Like a lot of people who live deep in their own brains, Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos and Rachel Brown use humor as a smokescreen. “There’s nothing about that song that isn’t funny to me,” Amos once said of “Barley,” a mathematical-philosophical puzzle masquerading as a dance-punk rave-up, and a highlight of their 2023 Matador debut, Everyone’s Crushed. “‘Remember Not My Name’ is the funniest song on the album to me,” Brown said of another Everyone’s Crushed standout, a pathos-soaked slow jam about the vulnerability of infatuation. And here’s that word again: “I was very anti-guitar for a long time, and then I realised that guitar is actually really funny,” Amos recently said of the stylistic turn the band takes on its thrilling new album, It’s a Beautiful Place. “Like, nothing’s funnier than a guitar solo.”

A two-person mind meld fueled by inside jokes and existential awe, Water From Your Eyes are unreliable narrators who can be counted on to perplex, enthrall, and occasionally shred. Their music is antic and turbulent in equal measure, marked by strange time signatures, stylistic pileups, and conflicted emotions hidden behind dazed grins. They are sufficiently schooled in the pop canon to confidently reshape it, balancing easy listening and serialism, industrial dance and microtonal composition, while invoking acts like Cake, Sting, and Red Hot Chili Peppers as reference points for their idiosyncratic, omnivorous brand of art pop—theoretically defensible comparisons, but also patently absurd.

To call It’s a Beautiful Place merely “funny” would be like calling Fargo a workplace comedy about a used-car salesman, or Being John Malkovich a mistaken-identity rom com. And while the guitar forms the backbone of Water From Your Eyes’ new album, to call it their “guitar record” would miss the astonishing range they wring from the instrument: pummeling post-hardcore, shoegaze, ’90s alt-rock, ’80s jangle, indie dance, prog, and even some ramshackle country rock that sounds not unlike, well, the Chili Peppers cosplaying as a podunk bar band—all held together with calming atmospheric sketches, eye-wateringly complex drum programming, and some of the most serenely searching vocals that Brown has brought to the project yet. Not to mention some blistering guitar solos.

After the relative darkness of 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed, an album steeped in pandemic angst, political turmoil, and Amos’ rocky efforts to get sober, the band suggested that the follow-up would be more “hopeful.” On the surface, It’s a Beautiful Place frequently is more upbeat and certainly more energized: Following a brief ambient teaser, the album lurches into action with “Life Signs,” the duo’s most intense song to date. Jagged power chords trade off with spidery riffs, all in a destabilizing 5/4 time signature that recalls hardcore deconstructionists Shudder to Think or math rockers Don Caballero. “Go to hell/Take the train/Generations/Learned impatience,” intones Brown, channeling rap-rock’s drawn-out cadences into a sleepwalker’s murmur before summoning Stereolab’s coolly angelic tones in the luminous, enigmatic chorus: “What’s on the record/Life in a small town/Fifth and a first sound.” Your guess is as good as mine, but the feel of their singing, combined with Amos’ buoyant jazz harmonies, is life-affirming, soul-cleansing.

As they did on 2021’s concise yet intricate Structure, Water From Your Eyes once again prove that three perfect songs is all that one side of an LP really needs. “Nights in Armor”—written for Amos’ This Is Lorelei and then reworked—shuttles between glinting, Sarah Records-caliber indie pop, metal-adjacent chugging, and atonal skronk; part grunge and part shoegaze, “Born 2” traverses an Escherian staircase of changing keys that summits repeatedly on a note of fist-pumping triumph. Lyrically, it might be the most straightforwardly political thing that they’ve written, but the meaning is as cryptic as ever. For all the song’s promise of limitless possibility (“Born to become/Something else/Something melts”), Brown repeatedly drives home a single word—“psychopath”—like a silvery nail in a varnished coffin.

The second half repeats the format: three proper songs rounded out with two ambient sketches, but this time, one track hogs the spotlight: “Playing Classics,” a madcap dance-punk romp partially inspired by Charli XCX’s “Club Classics.” Its ebullience is almost awkward; its mismatching parts—disco hi-hats, Eurodance bass, too-bright keys, overdriven guitar solo, snatches of vocoder teased and just as quickly abandoned—summed up in the record’s most utopian sentiment: “Practice shake it you’re free.” I suspect it will be the album’s big hit, certainly in a live context. I don’t like it as much as anything on the A-side, but it is, truly, the album’s funniest song.

B-side opener “Spaceship,” though, is another roller coaster of backmasked guitars and shifting time signatures, closer in feel to the A-side’s contorted alt-rock. It’s hard to overstate how effortless Water From Your Eyes make even the most complicated grooves feel, and Brown’s hopeful singing (“So you dream, you build, you change/The cage looks like a window pane”) only adds to the suggestion of weightlessness. The country-fried “Blood on the Dollar,” on the other hand, feels almost like a demo, a bare-bones sketch for fuzzed-out guitar and muted drums. Slipping across slant rhymes and a sidelong Pixies reference, Brown might be singing about the end of empire, or the ennui of life online. The album’s lyrics never reveal anything as clear-cut as the thematic talking points—space, dinosaurs, measuring human existence on a cosmic scale—the duo routinely trots out in interviews, but that’s a point in favor of Brown’s suggestively mysterious writing. The duo’s banter may often resemble low-stakes brainrot, but Brown’s writing reaches beyond stoned dorm-room riffing into places where the punchlines dissolve.

“It’s either nothing is important or everything is important,” Brown recently told Fader; in context, they were talking about the cosmic existentialism that informs It’s a Beautiful Place, but it also feels like a fair assessment of Water From Your Eyes’ almost obsessive attention to detail. One detail in particular sticks out on this captivating, ambitious album: “For Mankind,” the ambient sketch that closes the record, is made of exactly the same sounds as the intro, “One Small Step”—a queasy wash of what might be a whirly tube run through digital processing, or perhaps a family of chipper sea lions. If you listen to the album on a loop, “For Mankind” will blur seamlessly back into “One Small Step,” effectively enclosing you within Water From Your Eyes’ invented universe. A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown mind meld—sprawling, amorphous, hermetic, overwhelming, heartbreaking, funny as hell. It’s a privileged vantage point.