It’s a Beautiful Place, the new full-length from Water From Your Eyes out August 22, opens with zero-gravity instrumental ‘One Small Step’ – a fitting prelude for what is one giant leap for the New York duo. The album is a gleaming megalopolis: a satellite view of eras and musical forms, a reframing of the y2k songbook that is at once awe-struck and mindful of its place in the vastness. “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs and space,” says Nate Amos. “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.”
First single ‘Life Signs’ lands with a video directed by the band’s Rachel Brown. The towering and muscular track awakens with a nu-metal backbeat and a rhythmic vocal deadpan which takes a hard pivot into a signature WFYE chorus – cascading and celestial. The video features the duo as a rotating cast of television characters as well as a version of themselves watching it all play out on screen throughout the course of a lifetime.
“Television has always been my biggest passion,” says Brown, “and this video was mostly conceived from my desire to experiment with the tropes of genre. But I also think the medium lends itself to the idea of fitting an infinite amount of universes into a little box you can keep in your living room. I wanted the video to encapsulate as many worlds as the song does and to express an entire lifetime within a short few minutes.”
In the time since 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos have become a pillar of the city’s alternative music scene and one of its most revered underground exports. Live, they’ve expanded to a quartet, joining forces with guitarist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz of NYC duo Fantasy of a Broken Heart.
Throughout It’s a Beautiful Place is a clear sense of a band who have honed their curveballs into home runs. Looming and melancholy, wide-eyed and petrified, it’s Blade Runner with a touch of WALL-E, it’s Kubrick and Asimov with a hint of Jay and Silent Bob. These are songs that look outward, conscious of our smallness and questioning our place in the universe while admiring the surrounding beauty.
Stream / download ‘Life Signs’ here.
Pre-order / pre-save It’s a Beautiful Place here.
