On Friday, Water From Your Eyes will release It’s a Beautiful Place. The album is the duo’s dizzying, chrome-tinted masterpiece, which Rolling Stone has christened “their most joyously out there achievement yet.” Listen to the album’s ebullient and expansive third single ‘Nights in Armor’ and watch the Jo Shaffer-directed video below.
“Nights In Armor started life as a weird little Lorelei song called ‘Grill,’ explains WFYE’s Nate Amos. “I always felt like the riff was cooler than the song, so I recycled it into a new track and added other instrumentation specifically meant to place the guitar part in a radically different context to see what other emotional roles it could play. I remember struggling with writing a vocal hook I was happy with and I’m pretty sure at a certain part I reversed it and built the bass line around the backwards melody.”
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 (they/them) and Nate Amos (he/him) have become a pillar of the city’s alternative music scene and one of its most revered underground exports. 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 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.” The first single, ‘Life Signs,’ however, was 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.
‘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
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
“Water From Your Eyes revels in musical jump cuts and not-quite-sequiturs.. By the end of the song, somehow it all makes sense” – New York Times on ‘Life Signs’
“Water From Your Eyes haven’t forgone dynamism and experimentation in the quest for hardcore power” – Pitchfork
“Brilliantly subversive” – MOJO
“It’s brilliant, and sure to send them further into the indie rock cosmos that they’ve been orbiting for the last few years” – NME
“a dizzying, technicolour collage” – The Quietus
Water From Your Eyes
It’s A Beautiful Place
TRACKLIST
1. One Small Step
2. Life Signs
3. Nights in Armor
4. Born 2
5. You Don’t Believe in God?
6. Spaceship
7. Playing Classics
8. It’s a Beautiful Place
9. Blood on the Dollar
10. For Man
WATER FROM YOUR EYES
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