On the Rise
Water From Your Eyes

The pair have been creating music since the mid-2010s after meeting in NYC’s indie scene. Never defining themselves with one singular sound or vision, Brown and Amos prefer to keep things open. Their electro-led indie idea exists to morph, bending and folding at will; softening and hardening; changing shape and style; or simply meandering. All of this is the blazing nova at the core of Water From Your Eyes – a project that has no expectations.

Resting on the simple crux of “trying to keep it interesting and engaging for ourselves" – as Amos explains – this is also something which has resulted in a sort of eternal debut album syndrome; there’s no real starting point because the vision doesn’t exist to serve such linear narratives. While their debut official Long Days, No Dreams came in 2016, every effort after has sought to reestablish their rule book. Recently signing to Matador Records, and prepping to release their sixth album Everyone’s Crushed, now is the time for Water From Your Eyes to let in another new breath of fresh air.

Their creative relationship was once a romantic one and the duo’s musical urges proved indestructible in its wake. Ever since, Water From Your Eyes has been continually progressing – it’s an ever-growing, dichotomous relationship between Amos' sonics and Brown’s lyrics. “A common thread through a lot of the music that we've made is that it's intentionally presented in such a way that it's kind of up to interpretation,” explains Amos cooly. “There are little elements that could mean particular things.”

The main catalyst for the Water From Your Eyes vision is the subconscious. Piling their influences high, they blend into a metamorphosing translation of everything from their sense of humour to societal commentary, and their media consumption. It’s a melting pot that can be rewarding – the more you listen, the more unfurls around their sound.

While they refer to 2021’s Structured as “their European album”, Everyone’s Crushed is distinctly American. Equally influenced by the idea of things uniquely but disparately linked – such as cowboys and abandoned malls – their sonic mise-en-scène plays into the violence and beauty the nature of the United States offers. “What I was thinking about was the idea of the American sprawl, [that] was really on my mind,” explains Brown. “It's this sense of strip malls. People are living in these not even necessarily rural places but in between these really desolate suburbs and thinking about how Americans failed the American people. That all of these small towns have completely lost jobs but also any semblance of home – it’s all just Walmart's and track housing.”

Amos explains more of Everyone’s Crushed and the American Dream’s entanglement: “The weight of being trapped in the system that's not really designed for you to flourish within. But then also, Everyone's Crushed sounds like it could almost be a term for being locked up, or crushing pills and the thing about how this disparity has led to the opioid crisis in America.”

Water From Your Eyes deal with such grandiosity without the sullen weight of the world that often begets unpacking society’s flaws, even when they’re as switched on to what’s happening. “I feel like those last few years just felt very crushing. Not that I don't have hope for the future,” Amos glumly shrugs. “But it kind of feels like we're really living in the end of the American empire.” There’s an overarching idea that removing yourself from the equation and letting the bigger picture take hold is healthier than running into the ground trying to tackle things head-on. It’s a similar train of thought that runs throughout the musical aspect of the band.

“A big part of the way the songs come together is finding ways to create things that you wouldn't consciously sit down and be like, 'We should make this’ so you end up with a pile of stuff and wait for your subconscious to identify something within that, that you would come up with on your own and then chase that,” Amos says. “That process on our end is reflected in the way that we would like people to interpret it as the listener. Where they have to wait for their subconscious to pick up on and make sense out of whatever's going on and kind of come up with their own meaning because when, you, as a creator or listener are forced to take that approach, then you're going to come away with something different than what anyone else would come away with.”

They're are a band that balances ambition with creative restlessness. Their catalogue is a breathing organism that has evolved from a more centred, natural indie to more eclectic electric synth-based offerings that can calm as much as they can incite – leaving you as reeling as they can relieved. Concocting this sonic assault has been the consistent fault line running through the pair.

“I feel like in many ways, our dynamic has not changed, and the process is pretty similar to what it was, except it's not as goofy,” reckons Brown. “But also we lived together and Nate would be like, ‘Hey, let me show you this song’, and in my head, I'd be like, I don't want to hear this.” After their breakup, the pair found Water From Your Eyes’ structured flow more amenable. “I feel like there was like a point where it stopped being as much fun because it was this weird obligation and pressure,” says Rachel. “But then, now that we're best friends, we just go to Nate’s house and work on music – it's so much better because it's way more fun.”

Amos similarly concurs. Readily admitting that his own “obsessive tendencies” in regard to creating and writing led to it being a cohabiting nightmare. "When I was in ‘We're making Water From Your Eyes music’ mode, there was really nowhere for Rachel to escape.” The fact the pair are aligned even in this matter proves the strength of the pair’s connection, even today it’s simply a fact rather than an emotionally charged reaction.

This given physical space lends itself to latter-day Water From Your Eyes releases. Removing the tension, like letting a tightly wound spring loose in an antique store: indeed, it’s free, but it relishes in the chaos it gets to unleash – bouncing and careening around, and in the unknown between targets, it’s creating new moments to exist and change forever.

Unpacking their own catalogue is equally a task that, due to its having more transforming action than a Michael Bay movie, gives them trouble defining. “A few early albums have more in common with each other than we do now," Brown admits. "But then, the third release was so weird. The album that came out before Structured, 33:44, is pretty much just a noise collage. In some ways, there's a linear path from where we started to what we do now.

"In a lot of ways, it's not deconstructed, but it's maybe inverted because we were just making pop-dance music that was very synthy. And now it's not that it's versions of that but, the sounds have become really warped which I think is awesome. I never know what Nate is going to play,” Brown says gleefully. “Sometimes it'll be like this really crazy, bunch of insane noises and sometimes it's a classical composition.”

With Amos having a fine-tuned ear for composing, it becomes clearer why – and how – Water From Your Eyes’ albums are such a wholemeal effort. Tracks can be taken individually, but in their entirety, the projects resemble something akin to a modern-day movement; they’re restless after the building suspense, or they sigh with relief, allowing the breaths to become shallow. Amos offers up an affirming explanation for Everybody’s Crushed’s chaotic symphony in the wake of Structured. “The whole point of it was that it was very neatly balanced and fit together in this symmetrical way and had all these self-referencing elements and callbacks and recurring motifs,” he explains. “And it's very even on the scales, whereas this album has edges exposed in every way, it's not really balanced in an easy first half-second half way. The production is much more raw. It’s unfinished like unfinished wood – it's finished for what it is, but it's intentionally part of the medium is that it's left in a slightly rough format.”

There’s no doubt that Everyone’s Crushed is a fitting statement, particularly in 2023, but Water From Your Eyes shapeshifting demeanour means a positive outlook is on the horizon. Admitting they’re already looking beyond the horizon, “We have made something positive next,” Amos reveals before Brown quickly adds, “Not in a gushingly, everything's good way, but in a way that reflects our actual optimism about a better future.” And they should know since they’re built on the idea that your today, or even yesterday, doesn’t define your tomorrow.