Alt-Pop Duo Water From Your Eyes Commit to the Bit

The Brooklyn transplants understand that humor and darkness go hand in hand.

Water From Your Eyes arrive dressed to impress. On a Monday afternoon in early December, Rachel Brown, 25, and Nate Amos, 31, roll up to Brooklyn’s Melody Lanes decked out in turquoise and red bowling shirts, walking a fine line between hip and geriatric. They sought out the kitschy, thrifted shirts just for the occasion, and the effort is clearly noticed. As we head to our lane, bowling shoes in hand, the alley’s official photographer—a real thing, apparently—approaches to ask if he can take pictures of the duo for their website. They tentatively agree, posing with bowling balls and goofy grins.

It was the band’s idea to go bowling, although neither have any particular fondness for the sport. Brown admits to practicing at a different Brooklyn alley the week beforehand. As we start the game, the duo behind this strange and idiosyncratic pop project politely, quietly, cheer each other on. Both are openly tired—Amos is running on three hours of sleep after pulling an all-nighter working on music, while Brown performed at a DSA fundraiser the evening before—but they play remarkably well. Amos bowls a split the very first frame, eventually winning.

We move to the alley’s desolate barroom, and while they’re initially bashful in conversation, it’s quickly apparent that Brown—who once aspired to write TV comedy—and Amos share a purposefully on-the-nose sense of humor. They firmly commit to whatever offbeat bit they dream up, like their latest round of press photos, where the NYC transplants cheese in Times Square decked out in “I Love New York” shirts. Their ability to be weird and silly together seeps into the music they make as Water From Your Eyes—and not just the obviously goofy stuff, like their cover of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” Last year’s Structure is organized chaos built from the remnants of distorted post-punk, glitchy dance music, inquisitive orchestrals, and snatches of Exquisite Corpse-like word collages. Assessing his own album in hindsight, Amos says, “The whole thing sounds like the work of a crazy person to me.”

The duo’s instinctive bond has been a long time in the making, but it hasn’t been without its hiccups. Amos, who grew up in Vermont, and Brown, a Chicago native, met through the Windy City’s DIY scene and started making music as Water From Your Eyes in 2016. Brown was on summer break from New York University at the time; the project effectively became long distance until Amos moved to New York the following summer.

At first the band was little more than a New Order knockoff relying on gimmicks: see 2018’s All a Dance, where every track is from the viewpoint of side characters from unnamed movies, or 2017’s Feels a Lot Like, which is written from the perspective of a dog who is processing the death of his father. “We were probably just high as fuck,” Amos says in way of an explanation. But Amos’ relocation—and the duo’s ability to play live shows—encouraged them to take the project more seriously. “We had been writing little pop songs, and then Nate started bringing in songs that were 15 minutes long,” Brown recalls. This shift is evident on Water From Your Eyes’ 2019 album, Somebody Else’s Song, which features cheery synth-pop tunes like “Adeleine” but also an uncompromising 10-minute electro opus called “Break.”

The next change was more personal. In the spring of 2019, Amos and Brown broke off their nearly four-year romantic relationship. Both talk about the separation now with laughter and palpable relief. “The only thing that wasn’t working in our broader relationship was the romantic part,” explains Brown. “We were trying to break up in a way where we could still make music together.” After some time apart, “everything immediately got much easier,” says Amos. By the end of summer 2019, they were working on the album that would become Structure.

Shortly before the split, a friend asked Amos to write a song that could soundtrack a karaoke scene in a short film. The movie was never completed, and the song, titled “When You’re Around,” became Structure’s opener and emotional centerpiece. By Water From Your Eyes standards, it’s an unusually sunny track: the jaunty piano, swooning guitar riff, and pensive horns evoke the wide-eyed sweetness of ’60s pop music, like the Carpenters by way of Bushwick. “My feet don’t touch the ground when you’re around,” Brown sings on the chorus. “I hear your voice and save it for later.” The unguarded sentimentality is intensified when Water From Your Eyes perform live; it’s the only moment in the set when Brown removes the dark shades they sport as a protective “shield” and become vulnerable to the audience. “There is water in my eyes and I’m alive,” they blissfully proclaim midway through. It’s a cornball self-referential wink, sure, but the line also captures Water From Your Eyes’ precise balance of humor and darkness.

Structure is rarely so forthcoming. Amos and Brown are tricksters, and the album—organized into mirrored halves—is a particularly compelling puzzle. Each side begins with an uncharacteristically tender opener before moving into a jittery brain-melter, a 30-second spoken-word piece, and a version of their most popular song so far, “Quotations.” And there are plenty of Easter eggs: a song called “Track Five” is actually the album’s sixth song; half the tracks share the same lyrics, mixed and matched; the “Quotations” without punctuation in the title has quotation marks in the audio waveform. Dizzying as this can be, Amos and Brown claim that most of these patterns emerged organically. Only once it became noticeable did they lean into the concept, consciously crafting inverse versions and song pairings.

The system of creating Structure, according to Amos, was “creating chaos out of nothing, waiting for it to begin to make sense, and then chipping away at it.” Here, Amos mentions the influence of color field painter Mark Rothko, whose massive, sublime canvases blur perception. “The really long Water From Your Eyes songs came from this idea of trying to remove something as fundamental to pop music as duration from the equation.” Most of their songs begin as long slabs of instrumental melodies with bells or guitars standing in for vocals. Once a basic, ahem, structure emerges, Amos and Brown map out the syllables needed per line and then Brown takes the lead writing.

This process could not be more different than Brown’s songwriting for the lo-fi solo project thanks for coming, where lyrics sometimes come straight from their journals. Rather than merely personal, Brown wants Water From Your Eyes songs to “express a feeling that is shared beyond individual experience.” Both agree that the collaborative process creates a degree of distance, but Amos adds that out of his three projects—including solo endeavor This Is Lorelei and My Idea, a pop duo with Lily Konigsberg—this one is the most personal. “It’s also the most unsettling because it’s so personal,” he says. The pair refer to Water From Your Eyes as something with “its own entity that we just take care of,” “an identity that we can follow,” and “a plant we’re cultivating.” They both seem a little bewildered that people actually listen to this music that started as a joke between friends. But they’ve got some new songs they are waiting to “make sense.”

While explaining their process, Amos pauses for a moment and blushes. “This all sounds so pretentious,” he says. Sitting in this dingy carpeted room, we take a moment to laugh at ourselves. Beside us, children are running circles around their parents while a frazzled manager shouts over the intercom for someone named Randy to fix the pins in lane 12. Soon we’re talking about the long-running CBS procedural NCIS and its underwhelming Cajun spinoff. “NCIS: New Orleans makes normal NCIS look like it’s directed by the Coen brothers,” Brown groans. They ping pong back and forth like this all afternoon until suddenly it’s dusk, and we can feel our collective hunger. As we head to a nearby taco truck, Amos’ face suddenly sours. “I’m really sad that they didn’t have food here,” he explains. “I had this whole bit where I was going to get fries and a cup of water, and ask if anyone had wanted water for their fries.”

Pitchfork: What were you like as teenagers?

Rachel Brown: Depressed. I played softball and was voted class clown. At that age, the only thing I knew to be true about myself was that I could make people laugh; I went to college hoping to work in comedic television. I learned how to record music on my phone but kept it to myself. It was very lo-fi, just me and a guitar. I used comedy and humor to deflect the idea that I had any emotions, even though I was really depressed.

Nate Amos: Music was the only thing that I had any interest in. In hindsight, I was probably really annoying to the people around me because I was so serious about it. I started and killed well over 10 bands in high school. I was trying to make indie rock but definitely not succeeding. The only shows in the area to play were with hardcore screamo bands. I always had a couple of bands going on in high school, which essentially meant a couple different Myspace pages.

Rachel, when you were a freshman at NYU, you went viral for creating a Facebook event calling for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s resignation. Can you tell me more about that?

RB: I got social media when I was 13 and I was very much online. I previously made a Facebook event about falling asleep and never waking up, which went viral. Some mom threatened to sue me because she claimed I was encourging people to commit suicide.

In 2014, Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer, and Rahm Emanuel blocked the release of dash cam footage for over a year. After the footage was released, I made a jokey Facebook event that was a party demanding the resignation of Emanuel and state attorney Anita Alvarez. Then some people organized a protest around the event, which was great! Meanwhile, I was back in New York, doing my homework. The Chicago Reader interviewed me and some of the people who organized the protest. But then the story got picked up by places like the Daily Mail and they focused on me, not the actual organizers.

How did that experience affect you?

RB: I got offline. I remember being on Tumblr when I was younger and thinking that it would be cool to be famous on the internet. But that experience made me really not want to have any spotlight. Especially for something like that, because while I really care about politics and movements, I’m not an organizer or an activist. Since then, I’ve come to terms with the fact that the internet is not my life. The person I am online is not me.

Would you call Water From Your Eyes pop music?

NA: Definitely. Structure is a little more out-there than other things that you would put in that group, but to me it’s a pop album. It’s still based on [laughing] catchy melodies and dance grooves. Before Structure, I was literally just making noise. And then I got really into Ween. I think Ween had a bigger effect on my approach to making music than anything else I’ve encountered in my adult life.

Wait, did you say weed?

NA: No, Ween. Last summer I got so into that band and the way some of their songs are really silly and some are gut wrenchingly sad. I was looking back at Structure and parts of it are tongue-in-cheek, but for the most part it’s so in its own world that you lose the context. Whereas Ween, by doing this wide variety of different things, they would take you across a more complete representation of what makes good drama—comedy and tragedy. Their songs that are more serious also recognize that music is just music and is fun.

Do you think you complement each other as musicians?

NA: Water From Your Eyes doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways. It’s not a band that either of us would have sat down and decided to be like this. I don’t really know why it works the way it does, but we’re both capable of certain things that the other person is incapable of. Rachel’s voice is a huge part of Water From Your Eyes. It would sound so lethargic if I was singing that stuff! We just have a really strong friendship and that allows us to be completely walls down when we work on music. We can do nothing together, forever.

RB: I would never think of the melodies that Nate writes. I was in a choir when I was younger and I sang to myself, but I was never a singer. I would have never known that I can sing in some of the ways that I do if Nate hadn’t written the melodies like that.

Have there been any times when you’ve struggled as collaborators?

NA: We tried to cover “Santa Monica” by Everclear and it didn’t work. That’s the only thing I can really think of.