How Water From Your Eyes embraced chaos on Everyone’s Crushed

This story initially appeared in the summertime 2023 challenge of Alternative Press. Read the duvet story right here.

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Water From Your Eyes as soon as had an excellent thought. Inspired by Blue Man Group, the indie-rock duo made up of Nate Amos and Rachel Brown spitballed a plan to forged a bunch of people that vaguely resembled them to play a sequence of live shows and even go on tour. Amos and Brown? They would keep house — most likely to rewatch their favourite episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, they scrapped it.

“Turns out we know somebody who actually does that already,” Brown says, their earnest tone making it slightly unclear in the event that they’re being severe. 

In truth, it’s slightly unclear whether or not the band actually thought-about their DIY lookalike scheme. The two of them name it probably the most ridiculous thought for a bit that they’ve ever provide you with and by no means noticed by way of, however they describe it moderately matter-of-fact. It wouldn’t be too far off in the event that they determined to revisit it, even for one evening; actually, no band are fairly as in on the bit like Water From Your Eyes. 

Read extra: Draag, Hannah Jadagu, & Water From Your Eyes are the rising artists that you must know proper now

[Photo by Eleanor Petry]

An absurdist humorousness is ingrained within the group, who met in Chicago within the mid-2010s earlier than settling in Brooklyn and changing into DIY mainstays with their in depth experimental discography. They usually put on self-serious, sunglasses-indoors personas onstage, however picture opps are an opportunity to get goofy (from carrying matching Bulls jerseys to “I Love New York” tees in Times Square), and their merch has included stitching kits as a result of they wished to promote shirt buttons as an alternative of pin buttons. Recently, they performed an NYC residency, which included an evening of bowling, no music. 

To be honest, bowling has develop into certainly one of their favourite issues to do collectively — however that itself additionally started as a bit. (“It seems like the less there is to do somewhere, the higher the chances the bowling alley is too packed to get into,” Amos jokes, who would know, given they frequented it on pit stops throughout their current tour with Snail Mail.)

While the members of WFYE are clearly adept at humor, they don’t make literal comedy music. Their arty indie rock is off-kilter and wonky, stuffed with ambiguous lyrics and tracks that waver between sounding jittery or with a pop sparkle. It does include some in-jokes from time to time, although — just like the opener of their new album, Everyone’s Crushed (out now on Matador), is called after their 2021 document, Structure, and an interpolation of songs off 2020’s 33:44. 

But on Everyone’s Crushed, it’s as if the duo actually are searching for a way of ease, and to giggle. Throughout the previous couple of years, they handled — and labored by way of — melancholy, isolation and substance misuse. And popping out of that, they crafted an formidable, surrealist document about dealing with the shitstorm that may be residing within the twenty first century and looking for hilarity to reduce the ache. 

“I think [laughter is the] only coping mechanism that I have mastered. For me, personally, it’s been really important,” Brown says, noting how they arrive from a household with a darkish humorousness and the way that’s helped the ebb and move of their melancholy. “If you find yourself spiraling, one of the few things that works instantaneously is the feeling of guttural laughter. There’s nothing else that really feels that way.”

It is probably not guttural laughter, however Everyone’s Crushed is sort of a hallucinatory blitz of dance-rock guitars and synths that primarily really feel just like the summation of the memey phrase “embrace the chaos.” That’s almost Water From Your Eyes in essence and what’s made them a percolating band-to-watch for years — now discovering an viewers past Bandcamp devotees and Brooklyn DIY areas, as they’ve signed to Matador and since toured with Interpol. 

“A big part of the writing process is editing chaos,” Amos says. “It’s creating chaos, trying to see patterns and then editing things down to exposed patterns that naturally occur within the chaos — which probably applies to our lives to a certain extent, too.”

Brown provides that a couple of years in the past, their “slogan for the year” actually was “embrace the chaos.” “I really haven’t gone back! Not by choice — my life has just not gotten any less chaotic. But that’s a big part about life: You learn to accept that things are really chaotic, and that’s it,” they are saying.

You might say that acceptance is what led them to make sarcastic art-rock about capitalism (“Buy My Product”) and tracks that discover the burden of loneliness with wordplay and jolting percussion (“Everyone’s Crushed”) on their new album. The band initially began out making what they known as “sad dance music” — that itself being a bit, desirous to make New Order pastiche and discovering the picture of blasé-looking individuals making “pop content” humorous. And whereas they’re removed from that now, the catharsis stays. 

Their relationship — which they equate to Brown being like a “big brother,” regardless of being youthful —  has gotten them by way of. 

Much of that closeness has felt most at house watching hours of their favourite sitcoms — BoJack Horseman, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Party Down and Tim and Eric being a few of their favorites. Amos falls asleep to outdated movies of Norm MacDonald, too. 

“I feel like spending a lot of time being on drugs and watching Tim and Eric had a big impact on the way I make music and art in general,” Amos says, highlighting the comedians’ surrealist type. “It’s the way that they approach comedy as a medium and the way that you can look at that and apply it to however you approach your own medium.” 

Brown agrees and notes how they’re additionally drawn to that nice line of exploring darkish subject material with humor, like BoJack or Party Down. While it may not be so forthright, it’s all there in WFYE and their many bits. You can nearly guess what number of of them had been born after bingeing a sequence of Adult Swim sketches. 

[Photo by Eleanor Petry]

“Never in a million years would have expected this to happen,” Brown says of the band’s current breakout, which has come six years after they launched their first album. “I thought we were going to be that local band people talk about for years. But now we never even play in New York.” 

They say that in earnest, after which make a joke about how these days their life is simply extra so spent within the automobile greater than ever, they usually don’t have time for normal duties like laundry. But it’s nearly as if it’s one massive bit that WFYE and their indie-pop chaos have began to take over in the best way that it has. But once more, they’re all the time in on the bit.

Water From Your Eyes seem in Alternative Press’ summer season 2023 challenge. Grab a duplicate right here or under.