I would rather ignore the overstated and flat-out boring critical truism that every recession brings a new wave of dance music. Bleak times make for on-the-floor catharsis, austerity breeds ecstasy — did someone say “recession indicator” yet? But it’s hard to deny that, in the middle of yet another stretch of economic unease and end-of-era fatigue, somebody keeps trying to teach the indie kids how to dance. Disco outlived its own moral panic, and LCD Soundsystem turned post-9/11 disillusionment into a sort of collective self-mockery. Water From Your Eyes dares to call the collapse-into-ecstasy a “beautiful place.” Awkward, hypnotic, half-funny and half-heartbreaking, the Chicago-via-Brooklyn duo brought their contradictions to The Drake in Amherst on Oct. 7. And yes, they made us dance.
The Drake is small enough that you can see everything, which feels both convenient and vaguely threatening. The age range sprawled: aging millennials, college kids, a few old guys elbowing their way toward the front while I clutched my eight-dollar whatever-it-was artisanal beer, the random baristas I half-know from overpriced cafés and a lone child in noise-canceling headphones. A genuinely mismatched crowd, about right for a Tuesday night in western Massachusetts, stood before vocalist Rachel Brown, who paced the stage in dark sunglasses and jorts: unhurried, disturbingly calm.
Rachel Brown (right) and Nate Amos (left) of Water from Your Eyes perform at The Drake in Amherst (Photo By Anna Siegel ’26)
The band opened with “Born 2”: a single cello note rings out before the drums snap into place, followed by the jagged growl of Nate Amos’s guitar, the other half of the duo. It’s the closest thing they have to an anthem, in the way a song can accidentally become one. On record it’s very structural: a blend of distorted guitar, synthesized tones and Brown’s flat delivery. Live, though, the energy was less triumphant than suspicious.
Behind those sunglasses, Brown kept repeating “Born to become something else / The world is so beautiful / But born to machines.”
Rachel Brown from Water From Your Eyes (Photo By Anna Siegel ’26)
The crowd seemed to hold its breath until Amos’s guitar finally cracked the tension, sending the room back into motion. A guy next to me finally uncrossed his arms. Two rows back, someone started nodding their head like they’d just been given permission. Even then, the pacing of the set was hard to pin down. Everyone kept moving anyway.
What initially struck me as a shy performer shifted by the third track. Brown’s movement settled into a private choreography of small, haptic gestures. Deadpan, magnetic, always slightly behind the beat. By the time they reached “Barley,” it was clear that the reference point was exhaustion. “One, two, three, four / I count mountains.” Despite all the heady lyrical subtext — the building and fracturing, the late-stage capitalist entrapment — the song was simply, at its core, so much fun.
Between songs, the banter was as funny as it was uneasy. Brown tossed out dry jokes that drew real laughter, endearing in their awkwardness. Then they paused. Acknowledged the date: October 7. Brown called for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the room went still. Then came “Life Signs.”
“I’m unfulfilled, I’m in a beautiful place / Yeah, it’s so sad in this beautiful place.” It’s so sad in this beautiful place — and so fun. Brown sang it with the same flat affect as before, but now it felt almost cruel, or maybe just honest. I couldn’t tell if dancing felt like complicity or the only reasonable response. That’s the thing about Water From Your Eyes: they invite movement without a comforting narrative of redemption.
Al Nardo on guitar, live member of Water from Your Eyes, performing with the band at The Drake in Amherst (Photo by Anna Siegel ’26)
On “Life Signs” Nate Amos, who you could call the architect behind Water From Your Eyes’ sound, showed exactly why “It’s a Beautiful Place” resists easy classification as a guitar record. Live, you could see the way he built things to let them fall apart. This deliberate tension was the point. The song carries some of the heaviest guitars they’ve ever put to tape, layered with shoegazy distortion and feedback, but Amos never loses the project’s central faith in texture over power. Through it all, Brown’s voice remains eerily steady. It’s brutal and beautiful, grounded and weightless. By the time they hit “Playing Classics,” the room had fully surrendered.
“Playing Classics” is the nearly six-minute disco song Brown had been begging Amos to make. “I love disco and I love to dance,” they told The FADER. “There’s never a time in which I would say no to disco.” So Amos obliged, though in his own perverse way.
Nate Amos on guitar, half of the duo Water from Your Eyes, performing at The Drake in Amherst (Photo by Anna Siegel ’26)
The way I would describe “Playing Classics” is nervous tics, a throbbing bassline that made me anxious out of my skin, and a clompy piano line that shouldn’t even be there in the first place — yet I couldn’t stop dancing along. The guy who’d uncrossed his arms earlier was fully committed now, head bobbing, eyes closed. Brown described it as “dancing in a club while the world falls apart outside,” and live, it felt exactly like that. The groove does hold, but barely. Even at its most propulsive, it didn’t feel escapist at all.
By the time they returned for the encore — “Track 5,” spare and unrelenting — the room had warmed into something communal but unsentimental. Brown finally took off the sunglasses. They thanked us and said goodbye. The crowd applauded, then seemed briefly lost, unsure whether to linger or leave.
Outside The Drake, the October air hit cold and immediate. I walked back to the car, the bassline from ‘Barley’ still looping in my head. I felt wrung out and vaguely guilty. The world is still falling apart. We danced anyway.
