Believe In God?” before pivoting into the psychedelic odyssey of “Spaceship” cruising on currents of backwards guitar. Even for a band in which nothing seems off-limits, there’s a freedom on It’s A Beautiful Place. It reaches a zenith on “Playing Classics,” a masterful, intoxicating dance epic that finds Water From Your Eyes at the perfect intersection of their avant-garde and pop instincts.
These songs emerge logically from the band’s past, but still feel like they are surging forward in exploration. Fittingly, the cosmos was on both of their minds. While Amos’ music echoed spiritual concerns across the whole of human history, Brown carried books around with them on tour: Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 utopian sci-fi novel The Dispossessed and Marcello Tari’s 2017 work There Is No Unhappy Revolution. Many songs still concern themselves with the corporeal, with a few navigating interpersonal relationships. Then lyrics will flip from despondence to seeking transcendence. “I’m unfulfilled, I’m in a beautiful place/ Yeah it’s so sad in this beautiful place/ I need you here right now in this beautiful place,” Brown mumbles in “Life Signs,” before asking: “Can you resurrect a cloud? Can you claim it’s fate?” On “Playing Classics,” their delivery of “Look/ I’m concerned as a matter of fact” is a chills-inducing curtain-rise moment; later, as warped house piano and guttural guitars and beats consume them, they promise “There’s no lost future, baby.” Once more, you decide which way you take that.
It happens now and then, but all too rarely. A band releases a breakthrough album that builds upon everything they’ve done so far, and then they meet their moment. They level up, and then level up again right away. It’s A Beautiful Place is both exactly what you might’ve imagined from a new Water From Your Eyes album and also not anything you could’ve predicted. It’s the exhilaration of watching a band get better and better, delivering on heightened expectations by every metric. If at any point you wondered how serious Water From Your Eyes were, each ingenious turn on It’s A Beautiful Place obliterates doubt. In the span of one album cycle, they’ve gone from DIY to chasing the final frontier.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Deftones’ private music
• Earl Sweatshirt’s Live Laugh Love
• The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die’s Dreams Of Being Dust
• Mac DeMarco’s Guitar
• Nourished By Time’s The Passionate Ones
• Greg Freeman’s Burnover
• Hunx And His Punx’s Walk Out On This World
• Hand Habits’ Blue Reminder
• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s GUSH
• Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele 2
• Kid Cudi’s FREE
• TOPS’ Bury The Key
• Superchunk’s Songs In The Key Of Yikes
• BigXThaPlug’s I Hope You’re Happy
• Winter’s Adult Romantix
• Teyana Taylor’s Escape Room
• Blake Mills & Pino Palladino’s That Wasn’t A Dream
• Kathleen Edwards’ Billionaire
• Dominic Fike’s Rocket mixtape
• Sombr’s I BARELY KNOW HER
• Hot Mulligan’s The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still
• Wreck And Reference’s Stay Calm
• Laufey’s A Matter Of Time
• Anand Wilder’s Psychic Lessons
• Mariah The Scientist’s HEARTS SOLD SEPARATELY
• Jon Batiste’s Big Money
• Dinosaur Pile-Up’s I’ve Felt Better
• Double Wish’s Double Wish
• Case Oats’ Last Missouri Exit
• Delicate Steve’s Luke’s Garage
• Ava Max’s Don’t Click Play
• quannnic’s Warbrained
• Wolf Alice’s The Clearing
• Jobber’s Jobber To The Stars
• Dean Johnson’s I Hope We Can Still Be Friends
• Offset’s KIARI
• Kerala Dust’s An Echo Of Love
• Judy Blank’s Big Mood
• Chambers DeLauriers’ Our Time To Ride
• Signs Of The Swarm’s To Rid Myself Of Truth
• Foreign Air’s Such That I May Glow
• Three Days Grace’s Alienation
• Spaceface’s Lunar Manor
• SunYears’ The Song Forlorn
• Kingfishr’s Halcyon
• Pendulum’s Inertia
• Dan Rosenboom’s Coordinates
• Balu Brigada’s Portal
• heddlu’s Tramor
• Samer Ghadry’s Electric Gong
• Hundreds Of AU’s Life In Parallel
• James Yorkston’s Songs For Nina And Johanna
• Glitterfox’s Decoder
• Paul Cornish’s You’re Exaggerating!
• Adrian Sherwood’s The Collapse Of Everything
• Endlings + Vancouver New Music’s Parallel03
• Ami Taf Ra’s The Prophet And The Madman
• Chambers DesLauriers’ Our Time To Ride
• Sir Chloe’s Swallow The Knife
• Royel Otis’ hickey
• The Imaginaries’ Fever
• Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr’s Drops
• Claire Morales’ Lost In Tthe Desert
• Eric Zayne’s Sunset & La Brea
• Scree’s August
• Tullycraft’s Shoot The Point
• Innumerable Forms’ Pain Effulgence
• Arcadea’s The Exodus Of Gravity
• Lila Iké’s Treasure Self Love
• Rnie’s FULL NEPTUE
• Richard Carr’s The Escarpment
• Texas Headhunters’ Texas Headhunters
• Emma Louise & Flume’s DUMB
• Lojay’s XOXO
• Luke Marzec’s Something Good Out Of Nothing
• UMI’s people stories
• Jeremy Zucker’s Garden State
• Stella Cole’s It’s Magic
• Walker Hayes’ 17 Problems
• Cody Bodacious’ MicroplasticGodmonkey
• Karan Aujla’s P-POP CULTURE
• Black Pearl Livingston’s Your Richness Is Life
• Bec Lauder And The Noise’s The Vessel
• Bootcamp’s Time’s Up
• J.P.’s Took A Turn
• Russell Dickerson’s Famous Back Home
• Mildred’s Pt. 1
• Annie & The Caldwells’ Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right (Mixes — Part II)
• Lupe Fiasco’s Samurai (Deluxe)
• Various artists’ Antone’s: 50 Years Of The Blues box set
• Oasis’ Complete Studio Album Collection box set
• The Warning’s Live From Auditorio Nacional, CDMX live album
• John Fogerty’s Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years
• Chris Casey’s Buried Out Back EP
• Samantha Gongol’s Flash In The Pan! EP
• The Bends’ Leeward Drive EP
• april27’s the electric chair EP
• Burp.’s Video Games & Cartoons EP
• Patrick Wolf’s Better Or Worse EP
• Lissie’s Promises EP
• Lana Love’s Sorry I’m Human EP
• The Dare’s Freakquencies: Vol. 1 EP
• Luke Schneider’s For Dancing In Quiet Light EP
• Honk’s Closing Down Sale EP
• Goo Goo Dolls’ Summer Anthem EP
• The Band Loula’s Sweet Southern Summer EP
• Radio Free Alice’s Empty Words EP
• HONK’s Closing Down Sale EP
• Derek Day’s I Can’t Imagine EP
