Water From Your Eyes – ‘It’s A Beautiful Place’ review: a portal to a strange alien world

Aug 18, 2025 - 09:26

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Water From Your Eyes

‘One Small Step’, the opening track on Water From Your Eyes’ latest album ‘It’s A Beautiful Place’, is a portal to a strange new world. The New York-based duo of Nate Amos and Rachel Brown have long been attracted to weird and experimental sounds, but their latest record has themes of science fiction running throughout, coinciding with their most ambitious melding of different styles to date.

READ MORE: Water From Your Eyes contend with the universe: “We, as a species, don’t understand as much as we think we do”

Once through that portal, a collage of synthetic ambience, wailing grunge riffs and even nu-metal-style drumming awaits you. This is the first time a Water From Your Eyes album has been made with the intention of a full band playing the songs, with Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz of Fantasy Of A Broken Heart set to join their live shows. This fresh perspective has allowed Amos to go big, creating songs such as ‘Spaceship’, which features a constantly shifting landscape of scattered percussion, awkward guitar rhythms and textures that feel distinctly alien.

These new songs are much denser than their Matador debut and breakthrough album ‘Everyone’s Crushed’. Packed to the brim with small details you may not even notice upon a first listen, it’s reminiscent of Alex G. There’s a fatalistic element to ‘It’s A Beautiful Place’ that may not seem obvious at first – according to the album’s bio, Brown has recently been reading political theory and anarchist utopian novels, and it shows. “We’ve got modern idols for the end of an age,” they sing on ‘Playing Classics’.

The record paints a picture of listlessness in a world where smiles seem fake and people crave resistance from capitalistic restraints on expression. “I just want to dance, architecture, no rent,” they continue on ‘Playing Classics’. Brown plays it all with a straight face, balancing out the ambiguous background with their deadpan delivery.

Despite the looming dread and existential fear, there’s a lot of fun to be found in the various ethereal moments and shrieking guitar sections on what is the duo’s heaviest effort to date. ‘Playing Classics’ is an absolute triumph with a piano melody that feels as if it could belong to an early Crash Bandicoot game. It constantly twists and turns, melding rock with electronic elements and is just a fantastic pop song.

Amos and Brown remain perfectly in sync with each other. By the time you exit the portal on closer ‘For Mankind’, you know you’ve experienced one of indie’s most unique albums of the year. Refusing to conform to trends, Water From Your Eyes continue to push themselves to new experimental heights.