The Brooklyn experimental pop duo know their art need not be perfect or gloss, though they certainly use that to their advantage here in finding the right consumer who considers their sound to be something no one else could create in this timeline.

Those were the words written here on these pages about Water From Your Eyes’ Everyone’s Crushed, the Brooklyn duo’s acclaimed fourth full-length effort, debut on major indie Matador Records, and more relevantly, the album that was named +rcmndedlisten’s best album of 2023. For those less tapped into the more esoteric listening circles which Nate Amos and Rachel Brown had garnered a cult following, it was their formal introduction to their superpowers and a reminder to how much better “weird” music could be while still being made digestible with a larger audience in mind.

It should also be noted that Amos and Brown respectively know how to write really great, straight-forward songs if they want to, too. In the momentum of the band’s post-Everyone’s Crushed success, late-blooming recognition for each of their respective indie-pop projects — Amos’ This Is Lorelei and Brown’s thanks for coming — are concrete examples of that. This is why it comes as a very intriguing surprise to hear that the duo’s follow-up, It’s A Beautiful Place, exchanges a lot of those eccentricities which separated the sound of Water From Your Eyes from their other projects, and the results are equally as enticing.

With those outlets, it’s there where you come to expect to hear rounder corners, traditional songwriting patterns, and scenic familiarities that appeal more obviously to mass-appealing heads. They double as palette cleansers in a sense between Water From Your Eyes releases before the more exotic end destinations of their main journey are revealed. This time, the lines between all three of those projects begin to blur, and what we essentially hear is Water From Your Eyes’ translation of a solid, guitar-based indie rock album that has increased the band’s volume — not just in a literal power of sound kind of way, but physically in stage presence now that they’re making music with a fully-fleshed live band in mind now that Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz of fantasy of a broken heart are their official road squad.

Let’s make one thing clear: It’s A Beautiful Place has not dulled the color spectrum of the band’s sound, nor has it made them boring. Every advance single from the listen was a standout for a reason. What may be jarring, however, is how much they’re sounding heavier with the weight of the world on their shoulders here. The glossier effects of riffage currently being dished out in the modern hardcore-adjacent scene atop of the ongoing deluge of ’90s alternative and nü-metal revivalism is placed firmly on its surface, bent and reshaped ever so slightly to resemble a Water From Your Eyes interpretation of that more aggressive energy. Amos going on the record to profess he and Brown’s collective fandom for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ terminal butt / bro rock classic, Californication, earlier this summer was no joke. They’ve taken it to the otherside with accessibility in their own strange way.

I personally never considered that he and Brown would end up writing an album that sounded like it was pandering to my co-worker who just got into Turnstile and only began mentioning Charli XCX last BRAT summer, but here we are, and it indeed is a beautiful, albeit odd, place for them to be seven studio albums into their career. Its instrumental intro, interludes, and outro trinity of “One Small Step”, “You Don’t Believe In God?”, and “For Mankind” remain cosmically designed with space-age ambient waves and divinity strings for that outsider fix, but fuck me if the digital crush of “Born 2” doesn’t sound like it will go really hard live. I also want to imagine a scenario where the groundwork for Water From Your Eyes jumping onto the alternative-country wave with “Blood On the Dollar” was born out of copious hangs with MJ Lenderman while Amos was touring with him over the past year.

As far as the whys of it all, we need to consider Amos and Brown’s art of subversion. In a day and age where the streaming algorithm affect has started to flatten creative ambitions for the sake of surviving an industry ecosystem where artists don’t make money, there being a more concentrated effort to record music that can easily be bled into a playlist, and entertaining the idea that this is somehow the band’s own commentary on that — with Brown’s focus on creating content be it on her own accord or in chatting it up with Hayley Williams and other music celebs for a Stereogum paycheck adding to the narrative — it sounds like they’re possibly playing the game much like Sonic Youth did in the ’90s with “selling out” on a bigger label and being influencers of the underground without compromising their own singularity, even when reflecting it against a popular culture mirror.

It’s A Beautiful Place hopefully will find Water From Your Eyes’ an even large audience, if that was their intention. It may not be as complexly “weird” as their previous efforts — the kind of listen that took you off this Earth by way of asymmetrical sample loops, brain-warping electronic experimentation, and art-rock deconstructed down to the bit size that took some greater focus to digest — but it makes the most of this world we already exist in, because we kind of have to at this point.

Highlights: “Life Signs”, “Nights in Armor”, “Playing Classics”

Water From Your Eyes’ It’s A Beautiful Place is available now on Matador Records.

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