For Brooklyn electro-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, the path to clarity is paved with playful misdirection. On a pair of spoken-word interludes on their fifth album, Structure, frenzied dance punk careens into silence, suddenly replaced by the sort of dry, dead-air ambience you’d expect from a podcast. Within these hushed eye-of-the-storm moments, one smack in the middle of each side of the record, vocalist Rachel Brown plays a kind of word-game version of Exquisite Corpse. Repurposing the lyrics from album centerpiece “Quotations,” they pluck out nouns and adjectives and glue them to one another, seemingly at random, until they resemble the mutterings of a person talking in their sleep: “You’re the embers go sunlight/A line fake feel matching colors/Myth a revealing another constantly now.” Even at their quietest, Water From Your Eyes can’t resist cracking a surrealist joke, dragging you down a rabbit hole of “memories down of in sounds.”
A gambit like this is fully in character. After all, this is a band whose first release of 2021 was an album of covers that began with a stone-faced rendition of Eminem’s Academy Award-winning docu-single “Lose Yourself.” What is shocking is not only how brilliantly the diversion pays off, but that it works not just once, but twice. Structure follows a double-helix layout wherein the two cut-up poetry interludes lead into two marvelously distinct versions of “Quotations”: one an abrasive romp through gurgling synthesizers and whirls of processed guitar, the other (“‘Quotations’,” complete with scare quotes in the title) an ambient collage of Brown’s voice, pulsing in meditative harmony before erupting quietly into IDM breakbeats. But these puzzles aren’t just art-rock pranks; Structure is Water From Your Eyes’ most rewarding album to date. It holds your gaze long after the mystery fades, channeling a powerful sense of empathy to mesmerizing effect.
Structure is far from being a complete about-face for the band; they’re still making cryptic indie pop that hits like a sugar rush. Their most intriguing and satisfying departure is architectural. Compared to the disorienting way that Somebody Else’s Song swung from raging electro punk to acoustic indie pop and back again, their latest record is a carefully tended garden of ideas that reveals Brown and bandmate Nate Amos’ songwriting partnership blossoming in full flower. Structure opts for controlled chaos, unfolding over two mirror-image halves on a guided tour of heartbreak, hope, and longing. Each begins with a slower, psychedelic ballad, moves through blistering post-punk, and closes on one of two versions of “Quotations,” making it tempting to view the album as a pair of EPs, asking the same questions and receiving the same answer in different languages.
As they chart out these parallel journeys, Water From Your Eyes take care to circle back to their roots. Live and on record, they’re experts at using extended jams as a tool to purify the overwhelming emotions of a moment, breaking them down in magnificent detail as they filter through circular dance rhythms and spiraling melodies. “My Love’s” and “Track Five,” the two that hew closest to their origins attempting to ape New Order, capture the infectious melancholy of the ’80s new-wave titans while sounding uniquely of their time.
Water From Your Eyes are at their most unhinged on “My Love’s,” a fiery take on disappearing into the wild momentum of a night spent racing against last call. Brown’s voice, filtered and doubled until it drips with venom, bites through layers of seasick drones: “My love is lost somewhere under the ground/They know their own way out.” Violins stab against blasts of white noise, raising the stakes with a spy-thriller theme before the track blacks out, unconsciousness hitting like a brick wall. These cinematic flourishes are a welcome addition, expanding the scope of their crying-on-the-dance-floor antics by giving them a clear narrative, carving grooves to guide the tears down your face.
Beyond these steady refinements, album opener “When You’re Around” marks Structure’s cleanest break with Water From Your Eyes’ past, and the clearest indication of how far their irreverence for genre and form has carried them. At first listen, the disarmingly straightforward psychedelic pop tune could be mistaken for a test of how subtly they can troll a crowd with a hammed-up pastiche. A single piano chord stutters to life before surf-rock crooning glides in, swimming over a light, shuffling beat. Gentle horns, courtesy of New York DIY mainstay Matt Norman, guide you around a coy self-reference (“There is water in my eyes and I'm alive”) and into a swooning chorus. “I hear your voice and save it for later,” Brown sings, allowing the slightest crack to enter their typically cool delivery. It’s the kind of windswept, golden-hour confession that melts your heart in the moment and haunts you forever when love turns cold. For a band who have coyly dismissed their own work as “weed music,” it’s frightening how sharply they can make a ballad cut when they drop the act and go for broke. Emerging from the haze and snapping into focus, Water From Your Eyes allow nonsense to run its course, even if it ultimately means embracing sincerity.
Buy: Rough Trade
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