Life is horribly dark right now. And yet, it is not unfunny.
That’s the sentiment that animates Water From Your Eyes on their new album, and first for Matador/Remote Control, Everyone’s Crushed, released May 26th. On the follow-up to the Brooklyn duo’s 2021 breakthrough, Structure, Rachel Brown (they/them) and Nate Amos (he/him) find silliness and fatalism dancing in a frantic lockstep, using heart palpitating rhythms and absurdist, deadpan lyrics to convey stories of personal and societal unease.
Described by Brown as Water From Your Eyes’ most collaborative record ever, it’s a swollen contusion of an album: experimental pop music that’s pretty and violent, raw and indelible. “Barley is a rhythmic sound collage experiment drawing from modern classical, classic rock, and dance music,” say the band of the first single. “The lyrics suggest repeated futile attempts at attaining the unattainable and allude to Sting and Sonic Youth. The video mirrors these concepts in scope, texture, and variety – juxtaposing feelings of entrapment and late stage capitalism against the sense of freedom inherent to the vast American landscape. Despite all this heady bullshit the song is, at its core, fun.”
Everyone’s Crushed is shot through with unresolved tension, it’s nine tracks skittishly refusing to seek out resolute endings or stick to traditional structures. Many songs were written using serialism and microtonalism, and at times evoke the futurist-pop moves of Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono and the brutalism of Glenn Branca. ‘Barley‘ is a dance-rock track sequenced in alien tonality, with Brown speaking garbled transmissions (“One two three/Counter/You’re a cool thing count mountains”) over a bed of hallucinatory guitars. ‘14‘ leans into contemporary classical, with curtains of overlapping de-tuned strings underscoring lyrics that Nate describes as something out of a “gross-out horror movie”: “I’m ready to throw you up.”
Water From Your Eyes still possess an off kilter, shitposty quality. Everyone’s Crushed manages to reference classic rock twice – first, on ‘Barley,’ when Brown accidentally invokes Sting with the lyric “walk in fields of gold,” and again on ‘True Life‘, when they sing: “Neil let me sing your song/It’s been this way for so long/Give me another chance.” Those weren’t the song’s original lyrics – Brown and Amos initially wanted to interpolate the bridge to ‘Cinnamon Girl’ – but this is a typically meta compromise for the pair, a way to turn ‘True Life‘ into a song about writing the song ‘True Life‘.
Everyone’s Crushed maps the liminal space between humour and darkness, between cracking up and freaking out. In the album’s closing moments Brown speaks in direct terms, “Clap those hands/Buy my product/There are no happy endings/I’m spending/I’m spending.” It’s playful and totally serious, punky bordering on anarchic, and a resolution to the record’s opening sentiment – “I just wanted to pray for the rain/Wishful thinking for sunny days.”
Water From Your Eyes – Everyone’s Crushed
1. Structure
2. Barley
3. Out There
4. Open
5. Everyone’s Crushed
6. True Life
7. Remember Not My Name
8. 14
9. Buy My Product
Water From Your Eyes – Everyone’s Crushed is out 27 May
via Matador Records
Water From Your Eyes
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