COVER STORY | Water From Your Eyes Submit to the Universe
The Matador-signed, Brooklyn-based duo tells us about their new album It's a Beautiful Place, Benson Boone, their love for Megalopolis, and more.
Photos by Adam Powell
After 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed, Water From Your Eyes’ debut on Matador, vocalist Rachel Brown wanted to make a record that was less cynical—something that would have a more hopeful outlook. Their values lie in being optimistic that, despite corruption, most people value humanity and fight for a better future that serves all humankind. But when it came time to write their new album It’s a Beautiful Place, Brown found themselves conflicted. While dealing with their own mental health struggles as a person with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and witnessing the genocide of Palestinians by Israel, they found it difficult to retain that hope.
“I was trying to remain hopeful that the genocide will stop, that we’ll stop destroying the planet for profit, that we’ll start using our resources to give people decent lives—necessities like shelter, food, water, purpose, dignity. But it’s hard to maintain that when every day we continue to just watch atrocities happen at home and abroad,” Brown tells me, nestled in a chair next to their bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Nate Amos, in their manager’s apartment.
In It’s a Beautiful Place, Brown wrestles with enjoying the wonders of life while grappling with disillusionment, drawing inspiration from science-fiction and the prehistoric era to remind us that there’s more to this universe than what we know. While writing the album, they were reading The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Gui’s 1974 sci-fi novel that follows Shevek, a physicist from the anarchist, utopian society on the moon of Anarres, who travels to the capitalist Urras, Anarres’ sister planet, where his ancestors came from, as a way to try to bring both planets together. It mirrored Brown’s own efforts, as someone who is hopeful that a world not led by greed is attainable. However, they haven’t finished the novel yet, still waiting to see if Shevek’s quest will be successful.
Brown admits that, for them, it’s difficult to “write political music without it sounding cheesy.” The lyrics in It’s a Beautiful Place are often cryptic, but you get a clear picture of where Brown’s views lie. Take the hypnotic “Spaceship,” where they sing, “So you dream, you build, you change / The cage looks like a window pane / Wake up this gun can beg / I love, I loved you best,” or the rave-up “Playing Classics,” as Brown delivers in monotone the line, “Desire in crisis / No a longing for truce / Yeah the long hard road from here to the truth.”
“It’s like the Inception strategy,” Amos says. “With political stuff, you can’t tell people [what to think]. It’s hard for it not to feel preachy. That’s how a lot of this ended up being part of the lyrics, some sort of subconscious versions of those ideas that are buried in the album and part of the texture.” His mention of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film leads to Brown, who studied screenwriting at NYU’s Tisch program, going on a tangent about how unrealistic the dialogue is in the film. Amos joins them in nerding out over Inception‘s dialogue. “Why don’t people talk like that in real life? Imagine if everyone talked in real life the way they talk in Megalopolis,” he ponders.
After I joke that Megalopolis inspired their album, Brown says that it “does fit into the world” of It’s a Beautiful Place. Amos adds that the movie represents “a lot of what this album ended up being,” which is “kind of absurdist.” Francis Ford Coppola’s maligned 2024 film means a lot to the duo, with the word “megalopolis” even sneaking its way into the It’s a Beautiful Place bio, as an Easter egg of sorts. The day after the presidential election last year, the band battled the impending gloom by going to see the film in theaters with some of the Matador team and Brown’s film school mentor. Their former professor’s reaction stuck with Brown: “He was like, ‘Well, [Coppola] made the movie he wanted to make.’” They realized that, much like Coppola’s latest film, Water From Your Eyes is the kind of project that doesn’t follow the rules of convention. Instead, it follows the whims of what Brown and Amos want to create, even if it means that some people won’t like or get it.
When I point out that, ironically, It’s a Beautiful Place is the most accessible album in Water From Your Eyes’ discography, trading clanging microtonal soundscapes for simpler melodies, Amos notes that, while it “has some more normal components, the total package feels like it’s almost weirder because it’s using more common tools to communicate some of the same ideas.” He believes the LP will “feel more familiar on the surface level,” but to him, it “just sounds like noise. I have no idea what this album is anymore.”
Much of It’s a Beautiful Place’s instrumentation had been in the vault for years, finally finding new life on this album. Some pieces, including the intro, outro, “Life Science,” and clubby sample in “Playing Classics,” came from a period in the spring and summer of 2020, when Amos was hunkering down during lockdown and making what he believed at the time would become the follow-up to their 2020 “sound collage,” 33:44. The body of work became a “pile of ideas to harvest things from.” Meanwhile, “Nights in Armor” was originally written as the potential 10th track from Everyone’s Crushed, but ultimately didn’t feel like the right fit, and the folksy “Blood on the Dollar” was a demo for Amos’ critically acclaimed solo project, This Is Lorelei.
IT’S BEEN TWO YEARS SINCE Water From Your Eyes signed to Matador, with the storied indie label understanding their artistic approach, never pushing the band in a certain direction, and instead just routinely checking in to see what they have in the works. But even while not having to worry about Matador having hesitations, Amos admits to getting in his head about the label’s reaction. “I remember sending the link to this one and 60-percent of me just being like, ‘Oh, they’re going to fucking hate this.’ But then they’re just chill,” he says.
When I ask him why he thinks that, he explains, “I’ve never finished working on a Water album truly believing that it’s better than the thing that came before it, and then six months later, I always have this re-evaluation. Structure, I was not happy with when we turned it in. But I now see it as a stronger thing. Everyone’s Crushed, I was worried it was a huge step-down from Structure.” He notes that every Water From Your Eyes album is going to “alienate a certain percentage of the people who really liked the last album,” which has its advantages, as “people’s choices for their favorite Water From Your Eyes albums end up in a pretty even spread.” Still, the anticipation of the reaction makes him overthink things, wondering how the new release will stack up against the rest.