The surface level of Water From Your Eyes’ sound isn’t going to make much sense to a large part of the population, but the Brooklyn-based experimental pop duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos have never attempted to appeal to lowest common denominators anyway. On their late-blooming 2021 breakthrough, Structure, the pair challenged themselves to create sounds that were anything but abiding to that. In their own crack of meta wit, titling the intro track “Structure” on its follow-up (and first for Matador Records,) Everyone’s Crushed, doubles as a passage into their present expectation where, by all accounts, some semblance of form and “pop” cohesion actually does make itself visible. There’s symbolism in that. Brown and Amos are holding a mirror more focused than ever against the self, the world (and its all-consuming, capitalistic uneasiness) and onto their sound, and so their art becomes a reflection of how our experiences begin whole but become broken by forces beyond control. Everyone’s Crushed in turn attempts to put each tiny shard of mirror back together, but as we all know, you can never truly put something shattered back into its original form. That’s what makes this collection of 9 very singular tracks respective in their own prism of color, texture and energy. They’re dependent on the angle of stress they were smashed and the resulting meditation that glued them back into being part of the same shape, with Brown and Amos rummaging through their kitchen sink of instruments, from erratic synthesizers, percussion in disarray, droning guitar, and opulent strings, to mend them. Sometimes there are proportionate patterns in what your senses visualize or the degree at which they move (”Barley”, “True Life”,) and in other instances, it feels like the act of piecing everything together is a hard-earned exercise for the brain before it eventually sees outlines coming into being (”Everyone’s Crushed”, “Remember Not My Name”.) “There are no happy endings / Only things that happen,” Brown sings on its closer “Buy My Product”. There’s beauty in that realization in that when you accept everything and everyone eventually becomes their own unique version of a damaged good, it in turn becomes something beyond invaluable. Water From Your Eyes know their art need not be perfect or gloss, though they certainly use that to their advantage here on Everyone’s Crushed. Rather, it finds the right consumer who considers their sound to be something no one else could create in this timeline.

Highlights: “Barley”, “Remember Not My Name”, “Buy My Product”

Water From Your Eyes’ Everyone’s Crushed will be released May 26th on Matador Records.

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