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.