T
hree years ago, in the spring of 2022, Nate Amos and Rachel Brown went on their first tour together as Water From Your Eyes. No one knew their experimental avant-pop music yet, money was scarce, and Amos was in his first year of sobriety. Also, they were exes who hadn’t gotten around to fully processing their breakup a few years earlier.
“We were getting paid $250 a night, maybe selling three shirts if we were lucky,” says Amos, 34. “We were trying to make it work.”
“It was an absolute emotional trainwreck,” adds Brown, 28.
The one thing that kept Water From Your Eyes from falling apart on that first tour was a CD of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication. As Brown drove the New York band from gig to gig around the U.S., they kept the 1999 alt-rock classic on the car stereo. “We played it every single day,” says the singer. “Honestly, the Red Hot Chili Peppers saved us.”
Water From Your Eyes don’t sound very much like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They don’t sound like anyone else, really. Their songs collage freaky noises, catchy melodies, guitar outbursts, and electronic beats — all played and produced with polymathic verve by Amos — while Brown adds deadpan vocals on top. It’s one of the most genuinely original sounds to emerge in the last 25 years of American indie rock, and it’s made them heroes to a growing fanbase of adventurous listeners. Since that first tour, on which they opened for the younger NYC rock band Geese, Water From Your Eyes have signed with Matador Records, won rave reviews for their 2023 LP Everyone’s Crushed, performed for 160,000 Interpol fans in Mexico City, and put on three of the hottest boat-based concerts in New York history. They couldn’t have predicted any of it.
“I just didn’t see the music we made as likable or marketable at all,” Amos says. “I still don’t. I’m a little confused by the whole thing.”
It’s a Beautiful Place, out Aug. 22 on Matador, is the first album Amos and Brown have made together since finding an audience, and it’s their most joyously out-there achievement yet — a mind-blowing concept album about time, space travel, and the nature of reality. It’s also their most guitar-forward release ever, with an eclectic mix of styles that they credit in part to the Chili Peppers’ influence.
Take the album’s title song, an eerie, soulful 51-second guitar solo where Amos channels on-again, off-again Chilis member John Frusciante to a tee. “As soon as I pick up a guitar, it becomes way more obvious that I really love John Frusciante,” he says. “There’s a mystic quality to his musicality that I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of studying.”
When Amos was putting together the backing track for “Life Signs,” the head-spinning whirl of nu-metal riffs and pop sugar that they released as the lead single from It’s a Beautiful Place, he looked to the Chilis’ “Around the World” for guidance on how to make it all work together. “When we were writing the lyrics, you did say, ‘OK, go Anthony Kiedis on this one,’” Brown says.
THE DAY AFTER their third annual Boat Show, which didn’t get them back to dry land til well after midnight, Amos and Brown are hanging out at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. After lunch, they’re taking a train upstate to a fireworks store so they can buy some sparklers for an upcoming music video for another song. The treatment, naturally, is an homage to the Chili Peppers’ 2002 video for “By the Way.”
Perusing the historic seafood eatery’s menu, they’re struck by a reference to octopus legs. “My thing is that I know they’re really smart,” Brown says. “They’re, like, sentient beings that have an alien intelligence that we cannot even fathom.”
“They could take over the world,” Amos agrees.
This leads to a conversation about the ethics of eating animals, and the possibility of hyper-intelligent cephalopods hunting human beings as prey. “I’m OK with being eaten, if it came down to it,” Brown says. “If something decided to eat me, I could accept that.”
“Dude, I had crazy octopus nightmares as a child,” Amos says. “They have beaks, dude. I’m not really scared of animals, but that freaks me out.”
For the first time, Amos and Brown made their new album knowing they had an audience.
Amos and Brown seem relaxed and in tune with each other, chatting casually (and often hilariously) over the next hour-plus at the oyster bar. Both of them are in happy relationships with other indie musicians: Amos is with Al Nardo, who plays guitar in the live lineup of Water From Your Eyes, and Brown is with acclaimed North Carolina singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman, as they revealed on Valentine’s Day this year with an Instagram post captioned simply “boyfriend.” “We’re both in love,” Brown says with a smile. “That’s awesome.”
But the album is rooted in tenser times. Much of its music has origins that predate Everyone’s Crushed, with some going back as far as 2021. Amos spent four years tinkering with the tracks on and off at home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, in between increasingly big tours with this band and his solo project This Is Lorelei. When it was all ready for Brown to write lyrics last summer, the singer (who uses they/them pronouns) was at an emotional low point.
“For so long, when we talked about making a new album, I kept saying that I wanted it to be hopeful and optimistic and bring a positive energy into the world,” Brown says. “But when I sat down….” They meet my eyes: “Honestly, I was very suicidal at the time. I was trying to find a way to communicate how much life means, while personally, I was like, ‘Damn, it’d be awesome to be dead.’”
Brown says those feelings had to do with “a number of different interpersonal relationships” and their lifelong experience with depression. “Once you have that little seed in your head, it’s so hard to keep it at bay,” they continue. “And the stress of my life changing so much and not being able to handle my emotions in a way that was healthy just came back.”
Amos and Brown with touring members Al Nardo (left) and Bailey Wollowitz (right).
Brown poured it all into lyrics that draw on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 sci-fi classic The Dispossessed, Ada Limón’s poetry, quantum physics, and Catholic theology, all interpreted through their own signature detached tone. They’ve since gotten help with their mental health, and a borderline personality disorder diagnosis last year clarified what they were going through. “Within six weeks of writing those lyrics, I got medicated and diagnosed with BPD,” they say. “I feel better now.”
The table has been cleared of its oysters, and the duo behind 2025’s most ludicrously inventive indie album have a train to catch. The two of them look at their phones, and the conversation turns to memes they’ve seen recently. “Dude, my algorithm is getting so fried,” Amos says. “It’s not even memes anymore. Most of my feed is people who make realistic dinosaur puppets and take pictures like they’re their pets. And the freaky thing is, it’s exactly what I want to see, and I had no idea until my phone started showing it to me.”
If the music they make together often feels surreal, maybe that’s just an appropriate reaction to the timeline we’re all stranded in. “I mean, hasn’t everybody’s life changed in the last two years?” Brown says. “We’re living under fascism, and we’re still releasing our indie-rock album.”
“It’s absurd,” Amos says. “It feels absurd.”
“But there are hopeful things,” Brown says, adding a quick recommendation for New York’s upcoming mayoral election: “If anybody’s reading this, don’t rank Cuomo.”
They both say they’ve grown comfortable with the idea that Water From Your Eyes could go anywhere tomorrow. “The limitations that I thought inherently existed for this band have been smashed enough times that I’m just like, ‘I don’t fucking know, dude,’” Amos says. “It’s kind of just being along for the ride.”
