Everyone's crushed / Water from Your Eyes.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With each release, Water from Your Eyes level up their genre-mashing sound. They moved away from their early New Order homages to explore everything from folk to motorik to industrial music on 2019's Somebody Else's Song, then made a critical and creative breakthrough with 2021's Structure. As Nate Amos and Rachel Brown rifled through the psychic debris of their romantic breakup, they assembled their surreal spoken word, danceable rhythms, lilting vocal melodies, and noisy synths into songs with a more clearly intentional viewpoint and greater emotional impact. The duo tighten their focus once more on their Matador debut, Everyone's Crushed. If Water from Your Eyes rotated through their different modes on Structure, this time they shuffle them together into a more uniform -- but still surprising -- approach. The way its skronky songs are held together with subtle melodic gestures and unexpected hooks feels like a natural evolution from Structure. Water from Your Eyes seem to make this connection explicit by naming Crushed's opening song "Structure," but it's one of their many in-jokes: the track's glitchy, stuttering electronica actually repurposes some of the 2020 EP 33:44. Moves like these foreshadow how the album's immediate standouts lean into the duo's cerebral mischief. "Barley" is a looping, cryptically catchy collage of Brown's deadpan vocals and hypnotically flickering textures and rhythms that resemble design motifs as much as music (this is a band who once turned Rothko paintings into sound files, after all). Water from Your Eyes remain fascinated by how tiny shifts can make a massive difference; on the title track, Brown swaps words around to add nuance to the song's absurdist response to difficult times ("I'm in love with everyone/And everything hurts/I'm with everyone I hurt/And everything's love"). They sharpen their wit on the cheeky closing track "Buy My Product," which stares into the abyss and runs away from it with retail therapy, while the lumbering noise-pop of "True Life" strengthens Water from Your Eyes' connections to the art-damaged underground sounds of the early 2000s. Brown recalls Karen O's chameleonic quality, switching effortlessly from sweet to mournful to blasé as each song demands; there are also hints of Deerhoof in how easily the duo make experimental music sound catchy and vice versa. Interestingly, the most abstract moments on Everyone's Crushed are the most emotionally charged -- though perhaps that makes sense for a group whose name could be a translation of "crying" from an alien language. Water from Your Eyes' knack for gorgeous melodies gets its due on the questioning "Remember Not My Name," but the band goes deeper on "14," a Mica Levi-esque, string-laden ballad that grew out of Amos' exercises in serialism and captures the gut-wrenching pain of goodbyes, even when they're necessary, when Brown sings, "I'm ready to throw you up." Some of Water from Your Eyes' most consistently gripping music, the cohesion of Everyone's Crushed lends a new vantage point to their music -- and it's an exciting one. ~ Heather Phares