For Brooklyn electro-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, the path to clarity is paved with playful misdirection. On a pair of spoken-word interludes on their fifth album, Structure, frenzied dance punk careens into silence, suddenly replaced by the sort of dry, dead-air ambience you’d expect from a podcast. Within these hushed eye-of-the-storm moments, one smack in the middle of each side of the record, vocalist Rachel Brown plays a kind of word-game version of Exquisite Corpse. Repurposing the lyrics from album centerpiece “Quotations,” they pluck out nouns and adjectives and glue them to one another, seemingly at random, until they resemble the mutterings of a person talking in their sleep: “You’re the embers go sunlight/A line fake feel matching colors/Myth a revealing another constantly now.” Even at their quietest, Water From Your Eyes can’t resist cracking a surrealist joke, dragging you down a rabbit hole of “memories down of in sounds.”
A gambit like this is fully in character. After all, this is a band whose first release of 2021 was an album of covers that began with a stone-faced rendition of Eminem’s Academy Award-winning docu-single “Lose Yourself.” What is shocking is not only how brilliantly the diversion pays off, but that it works not just once, but twice. Structure follows a double-helix layout wherein the two cut-up poetry interludes lead into two marvelously distinct versions of “Quotations”: one an abrasive romp through gurgling synthesizers and whirls of processed guitar, the other (“‘Quotations’,” complete with scare quotes in the title) an ambient collage of Brown’s voice, pulsing in meditative harmony before erupting quietly into IDM breakbeats. But these puzzles aren’t just art-rock pranks; Structure is Water From Your Eyes’ most rewarding album to date. It holds your gaze long after the mystery fades, channeling a powerful sense of empathy to mesmerizing effect.
Structure is far from being a complete about-face for the band; they’re still making cryptic indie pop that hits like a sugar rush. Their most intriguing and satisfying departure is architectural. Compared to the disorienting way that Somebody Else’s Song swung from raging electro punk to acoustic indie pop and back again, their latest record is a carefully tended garden of ideas that reveals Brown and bandmate Nate Amos’ songwriting partnership blossoming in full flower. Structure opts for controlled chaos, unfolding over two mirror-image halves on a guided tour of heartbreak, hope, and longing. Each begins with a slower, psychedelic ballad, moves through blistering post-punk, and closes on one of two versions of “Quotations,” making it tempting to view the album as a pair of EPs, asking the same questions and receiving the same answer in different languages.