water

As they did on 2021’s concise yet intricate Structure, Water From Your Eyes once again prove that three perfect songs is all that one side of an LP really needs. “Nights in Armor”—written for Amos’ This Is Lorelei and then reworked—shuttles between glinting, Sarah Records-caliber indie pop, metal-adjacent chugging, and atonal skronk; part grunge and part shoegaze, “Born 2” traverses an Escherian staircase of changing keys that summits repeatedly on a note of fist-pumping triumph. Lyrically, it might be the most straightforwardly political thing that they’ve written, but the meaning is as cryptic as ever. For all the song’s promise of limitless possibility (“Born to become/Something else/Something melts”), Brown repeatedly drives home a single word—“psychopath”—like a silvery nail in a varnished coffin.

The second half repeats the format: three proper songs rounded out with two ambient sketches, but this time, one track hogs the spotlight: “Playing Classics,” a madcap dance-punk romp partially inspired by Charli XCX’s “Club Classics.” Its ebullience is almost awkward; its mismatching parts—disco hi-hats, Eurodance bass, too-bright keys, overdriven guitar solo, snatches of vocoder teased and just as quickly abandoned—summed up in the record’s most utopian sentiment: “Practice shake it you’re free.” I suspect it will be the album’s big hit, certainly in a live context. I don’t like it as much as anything on the A-side, but it is, truly, the album’s funniest song.

B-side opener “Spaceship,” though, is another roller coaster of backmasked guitars and shifting time signatures, closer in feel to the A-side’s contorted alt-rock. It’s hard to overstate how effortless Water From Your Eyes make even the most complicated grooves feel, and Brown’s hopeful singing (“So you dream, you build, you change/The cage looks like a window pane”) only adds to the suggestion of weightlessness. The country-fried “Blood on the Dollar,” on the other hand, feels almost like a demo, a bare-bones sketch for fuzzed-out guitar and muted drums. Slipping across slant rhymes and a sidelong Pixies reference, Brown might be singing about the end of empire, or the ennui of life online. The album’s lyrics never reveal anything as clear-cut as the thematic talking points—space, dinosaurs, measuring human existence on a cosmic scale—the duo routinely trots out in interviews, but that’s a point in favor of Brown’s suggestively mysterious writing. The duo’s banter may often resemble low-stakes brainrot, but Brown’s writing reaches beyond stoned dorm-room riffing into places where the punchlines dissolve.

“It’s either nothing is important or everything is important,” Brown recently told Fader; in context, they were talking about the cosmic existentialism that informs It’s a Beautiful Place, but it also feels like a fair assessment of Water From Your Eyes’ almost obsessive attention to detail. One detail in particular sticks out on this captivating, ambitious album: “For Mankind,” the ambient sketch that closes the record, is made of exactly the same sounds as the intro, “One Small Step”—a queasy wash of what might be a whirly tube run through digital processing, or perhaps a family of chipper sea lions. If you listen to the album on a loop, “For Mankind” will blur seamlessly back into “One Small Step,” effectively enclosing you within Water From Your Eyes’ invented universe. A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown mind meld—sprawling, amorphous, hermetic, overwhelming, heartbreaking, funny as hell. It’s a privileged vantage point.