It's A Beautiful Place

In the time since 2023's Everyone's Crushed, their Matador debut and critical breakout - which appeared in end of year lists by The New York Times, The Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, Vogue, Wired and Rolling Stone - Rachel Brown and Nate Amos have become a pillar of the city's alternative music scene and one of its most revered underground exports. Live, they've expanded to a quartet, joining forces with guitarist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz of NYC duo Fantasy of a Broken Heart. They played huge stages supporting Interpol on tour, including in front of 160,000 fans in Mexico City. Back home, the band established a DIY boat show franchise on the East River, hosting friends at the heart of the city's musical vanguard including YHWH Nailgun, Model/Actriz, Frost Children, and Kassie Krut. Brown released a new EP under their thanks for coming moniker, while Amos released an acclaimed full length under his This Is Lorelei solo project.

The duo recorded the bulk of It's a Beautiful Place last summer, just as they have every other WFYE release: in Amos's bedroom, under the watchful eye of a tattered Robin Williams poster from the Mork & Mindy era.. "Basically," jokes Amos, "Robin is like a silent member of Water From Your Eyes." But this time, much of the writing and recording were shaped around the dynamics of a full-blooded live group: "When you're playing with a band you tend to write with one in mind - this was the first time I wrote anything for WFYE imagining us playing anywhere bigger than a basement", he observes.

Throughout It's A Beautiful Place is a clear sense of a band who have honed their curveballs into home runs. Looming and melancholy, wide-eyed and petrified, it's Blade Runner with a touch of WALL-E, it's Kubrick and Asimov with a hint of Jay and Silent Bob. These are songs that look outward, conscious of our smallness and questioning our place in the universe while admiring the surrounding beauty.