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Listings are
in the opposite order of appearance: headliner is listed at the top,
next is the support band(s),
and the last band listed is the opener.
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Friday May 8
2026 8:00PM doors -- music at 9:00PM ••• ALL AGES $30 in advance / $35 at the door $36.31 in advance [30 face value + 6.31 service fee] Water From Your Eyes waterfromyoureyes.com post-punkexperimental pop Sour Widows sourwidows.com bedroom rock, folk, shoegaze Water From Your Eyes -from Chicago, IL -It's A Beautiful Place opens with zero-gravity instrumental ‘One Small Step’ – a fitting prelude for what is one giant leap for New York duo Water From Your Eyes. The album is a gleaming megalopolis, a satellite view of eras and musical forms, a reframing of the y2k songbook that is at once awe-struck and mindful of its place in the vastness. Short instrumental interludes serve as portals between towering, muscular songs. “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs and space,” says Nate Amos . “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.” In the time since 2023’s Everyone's Crushed, their Matador debut and critical breakout – which appeared in end of year lists by The New York Times, The Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, Vogue, Wired and Rolling Stone – Rachel Brown and Nate Amos have become a pillar of the city's alternative music scene and one of its most revered underground exports. Live, they’ve expanded to a quartet, joining forces with guitarist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz of NYC duo Fantasy of a Broken Heart. They played huge stages supporting Interpol on tour, including in front of 160,000 fans in Mexico City. Back home, the band established a DIY boat show franchise on the East River, hosting friends at the heart of the city’s musical vanguard including YHWH Nailgun, Model/Actriz, Frost Children, and Kassie Krut. Brown released a new EP under their thanks for coming moniker, while Amos released an acclaimed full length under his This Is Lorelei solo project. The duo recorded the bulk of It’s a Beautiful Place last summer, just as they have every other WFYE release: in Amos’s bedroom, under the watchful eye of a tattered Robin Williams poster from the Mork & Mindy era. “Basically,” jokes Amos, “Robin is like a silent member of Water From Your Eyes.” But this time, much of the writing and recording were shaped around the dynamics of a full-blooded live group: “When you’re playing with a band you tend to write with one in mind - this was the first time I wrote anything for WFYE imagining us playing anywhere bigger than a basement”, he observes. True to this, ‘Life Signs’ awakens to existence with a nu-metal backbeat and a rhythmic vocal deadpan that wouldn't be out of place in a 1997 MTV sequence nestled between Bran Van 3000 and Cake. It then takes a hard pivot into a signature WFYE chorus – cascading and celestial. ‘Nights In Armor’ is introduced with a whirlwind of Frusciante Stratocaster bliss leading into a vulnerable Brown soliloquy. ‘Born 2’ is a worldbuilding guitar onslaught, its lyrics channeling a preoccupation with sci-fi literature and political theory as Brown’s voice glides overhead: "the world is so common / and born to become / something else". “I’ve been carrying around The Dispossessed (a 1974 anarchist utopian novel by Ursula K. Le Guin) and There Is No Unhappy Revolution (a 2017 non-fiction by Marcello Tarì) in my backpack for well over a year now,” Brown says. “They have been to four different continents and across almost every state line. While writing lyrics for the album, I skimmed both books quite thoroughly.” Side A closes with instrumental interlude ‘You Don’t Believe In God?’. Both members come from a church-going upbringing, Brown having been raised Catholic and Amos Episcopalian. “I wanted to be a priest when I was little,” Brown recalls, “before I learned that you had to be born into a different kind of body to get to be the one who directly talks to God. It was there that they began to lose me, although I have retained some belief in something like God.” Amos adds: “Part of this record is about slowly becoming scared of god again after completely rejecting religion”. 'Playing Classics' is a 6-minute four-on-the-floor epic, its otherworldly piano motif straddling the uncanny valley where much of WFYE’s sonic world resides. The deceptively straightforward folk-rock of ‘Blood On The Dollar’ finds Brown's vocals at their most unmediated and emotive, while Amos’ guitar solo delivers the albums’ soulful country rock zenith. Throughout It’s A Beautiful Place is a clear sense of a band who have honed their curveballs into home runs. Looming and melancholy, wide-eyed and petrified, it's Blade Runner with a touch of WALL-E, it's Kubrick and Asimov with a hint of Jay and Silent Bob. These are songs that look outward, conscious of our smallness and questioning our place in the universe while admiring the surrounding beauty. “A song can feel like everything, communicating vast emotional landscapes,” says Amos, “but your favourite album is less important than any person. That person is less interesting than any dinosaur. That dinosaur is less important than any mountain. That mountain is boring compared to any planet. That planet is only a part of a solar system. That solar system is microscopic next to any galaxy. If music and all other human practices are meaningless on a cosmic scale why does it still feel so important?” Sour Widows -from the Bay ARea, CA -Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson like to joke that they are delusional about Sour Widows, the Bay Area band they started seven years ago that is just now releasing its entrancing and powerful debut LP, ‘Revival of a Friend’. In those seven years, Sinaiko and Thomson each endured losses and hardships that at times required putting bigger plans on hold; looking back, they can only laugh at these hurdles and wonder if they should have taken them as signs—to stop, to start over, to succumb to the hardship. Absolutely not: Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko, Thomson, and drummer Max Edelman, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. ‘Revival of a Friend’ is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making. Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, ‘Revival of a Friend’ fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years with longtime friend and trusted drummer Max Edelman, this is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it. However pervasive it is, grief is not the only takeaway on the album. Sinaiko, Thomson, and Edelman are still here, after all, in a great DIY rock band that is a gathering of best friends, having made a mighty record that encapsulates and so sublimates all this anguish. It feels especially relevant that it emerges as a work of friendship from the Bay Area, dominated in recent years not by stories of the arts but instead by technology and the inequality it has wrought there. ‘Revival of a Friend’ is rooted in personal hurts, but it feels like an invitation to band together and work through our pains as one, to share the burdens of the world until we can find a better way forward. This is not delusion; this is hope, as difficult and necessary now as ever. |
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