Among rock’s underclassmen, Water From Your Eyes’ Rachel Brown and Nate Amos present like back-of-classroom slackers with drool stains on their hoodie sleeves, their minds too clogged with Vine compilations to pay attention to World History. Alongside putzing around the bowling alley and getting their minds blown by Ween, the Brooklyn art-rock duo’s primary activity seems to be smoking a gargantuan amount of weed: “There was not a single drop of work done in the recording, editing, or mixing process that was not preceded by a spliff,” Amos said of their breakout 2021 album Structure. The way they talk about their latest record, Everyone’s Crushed, makes it sound as though they fished it out from their underwear drawer: culled from pre-existing material with only a few weeks of polishing, made from a “broken $100 interface and a dying computer,” their shittiest equipment yet. They purportedly tossed it to their label with no intention of taking edits.
Misdirection is a Water From Your Eyes forte though, and behind Brown and Amos’ oafish exterior is a slanted and singular ingenuity. Their closest contemporaries are the oddball virtuosos Jockstrap, with whom they share a proclivity for audacious sonic contrasts, silver-screen sentimentality, and snipped, inscrutable writing. Structure was a beguiling experiment in form, intricate and patterned as origami: The album split into matching halves—first a pastoral tearjerker, then a dubby basement experiment, then a garbled poem—with recurring motifs. Beyond its clever design, the music itself was mesmerizing, specifically the macerated noise freakout “Quotations” and its inverse, the beautiful stained-glass reverie ““Quotations.”” Structure led them to opening slots with Pavement, Spoon, and Interpol and a record deal with Matador. “Yeah we don’t even smoke weed anymore,” Brown says. “We have meetings now…a lot of meetings.”
Even a packed calendar can’t stop the duo from a good gag. So Everyone’s Crushed launches with a prelude called—they had to do it to ’em—“Structure,” which reappropriates a snippet not, in fact, from Structure but 2020’s 33:44. As if guided by a medieval jester, the song begins with vigorous twiddles of what sounds like a lute, until Brown’s bittersweet voice softens the mood: “I just wanted to pray for the rain/Wishful thinking for sunny days.” The couplet originates from a sound collage where Brown drones bleakly about the squeal of emergency sirens and children growing up to hostile futures—a despair that extends into Everyone’s Crushed, written amid struggles with substance abuse, depression, and pandemic-era hopelessness. “I guess lyrically [the album] is just us thinking about how fucked up things were,” Brown has said.
Nowhere is their fatalism more overt than on the acrid post-punk closer “Buy My Product,” a mock corporate ditty about the endless production of insecurity under late capitalism. “There are no happy endings/There are only things that happen,” Brown announces. “Buy my product.” But their disquiet tends to come through more obliquely, as in the nauseated orchestral loops of “14,” where Brown repeatedly declares intent to “throw you up” but never quite achieves relief. Or the elliptical title track, where almost no matter how you scramble it, “everything hurts.” On the latter, Brown mumbles feebly like a child with a tummy ache, while the doomy, disjointed production foreshadows the arrival of something worse: The synths creep like carbon monoxide, the guitar hobbles on broken legs, and the drums incite mangled bleats as though you’re next up at the slaughterhouse.
Ultimately, it’s not the hazy discontent that makes Everyone’s Crushed indelible but its livewire sound. You can interpret the deadpan counting in “Barley” as a slog through business hours—“another long day at the not killing myself factory,” according to one meme—but the song’s erratic whirl of movement and texture evokes glass shards trapped in a tornado, intersecting with the flat, 2D stitching of Brown’s voice, the up-down scratch of shakers, and the jagged slope of a rock’n’roll guitar riff. Amos has cited color field painter Mark Rothko as inspiration, but his capricious production more directly evokes the transgressive, action-oriented approaches of other Abstract Expressionists, who staged upon the canvas “not a picture but an event.” Likewise, Water From Your Eyes are always thrusting you into the middle of a grand saga you can’t quite grasp: On “Out There,” peals of tropical-sounding synths disappear into mist, the paradise breeze interrupted by a subterranean rumble; midway through, the song screeches like hot-wired car pulling a U-turn. This is music that resists logic, that invites questions like: Where am I? What the fuck is going on?
Who knows, but let me offer another example. “True Life” opens with skronking guitar blasts in alternating tones, like construction workers wreaking havoc on opposite sides of the road. Brown struts, sunglasses on, through the chaos. “You don’t even grasp the zipper/You won’t even ask the question,” they accuse, whatever that means, while the song tumbles and thumps like an off-balance laundry machine. Then Brown begins to plead, “Neil, let me sing your song,” which the band explains in interviews with a long backstory about hoping to interpolate Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” but not being able to get past his lawyers. It’s a highdea if I’ve ever heard one: singing a song about not singing somebody else’s song—Somebody Else’s Song also being the title of one of their past albums, not to be confused with their covers collection, Somebody Else’s Songs—and the whole thing is dizzyingly obtuse and borderline incomprehensible. But in the end who cares, because the music sounds awesome. Neil, give ’em a call.
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