‘Playing Classics’ is the second single from Water From Your Eyes’ forthcoming album, It’s a Beautiful Place, landing August 22nd via Matador Records. The track finds duo Nate Amos and Rachel Brown delivering an expansive and coolly composed banger – a 6-minute dance-floor-friendly epic that threads elegantly heat-warped piano lines across pulsing four-on-the-floor rhythms. Watch the James Dayton directed video below.
Water From Your Eyes – ‘Playing Classics’ (Official Music Video)
Praise for Water From Your Eyes
“Their most joyously out-there achievement yet — a mind-blowing concept album about time, space travel, and the nature of reality.” – Rolling Stone
“Freaky, full-bodied rock songs” – The Guardian
“Playing Classics started as an attempt to transform an existing guitar piece that I had stalled on into a dance number after Rachel requested that the next album have a disco song on it – the original version was 12 minutes long,” writes Amos. Brown adds, “it was probably my favorite instrumental that Nate sent so it was my favorite to work on lyrically. I love disco and dance music and I had been begging him to make a super dance targeted track. I was focusing on the idea of dancing in a club despite the world falling apart outside. It was written during Brat Summer, so Charli definitely had an influence.”
It’s A Beautiful Place is a gleaming megalopolis: a satellite view of eras and musical forms, a reframing of the y2k songbook that is at once awe-struck and mindful of its place in the vastness. “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs and space,” says Amos. “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.”
Pre-order the album HERE.
The NYC-based duo were recently featured in a Paste cover story and profiled by the Guardian and Rolling Stone, who called the album “jaw-droppingly brilliant.” Brown was also a guest on Talkhouse’s new Music Person podcast. Listen HERE.
In the time since 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed, their Matador debut and critical breakout – which appeared in end of year lists by The New York Times, The Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, Vogue, Wired and Rolling Stone – Rachel Brown and Nate Amos have become a pillar of the city’s alternative music scene and one of its most revered underground exports. Live, they’ve expanded to a quartet, joining forces with guitarist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz of NYC duo Fantasy of a Broken Heart. They played huge stages supporting Interpol on tour, including in front of 160,000 fans in Mexico City. Back home, the band established a DIY boat show franchise on the East River, hosting friends at the heart of the city’s musical vanguard including YHWH Nailgun, Model/Actriz, Frost Children, and Kassie Krut. Brown released a new EP under their thanks for coming moniker, while Amos released an acclaimed full length under his This Is Lorelei solo project.
The duo finished the bulk of It’s a Beautiful Place last summer, just as they have every other WFYE release: in Amos’s bedroom, under the watchful eye of a tattered Robin Williams poster from the Mork & Mindy era.. “Basically,” jokes Amos, “Robin is like a silent member of Water From Your Eyes.” But this time, much of the writing and recording were shaped around the dynamics of a full-blooded live group: “When you’re playing with a band you tend to write with one in mind – this was the first time I wrote anything for WFYE imagining us playing anywhere bigger than a basement,” he observes.
True to this, ‘Nights In Armor’ is introduced with a whirlwind of Frusciante Stratocaster bliss. ‘Born 2’ is a worldbuilding guitar onslaught, its lyrics channeling a preoccupation with sci-fi literature and political theory as Brown’s voice glides overhead: “the world is so common / and born to become / something else”. “I’ve been carrying around The Dispossessed (a 1974 anarchist utopian novel by Ursula K. Le Guin) and There Is No Unhappy Revolution (a 2017 non-fiction by Marcello Tarì) in my backpack for well over a year now,” Brown says. “They have been to four different continents and across almost every state line. While writing lyrics for the album, I skimmed both books quite thoroughly.”
Throughout It’s A Beautiful Place is a clear sense of a band who have honed their curveballs into home runs. Looming and melancholy, wide-eyed and petrified, it’s Blade Runner with a touch of WALL-E, it’s Kubrick and Asimov with a hint of Jay and Silent Bob. These are songs that look outward, conscious of our smallness and questioning our place in the universe while admiring the surrounding beauty.
Water From Your Eyes
It’s A Beautiful Place
Pre-order the album HERE.
TRACKLIST
- One Small Step
- Life Signs
- Nights in Armor
- Born 2
- You Don’t Believe in God?
- Spaceship
- Playing Classics
- It’s a Beautiful Place
- Blood on the Dollar
- For Mankind
WATER FROM YOUR EYES
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