It’s cliché to say everything is bad right now. No matter where one lives, we can always find something to complain about. The rent is too high, the political leaders are too corrupt, countries are supporting deadly and unjust wars—the list of miserable realities goes on. Yet, we can’t escape the world; first, because there’s no other planet that can sustain us, and second, because there’s no other place that’s as cool and weird as ours. Water From Your Eyes’ It’s A Beautiful Place, their first full-length since 2023’s Everybody’s Crushed, aims to reflect on the general feeling of futility, as well as the struggle to remain optimistic, as members Rachel Brown and Nate Amos told Paste earlier this summer. “I was trying to remain hopeful that the genocide will stop,” said Brown. “That we’ll stop destroying the planet for profit, that we’ll start using our resources to give people decent lives… But it’s hard to maintain that when every day we continue to just watch atrocities happen at home and abroad.”
The duo do their best not to romanticize an admittedly bad moment in human history, so that makes those moments of actually finding beauty all the more special. The “place” they portray is made of equal parts grime and glitter—a believable myth of spirit and community, as well as a bleak reality of overpriced dysfunction. Produced and composed by Amos, with words primarily by Brown, the record shifts between these attitudes constantly, blending together a metallic, noise-heavy rock band with crisp, spectral electronica to capture the internal chaos that makes this place as beautiful as it is.
After a hypnotic instrumental introduction (“One Small Step”)—which stitches together a pulsing, whirring noise in a clunky loop—“Life Signs” kicks off It’s A Beautiful Place on a brash, punkish, cynical note. “Go to hell, take the train,” Brown spits out over a pattering drum line and the fingerpicking of a heavy electric guitar. The music progressively becomes more overwhelming, reflecting a simmering, angry feeling by layering choruses of thrashing electric guitars, snappy percussion, punchy drums, and buzzing electronica. Morale is seemingly at an all-time low: “I’m unfulfilled, I’m in a beautiful place / Yeah it’s so sad in this beautiful place,” Brown sticks at the center of the first verse, crying it out with slightly more emphasis than any of the previous ramblings. “Return to a memory, a land, a tradition,” they continue, searching for the well-known parts of New York City, where the band is based, that make it appealing. But, accepting it’s all a myth people believe to stay happy, they snap, “To save a tradition, imagine it different.”
The album makes disenchantment feel as grandiose and overwhelming as falling out of love. Unlike the breathy lightness of “Nights in Armor” or the unstoppable momentum of “Life Signs,” “Born 2” trudges on with its piles of heavy guitars, crashing drums, and vocals gradually getting buried underneath the crescendo of noise. The track is a fizzy, reverberating mountain of frustration. Lyrically, it captures this internal conflict of both loving and loathing one’s home spectacularly, composing stanzas to highlight all the contradictions in the world’s DNA (“The world is so common / And born to become something else” and “Born far beyond / The world is a paradise / Yeah born to belong”). Brown’s soft vocals waver on the sustained notes, dragging out the word “beautiful” to accentuate how hard it is to admit one’s disappointment with life. The penultimate track, “Blood on the Dollar,” carries on similarly, capturing exhaustion through Brown’s timid whimpering to a simple drum beat and slow, guitar-led alt-rock tune.
“Playing Classics” is another highlight of the record, serving as a modern, uber-cool dance track that invites at least several repeats. It’s bare-boned and minimal in sound, at least compared to the warblier, synthesized-to-the-max songs like “Spaceship.” Instead, “Playing Classics” focuses on the simple snaps and shimmers that make a solid hit. Musically, it presents the club as a dazzling, cathartic haven, building around Amos’ disco-punk guitar riff with the thumps of the beat and Brown’s cool, nonchalant talk-singing that harkens back to the electroclash takeover of NYC’s nightlife scene in the ’90s and early ‘00s. Even in the lyrics, Brown recognizes the allure of this city, acknowledging that, for bored people inside or outside the state, there’s nowhere else to go that’s comparable. “You’re in debt or well, you’re nothing at all,” one of the more amusing lines written from the perspective of an outsider goes, “tried to make it to hereafter, just wound up at the mall.”
But, despite the blatant angst that drives it forward, It’s A Beautiful Place is particularly effective because the duo roots all their critique in pure love. There’s a reason why the titular track is a brief instrumental duet that dramatically switches up the tone from “Playing Classics.” Amos’ main, steely riff glides in a way that’s perfectly modern rock and roll, emulating the confidently cool energy of staple bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Strokes, and the White Stripes. Grooving along in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, the guitars don’t need words to have soul.
One should not dismiss It’s A Beautiful Place as a totally nihilistic record. Sure, the band spends much of its runtime lamenting the general cost of living crisis, constant war, political corruption, and more. But the more interesting thought explored is the unexpected desire to make a nice, stable-ish home in the rut we’ve dug ourselves in. This comes across best in “For Mankind,” the album’s finisher that repeats the clunky instrumental riff from “One Small Step.” The duo subverts the common trope in modern record-making where Water From Your Eyes unites both ends of the album with a common, continuous note. The loop is traditionally meant to go unnoticed, but Amos and Brown delay the cyclical motion of “For Mankind” just enough to throw off its rhythm. If one listens closely, there’s a slight, awkward silence between tracks before settling back into the same groove. Spiritually, we’ve never left this sad, beautiful place; we haven’t even moved an inch.
