Water From Your Eyes: It's A Beautiful Place (digital outlets)

This left-field indie outfit from Chicago – signed to Matador after a brace of self-released albums – was first heard by Elsewhere on the album of Howe Gelb/Giant Sand covers Sandworms.

That was just a fortnight ago and we speculated most our our readers wouldn't have heard of them either.

Here's them with Gelb's Warm Storm.

Warm Storm, by Water From Your Eyes

But we do our “own research”, and learned their 2023 Everyone's Crushed debut for Matador won acclaim for its mash-up of diverse sounds from airy pop and cheap electropop to unsettling backdrops of distortion and fragmented rock.

So we listened and concluded it was clever, very arty and persuasive.

A band to listen out for we thought and then . . . lo! This new album suddenly appeared with its similarly collaged sounds and sources.

WFYE are essentially the duo of Nate Amos and Rachel Brown (expanded to a four-piece for touring) and while most would say Brown has a limited vocal range she delivers with a kind of emotionally flattened indifference which suggests a casual disregard but is actually quite engaging (Playing Classics).

Although in other places (Blood on the Dollar) it's just plain annoyingly dull as it slides into ennui.

They toss off grinding noise-rock (Born 2) as much as quirky and punchy alt.pop (Nights in Armor), there's also a 90 second dreamy instrumental passage (You Don't Believe in God?) which segues into the bent folk-pop of Spaceship (think Beta Band slacker folk).

There's also a keen sense of irony in the album's title. 

WFYE aren't our new favourite band but we can see they could be someone's for their downbeat ambiguities and musical jigsaw of sounds which, to their credit, make rather good sense in the context.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here