Life is horribly dark right now. And yet, it is not unfunny.

That’s the sentiment that animates Water From Your Eyes on their new album, and first for Matador, Everyone’s Crushed. On the follow-up to the Brooklyn duo’s 2021 breakthrough, Structure, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos find silliness and fatalism dancing in a frantic lockstep, using heart palpitating rhythms and absurdist, deadpan lyrics to convey stories of personal and societal unease. Described by Brown as Water From Your Eyes’ most collaborative record ever, it’s a swollen contusion of an album: experimental pop music that’s pretty and violent, raw and indelible.

Everyone’s Crushed is shot through with unresolved tension, its nine tracks skittishly refusing to seek out resolute endings or stick to traditional structures. Many songs were written using serialism and microtonalism, and at times evoke the futurist-pop moves of Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono and the brutalism of Glenn Branca.

Water From Your Eyes still possess an off kilter, shitposty quality. Everyone’s Crushed maps the liminal space between humor and darkness, between cracking up and freaking out. In the album’s closing moments Brown speaks in direct terms, “Clap those hands/Buy my product/There are no happy endings/I’m spending/I’m spending.” It’s playful and totally serious, punky bordering on anarchic, and a resolution to the record’s opening sentiment – “I just wanted to pray for the rain/Wishful thinking for sunny days.”

Release: May 26, 2023, Matador Records/Remote Control