Water From Your Eyes, “It’s A Beautiful Place”
By
·
August 22, 2025
Water From Your Eyes’s 2023 sophomore release, Everyone’s Crushed, was a veritable art-pop piñata exploding with dizzying grooves, destabilizing noises, and nonsensical numerology. For singer Rachel Brown and multi-instrumentalist/producer Nate Amos, the aftershocks rippled far and wide. The album appeared on numerous year-end lists, and spawned an all-star remix collection. The duo got to open for their Matador labelmates Interpol at Mexico City’s Zócalo—aka the show that drew 160,000 people—which technically makes them the first Matador act to ever play for a crowd of 160,000 people. (They also got tapped to play Paul Banks’s wedding.) Meanwhile, Amos enjoyed a breakthrough of his own with his long-running This Is Lorelei project, and Brown landed a fun side hustle as Stereogum’s new resident Narduwar.
But as Brown pointed out recently on the Music Person podcast, high visibility is still no reliable measure of economic security. “When Everyone’s Crushed came out, we made it onto so many lists,” they recounted, “and I was like, ‘Whoa, we did such a good job…and I’m broke.’ Our music doesn’t really sound like a lot of stuff.” It’s a Beautiful Place seems to reflect the duality of their whirlwind existence: Water From Your Eyes’s third album is exuberant and excitable on the surface, yet wounded at its core.
Fittingly for a record that’s bookended by an identical pair of surreal soundscapes referencing the moon landing (“One Small Step” and “For Mankind”), It’s a Beautiful Place sees Brown hovering above the chaos, calmly suspended in zero gravity. But as the duo’s multitasking musical architect, Amos is entrusted with building the fantastical shapeshifting environments in which Brown can wield their ennui like a superpower. “I’m unfulfilled/ I’m in a beautiful place/ Yeah, it’s so sad/ In this beautiful place,” they declare in their signature sing-spiel on lead single “Life Signs.” To which Amos responds: Perhaps a slack rap-rock track tricked out with a hellbound math-metal riff and a Stereolab cocktail-pop chorus will cheer you up?
“Life Signs” exemplifies the upside of lagging behind your more popular peers—i.e., the freedom to do whatever the hell you want—and with It’s a Beautiful Place, the duo forsake any latent commercial-crossover ambitions and double down on their commitment to gunking up the algorithm. While ‘90s revivalism continues to steer the indie-rock conversation in 2025—be it through fuzz-pop flashbacks, lo-fi sing-alongs, Silver Jews influences, or a never-ending shoegaze wave—Water From Your Eyes descend from the decade’s less-celebrated alterna-lineage. Namely, a post-Odelay boho playground where thrifty genre-smashing acts like Cibo Matto could land multi-page fashion spreads in Teen People and the Butthole Surfers could spin spoken-word absurdity into a Top 40 hit. At once bolder and more bizarre than its predecessor, It’s a Beautiful Place sounds precisely like the sort of album made by some weirdo New York band who got scooped up by Elektra in 1996 during the dying days of the post-Nevermind signing frenzy and were promised complete creative freedom by the A&R guy who got laid off a week after the album came out.
In essence, Water From Your Eyes have moved on from merely counting mountains to shifting tectonic plates, as tracks like “Nights in Armor” and “Spaceship” emerge from earthquaking collisions of broken-beatbox rhythms and disorienting textures. But just as the pawn-shop house workout “Playing Classics” hits peak delirium, Amos strips the arrangement down to a solitary acoustic-guitar echo of the song, reminding us that Water From Your Eyes’s scatterbrained sound design is always undergirded by a sturdy melody you could pull out at an open-mic night.
It’s a Beautiful Place shrewdly counterbalances its gonzo gestures with more unfettered displays of Water From Your Eyes’s songwriting savvy, like “Born 2,” a blissful, blown-out blast of distorto-pop that suggests My Bloody Valentine trying to write an arm-swaying Oasis anthem. And with “Blood on the Dollar,” a duo that once bemoaned the fact they couldn’t legally interpolate a Neil Young song opt to just write a beautifully bummed Neil Young song of their own. “These years make me spin, man/ Motion again,” Brown sighs, reiterating a deep-seated malaise that even a comforting dose of Topanga Canyon folk-rock can’t fully alleviate. It’s their way of saying everyone’s still feeling crushed—but that’s only hardened Water From Your Eyes’s resolve to elevate the rubble into a beautiful mess.