Water From Your Eyes - It's A Beautiful Place Review
A brilliantly focused album that proves how far Water From Your Eyes have come, turning their experimental instincts into songs that feel clearer, bolder and more compelling than ever.
Water From Your Eyes have been Brooklyn-based for years now, long enough that the city’s art-rock DNA feels baked into their process. What’s changed on It’s a Beautiful Place, their second album for Matador, isn’t their location, but their role. They’ve quietly moved from the periphery of the scene to its centre, becoming one of the few bands in New York making experimental music that feels genuinely self-directed instead of strategically weird. This album doesn’t arrive with the posture of a breakthrough. It arrives like a band making the record they wanted to make, and trusting that to be enough.
The album opens with ‘One Small Step,’ a 26-second ambient flicker that barely registers before ‘Life Signs’ arrives and immediately reframes the record. The song has rightfully been called their most intense moment: jagged guitars grinding through a 5/4 rhythm, constantly pulling at the song’s center. Earlier WFYE noise tended to be sly or self-aware; here it’s direct and almost confrontational. Nate Amos has joked about once being “anti-guitar,” and you can hear the shift in how unapologetically he uses them now.
Rachel Brown keeps the song upright. Their voice doesn’t fight the arrangement; it stabilizes it. Brown’s delivery is calm, clipped, and melodic enough to give shape to everything happening around it. That interplay, Amos pushing outward, Brown clarifying the emotional line, is the dynamic that holds the album together.
What you notice after a few listens is how much of the album hides in its details. The record plays smooth on the surface, but it’s built from tiny edits and small choices that don’t call attention to themselves. A rhythmic stutter that only happens once, a synth line that folds back into itself, a guitar harmonic that flashes by in a single beat, none of it is showy, but all of it matters. The band has said the record grew from thinking about whether “nothing is important or everything is important,” and the production clearly leans toward the latter. The closer you listen, the more the songs open up.
After the volatile opening stretch, the album slips into a more diffused, exploratory mode. ‘Spaceship,’ which opens the B-side, is one of the most expansive things they’ve ever made. Reviews have described it as psychedelic and backmasked, and those descriptions track: the guitars literally run backward through the mix, the beat keeps subtly shifting, and Brown slips in a line that feels like a thesis for the whole record: “So you dream, you build, you change / The cage looks like a window pane.” It’s not a grand statement, but it reframes the song’s drifting unease into something closer to transformation.
‘Playing Classics’ is the album’s focal point, a frenetic dance-punk sprint partly inspired by Charli XCX’s “Club Classics.” It’s the closest WFYE get to a big, outward-facing track, but even here, they don’t make the obvious choices. Piano stabs glitch out, the bass keeps escalating, and the guitars sound like they’re trying to keep pace rather than lead. Brown’s deadpan delivery makes small lines feel loaded, especially when the arrangement swells around them. It’s the closest the album comes to a big tentpole moment, but it still operates within the band’s instinct-driven framework rather than any commercial logic.
The title track follows, and its placement says a lot about the band’s sense of humour. ‘It’s a Beautiful Place’ is essentially one exaggerated guitar solo over a synth bed, funny in concept, but also effective as a hinge between the album’s biggest song and its most free-form one. For a band that once avoided the guitar as a central voice, dedicating an entire interlude to a solo feels knowingly tongue-in-cheek, but it also clarifies the album’s internal architecture.
‘Blood on the Dollar’ and ‘For Mankind’ close the record in a more diffuse way. The former plays like a decayed country-rock sketch; the latter circles back to the opener by using many of the same sonic elements. Loop the album and the transition is seamless. Nothing about the structure feels like a gimmick, it’s simply the most natural way for these songs to connect.
What makes It’s a Beautiful Place stand out isn’t that Water From Your Eyes have leveled up or pivoted toward accessibility. It’s that they’ve deepened their own language. They’re still writing dense, detail-heavy music built from instinct, but the clarity of their ideas has sharpened. They’ve been in Brooklyn long enough that the city’s experimental lineage is part of their DNA, but this album is the moment where they feel like they’re actively shaping that lineage rather than orbiting around it. The record isn’t trying to be definitive. It’s trying to be expressive, and that clarity of purpose is what makes it their strongest work yet.