It’s A Beautiful Place opens with zero-gravity instrumental ‘One Small Step’ – a fitting prelude for what is one giant leap for New York duo Water From Your Eyes. The album is a gleaming megalopolis, a satellite view of eras and musical forms, a reframing of the y2k songbook that is at once awe-struck and mindful of its place in the vastness. Short instrumental interludes serve as portals between towering, muscular songs. “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs and space,” says Nate Amos . “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.”
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 and Nate Amos have become a pillar of the city’s alternative music scene and one of its most revered underground exports. Live, they’ve expanded to a quartet, joining forces with guitarist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz of NYC duo Fantasy of a Broken Heart. 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 recorded the bulk of 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.” But this time, much of the writing and recording were 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.‘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.”True to this, ‘Life Signs’ awakens to existence with a nu-metal backbeat and a rhythmic vocal deadpan that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1997 MTV sequence nestled between Bran Van 3000 and Cake. It then takes a hard pivot into a signature WFYE chorus – cascading and celestial. ‘Nights In Armor’ is introduced with a whirlwind of Frusciante Stratocaster bliss leading into a vulnerable Brown soliloquy.
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