In 2023, Water From Your Eyes seemed to have it figured out. It’s the cheeky, straight shot closing track of their fifth full-length record, Everyone’s Crushed, and Rachel Brown’s deadpanning over a Kim Deal-meets-Crash Bandicoot bassline, “There are no happy endings / There are only things that happen.” Without a wink in their delivery, they demand, “Buy my product / Now!” Fitting, it would seem, for a record with the title Everyone’s Crushed—crushed here, meaning both defeated and atomized, both buckling from the weight of late capitalism and distracted and diffracted into a million tiny pieces.

But it’s 2025 now, and the duo is back in New York, after bringing in fantasy of a broken heart’s Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz to tour with Interpol and play Primavera Sound; after Brown’s What Is My Capacity to Love? EP with their solo project, Thanks for Coming; and after Nate Amos’s acclaimed 2024 record as This Is Lorelei, Box for Buddy, Box for Star. They’re hosting concerts on a ship in the middle of the East River, performing with Model/Actriz, Frost Children, YHWH Nailgun, and fellow vanguards of New York’s experimental semi-underground.

There’s an easy narrative of progress from Everyone’s Crushed to their second Matador record, It’s A Beautiful Place, that is worth troubling—one that positions the duo’s newest album as an optimistic antidote to the fatalism of their previous, more oblique work. Yet It’s a Beautiful Place remains rooted in a necessary despair, metabolizing the fragmented, overstimulated conditions of contemporary life by flooding their own zone, with their own set of collaged influences.

WFYE forsake some of the microtones, the anti-hooks, and the rattling, unstructured polyphonies, moving toward a harder rocking, more guitar-driven sound, embracing guitar static and indie rock aesthetics alongside their typical oppressive repetition and droning wordplay. And even though many of It’s a Beautiful Place’s songs originated around the same time as the two sat in Amos’s bedroom with about $100 worth of equipment, cranking out Everyone’s Crushed’s doomer-anthems, they do point toward a future vision with more than a subtle increase in hope.

After it opens with the ambient “One Small Step,” caterwauling impossibly as the sound of ambulance sirens crashing like waves onto a shore, It’s a Beautiful Place enters a more recognizably WFYE mode with lead single, “Life Signs.” The lyrics are some of the duo’s sharpest and most absurd, as Brown dishes out rhythmic wordplay, “For thy cathedrals are built / unbuilt rebuilt / Unwavering guilt, pools / of rain heaven spilt / subject to tilt.” They rhyme dense and riff fast, alternating between assonant, spoken word verses, a twinkly, Broken Social Scene-esque chorus, and a freewheeling, looping guitar solo, orchestrating chaos into tight bursts and unexpected redirections.

Unexpected redirections are something It’s A Beautiful Place has in spades. Take the shoegaze-influenced “Born 2” which buries the duo’s layered vocals under a wall of trudging noise, just to thrust us into the sweeping crescendos of “You Don’t Believe in God,” a minute and a half long soaring instrumental that rings in the psychedelic “Rocket” like some sort of alien ringtone choked through an M. C. Escher-shaped vacuum.

It becomes obvious that WFYE have found their stride in a particular contradiction. It’s a Beautiful Place is far and away their most accessible project to date—as much as accessibility is a game of barriers to entry. It’s A Beautiful Place opens its rabbit hole so wide, with dance hooks and guitar solos, that it is impossible not to fall right in. It just so happens that the record’s scale is cosmic and we—Brown, Amos, myself, you, all of us—are so, so small.

In interviews anticipating the album’s release, Amos has articulated the thesis statement as something along the lines of: any dinosaur or fossil is way more interesting than your favorite rock album. For WFYE, the world may be a beautiful place, but this is because it is a big one. The scope of It’s A Beautiful Place’s influences—from Euro house to shoegaze, the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Ursula K. Le Guin and Bigfoot—is as vast and varied as the duo’s cosmic vision. The fragments become the structure; though it is easier to get ourselves into their world, it’s nearly impossible to access all it has to offer. And as far as getting out? No, they won’t let us do that either—the outro “For Mankind” careens right back into reprising the very same intro arrangement.

The way I see it, It’s A Beautiful Place’s thesis statement comes as a lyric on the dance punk banger “Playing Classics,” a deadpan refrain: “Desire in crisis / No a longing for truce / Yeah the long hard road from here to the truth.” Desire, like all things in It’s A Beautiful Place’s world, is threatened, yet it still persists. You can hear it in “Blood On The Dollar’s” soft, gentle vocals, on “You Don’t Believe in God’s” rising and falling. It’s still the polycrisis, but desire has not been foreclosed.

Though It’s A Beautiful Place is able to outwit fatalism, at least with a joke, a riff, and a small step, Water From Your Eyes still cannot promise a happy ending. Yet to say that all they promise is a laugh would be to drastically undersell the magnitude of what they are capable of—leveling up the precision of their slanted approach to pop craftsmanship, and taking the whole universe in stride while they’re at it. There was a time when I thought that Water From Your Eyes were great at irony; now, I hear perhaps the most earnest album of 2025—maybe the only sort of earnestness possible anymore.

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