Water From Your Eyes reach the stars through riffs and wires on It’s a Beautiful Place

While the consistent casting of Water From Your Eyes as prototypical indie pranksters was never entirely inaccurate, it often missed the finer point. The band's sense of humour is far closer to Zappa or Ween than the Dead Milkmen, the absurdism matching the complexity and sincerity of the craft at play, always more dressing than salad.

With each release, that ratio has shifted; the bands initial melancholic dance-pop, which pitched them as the stoners' answer to New Order, has gained greater complexities with each album. 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed was a breakthrough, a bleak satirical slab of post-pandemic art pop where songs were marked just as equally by their additions as their absences. Often oscillating between tender minimalism and crushing noise. Beautiful Place simultaneously builds on and contrasts its predecessor. The noise has been amped up but so has the sense of hope.

In contrast to Everyone’s Crushed’s consumerist absurdism, Beautiful Place is a work laden with sci-fi optimism. But there’s no easy retrofuturism to Water from Your Eyes' vision, like their music, their vision is fractured and confusing, the ideas echo out through broken phrases amidst an avalanche of a thousand notes.

While no Water From Your Eyes record has strayed beyond the 35-minute mark Beautiful Place is the band's shortest yet, clocking in at just under half an hour. It’s also their most serious with songs sharply divided between short experimental jams and full blooded slabs of dense feedback pop. Lead single "Life Signs" made it immediately clear that a shift in sound was coming with its scorching guitar shred and pounding electro-industrial rhythms, but that only captured a fraction of the band's power. There’s always been hints of a rumble within Water From Your Eyes, tracks like "Still Life" and "Track 5" suggested that behind their melancholic twee lurked a truly monstrous pair of noiseniks. But compared to the songs on Beautiful Place, those discordant duels sound like bedroom pop.

The shifts caused by extensive touring have left the duo writing in band mode, a decision that allows the noise to work as more than just an element of discordance. Drum rhythms and basslines are further emphasised, allowing the band to shift and ensnare their thousand riff a minute slabs into pieces of incredible maximalism. The glowing "Nights In Armor" is a perfect example of this new style with its groaning yet elastic bass line providing stability amidst clashing cymbals and twinkling guitars. Elsewhere on "Born 2", it’s a steady drum beat that keeps the focus. Its mechanical rhythms combine with Nate Amos’ glittering guitar lines to create a sound that marries the ascending waves of shoegaze with the punishing industrial grooves.

The album's best moments are those where they combine these confident pyrotechnics with the sounds they’re known for. "Playing Classics" is the highlight and might be the best song the band has ever written. It’s a brilliant piece of dance pop where rapid drums combine with upbeat bass thumps to create an impressive liquid rhythm which Amos’ guitars play in complement. The glimmering notes combine with the syncopated groove to form a whirring and swirling piece of irresistible pop. The gorgeous "Blood On The Dollar" follows with a swirl of hazed-out alt-country that carries forward the band's trademark laidback swagger, but with the earnest emotion of David Berman’s best work. It sounds like a natural evolution of their trademark post-capitalist twee. A swirling piece of melancholic optimism that complements Brown’s wavering vocals perfectly.

Brown is the object around which Water From Your Eyes bizarre, surreal sci-fi world emanates. Their deadpan vocals offer a beguiling mix of joy and boredom that renders the band's ranging lyrics and forward-thinking guitar work as casual as a lazy summer afternoon. Through them, Beautiful Place achieves the same trick that the band has been maintaining since their inception. Portraying innovative pop experimentalism as a chilled-out slab of slacker noodling. But on It's a Beautiful Place, we’re more in on the joke than ever. It’s an album of such focus and dedication to its oddness and brilliance that you can tell just how much work has been put in. Not that the band ever states it. Like the best pranksters, they know that those who get it will get it and appear perfectly content, leaving others confused by their screeching dance-punk genius.