Water From Your Eyes Is Too Cool To Pin Down

Water From Your Eyes is the Brooklyn indie scene’s talk of the town. The near-uncategorizable duo — producer/songwriter Nate Amos and vocalist Rachel Brown, who met in Chicago in 2016, formed the band, and briefly dated — have become one of those bands that everyone who knows says you should know.

Though they’ve been active for almost a decade, it was their 2023 LP Everyone’s Crushed that made them an industry breakout. (Just before that release, they got signed to Matador Records, home of Julien Baker, Snail Mail, and, formerly, Lucy Dacus.) Since then, they’ve collaborated with The Dare and Nourished By Time, appeared at Pitchfork’s late music festival, and shared their experimental, half-speak-meets-alt-rock-meets-electro-pop sound with more than 100,000 people while opening for Interpol in Mexico City. In DIY circles, Amos and Brown have been pretty much everywhere; now, they’re gearing up for the next level.

As they prepare to release their new album It’s A Beautiful Place on Aug. 22, NYLON catches up with the pair to see what’s behind their creative genius.

I actually don’t know this story. Where did you get your name from?

RACHEL BROWN: The idea was that Nate showed me New Order, and we wanted to make New Order kinds of songs. So it was supposed to be a sad dance band. We were just walking around and throwing names around. “Tears” was too obvious. Water From Your Eyes sounded like a good, nuanced sad dance band name. And now it’s an LLC.

This is your first release since your breakout moment. What’s it been like to start opening yourselves up to a wider audience?

NATE AMOS: Slightly nerve-wracking at first, but I think we both adapted to it. Definitely feel very grateful that the interest is there.

RB: It’s really nice. It’s awesome that people like our music. I guess there’s more pressure, and it does get sad to see when people don’t like it, but that’s what you sign up for.

How do you deal with that kind of pressure, especially when you’re going back to the drawing board for a new album and are trying to just be creative?

NA: It’s a combination of things. There was definitely a concerted effort to not switch up the process too much, because we’re a very process-based band, and the particular way the two of us collaborate has a lot to do with, stylistically, how things turn out. But at the same time, when we made Everyone’s Crushed, we had no idea [under what label] it was going to come out. It’s A Beautiful Place is the first time we’ve made an album knowing it was going to come out with at least a certain caliber of platform, through Matador. We also had more conversations about the energy we wanted to put into the world. With Everyone’s Crushed, we both sort of felt it was a particularly nihilistic representation of the way we felt when the truth is more complicated than that, so there’s more of a sense of wanting to put out positive energy on this one.

What does that creation process look like?

NA: I’ll collect ideas and begin working on songs — I pretty much write all the music. I’ll have sketches of the melodies and present Rachel with a karaoke track with little to no words, essentially. Then Rachel takes over and I just serve as a reflective surface to Rachel’s ideas.

RB: It’s kind of like working on a puzzle, because a lot of the time the melodies have syllables already built in. Then it’s about trying to figure out what the vibe of the song is, figuring out what the idea is to me, and then making that even vaguer. Each song is built from an emotional point of view and then abstracted, partially because that’s generally how the words fit — it makes more sense for them to be abstract — and because since the beginning of this project there’s been an intention to keep it looser lyrically so people can come to terms with the songs on their own.

Where did existentialism come into play on this record?

RB: We both kind of keep existentialism in the back of our heads. I feel like it’s something we originally bonded over. Conspiracy theories, where-did-we-come-from type stuff, simulation theory. With this album, when I was writing the lyrics, I kept just feeling like, how much time do we really have left? Aren’t we all existential these days?

I kept just feeling like, how much time do we really have left? Aren’t we all existential these days?

How do you know when it’s time to release with Water From Your Eyes versus when it’s time to work on your solo projects?

NA: With both our solo projects, we’re people who can kind of just sit down and write and something will happen. Water From Your Eyes has a little bit more of a brain of its own that you have to observe and be more patient with. We’ll definitely hit a point when we’ll know it’s time for a new album, and I’ll begin looking at collecting various parts of things that have been made. But often, in the creation of those things, we don’t know they’re destined to be a Water From Your Eyes song until they’ve taken form.

A lot of the stuff on this album was, essentially, an experiment that wasn’t made for release. The guitar part in “Life Signs” started as a 24-note quarter-tone series generated by a random number generator. The song “Blood on the Dollar” started as an attempted This Is Lorelei song that I ended up shelving but then basically stripped of the lyrics and gave to Rachel. Lots of stuff like that.

To close, I just want to acknowledge that you both have really become pillars of the Brooklyn indie scene, a scene that’s having an amazing moment right now. What does that mean to you?

NA: I mean, Water From Your Eyes really grew up in the Brooklyn DIY scene playing shows at The Glove. The openness of the DIY scene stylistically allowed us to be comfortable doing whatever we wanted. Also, once we were a “New York band,” there was some looking back at past influential New York pockets, like the ‘70s no-wave scene. But, yeah, without the Brooklyn DIY scene and whatever this current movement is, I’m not sure if we would be an active band at all. We kind of owe it everything.