Water From Your Eyes and the Audacity of Hope 

It’s not your imagination: Good vibes are in short supply these days. But you don’t have to tell that to Rachel Brown and Nate Amos of the restless art-pop outfit Water From Your Eyes. Their understanding of our collective malaise is baked into the title of the band’s 2023 off-the-wall breakthrough album, Everyone’s Crushed. 

“It came from a pretty dark place, which reflected this sense of hopelessness we were both feeling at the time,” says vocalist Brown, 28, who co-founded the band with former romantic partner Amos in Chicago nearly a decade ago before relocating to New York City. “I guess it made us more aware that was the energy we were bringing into the world as artists, and that it doesn’t necessarily reflect who we want to be.”

Now the pair return with a more upbeat framing on this summer’s effervescent follow-up, It’s a Beautiful Place, released in August via indie juggernaut Matador Records. While there may not seem to be much beauty in the world right now, they set out to offset the bleakness of our American moment with a ten-track menagerie of manic pop experiments woven together by Brown’s deadpan delivery and Amos’s frenetic arrangements. Bouldering from guitar-driven heaters to twitchy bedroom dance-party bangers, the result is a slim and slippery thirty-minute offering that feels both wafer-light and oddly epic. 

“The idea was trying to make an album that had more of a positive impact — obviously not directly, because it’s all pretty esoteric, but a more positive aura. In a very simple way, I wanted to be a person with more hope,” Brown tells Westword ahead of the band’s upcoming show at Globe Hall on November 7. “Generally speaking, I’m extremely depressed, so it’s kind of hard to see the future when I don’t necessarily always want one.” 

But, like it or not, the future keeps coming. For Brown and Amos, that means navigating the music industry from a more prominent place than they’d ever thought possible. When the two first began conjuring their bonkers brand of erratic post-pop in 2016, they never imagined they’d be headlining international tours with the support of a linchpin DIY label while drawing effusive praise from critics and music legends like David Byrne. Returning to the studio this time around, it was clear a lot more people would be listening.   

“We have never really given a shit about what anyone thinks about it. It’s just totally whatever we feel like doing. So there wasn’t really a sense of ‘OK, we gotta make sure people like this one more,’” says Amos, 34, whose breakout solo project This Is Lorelei helped raise the profile of his long-running collaboration with Brown during their two-year pause between records. “Even a tiny bit of pandering would be the thing that thwarts this whole project, because it specifically functions on not doing that.”

Spend any time with the warm and warped sounds of It’s a Beautiful Place, and it’s clear the band isn’t interested in pandering to anyone. Despite making their oddball gems easier to get your arms around, Brown and Amos remain dedicated to the lost art of pushing boundaries.  

“We’re still in the early history of pop music being a thing, especially in terms of it being an accessible medium for anybody to explore. The natural evolution kind of hit a wall around the turn of the millennium, and was really just based in reflection for 20 years after that,” Amos says. “It will be interesting to see what the next breakthrough is, when someone fundamentally changes music again, because it feels like it hasn’t happened in a long time.”

If you hear a flash of optimism in those remarks, that’s just where the duo’s heads are at these days. Give their latest LP a spin — or more likely two, or three in a row — and you won’t hear a rallying cry for the coming dawn of some great social upheaval. Instead, amid the grim churn of horror-show headlines, you’ll hear the sound of two artists trying to find a more hopeful way to be in the world. It just might not sound like what you expected.

“We’re not singing the news or whatever. But I think being a member of society is in itself a political act, and therefore everybody is political,” Brown says. “Even though everything is bleak and depressing and pretty much seems to always be getting worse, if we were to succumb to that idea to just say, ‘Well, everything is bleak and it’ll be bleak forever,’ then it completely rules out the possibility of change.”

Water From Your Eyes, with Dutch Interior and Flutter, 7 p.m. Friday, November 7, Globe Hall, 4483 Logan Street. Tickets are $27.64.