Now, a decade removed from their inception, they’re finally easing into a groove. It’s a Beautiful Place, the band’s seventh LP, builds on everything they’ve been brewing toward, deploying their idiosyncratic blend of sound with charisma and precision across ten tightly wound tracks. The result is one of the most distinct voices in contemporary indie rock.

RANGE contributor Khagan Aslanov caught up with the pair during a brief pit stop somewhere in Texas. Groggy, tired, and just a half-hour away from hotel check-out, the two gamely fielded questions between sips of coffee.

KA: First off, congratulations! You have a great new album out, you’ve signed to Matador, and you’re touring and actually making money—and not living in a stress spiral all the time, I imagine.
NA: It’s certainly gotten a little bit easier.
RB: It’s gotten a LOT easier.
KA: And you didn’t have to make shitty music to get there.
NA: Yes. That’s the real blessing.
RB: I don’t even know if that’s possible. Not that we couldn’t make shitty music. We could make a lot of shitty music. I just don’t think we could make shitty music that could make us rich.
KA: I feel like even if you sit down to make something ordinary, you’ll still slip in odd time signatures and all the little weird details.
NA: Feels like the more we try to make a particular type of music, the more we end up making something else. So maybe we should sit down and try to make something like that.
KA: What were you trying to make on It’s a Beautiful Place?
NA: Pretty much everything on this album is a botched attempt to do something else. Whatever you’re trying to do doesn’t really matter. The album just ends up being the accidents you make along the way.
KA: Very Bob Ross-ian of you.
RB: (laughs)

By any measure of what a good indie album can be, It’s a Beautiful Place is a triumph—a restless record full of odd turns, knowing lyricism, and scintillating guitar work that’s replaced the electronic terrain the band mined previously. There are plenty of alt-rock touchpoints, but the end result is distinctly their own. That self-assured identity has drawn the attention of legacy acts like Interpol.

KA: How surreal was it opening for Interpol in Mexico, playing to a hundred thousand people?
NA: It didn’t feel strange in the moment. We didn’t have the tools to process what was happening.
RB: It felt way crazier after the fact—going home and having people ask how it was.
NA: Yeah, you’d talk to someone you saw five days before, and they’d ask how Mexico was, and we’d say, “Yeah, we played to 160,000 people and were escorted by a police motorcade.”
RB: There were more people at that show than every other show we’ve played combined. If there weren’t photos, I’d feel like it was a false memory.
KA: How was it technically? How did your sound transfer to such a vast space? Were you using in-ear monitors?
NA: No, but we did our best.
RB: I couldn’t hear myself. I could barely hear the instruments. But I don’t think most people show up to a show like that expecting good sound. It’s an experience.
NA: That was our first time playing Mexico.
RB: And then we went back later that year to play a festival. But they didn’t open the gates until halfway through our set, so there was barely anyone there. People were still sweeping the grounds.
NA: It was super weird (laughs).
RB: People from our label were supposed to be there, and I’d invited my whole family down. I thought they didn’t make it. Then later they told me they didn’t open the gates until halfway through.

Now with a full-fledged live band and a team handling the day-to-day logistics of touring, Water From Your Eyes can focus more fully on their craft. Still, life on the road doesn’t always point toward clarity.

NA: In a perfect world, I’d love to take a year off to write the next album. But it’s just not feasible. Writing on tour is an entirely different muscle to train. I can write on tour and work on something for three weeks, and then go home and make something in one hour that I like far better. Not a lot of tour writing is used. I prefer to be left alone in a room for a few days.
KA: Rachel, how about you? Do you write every day and then sift, or do you write specific lyrics?
RB: I write specific lyrics. They are very much tied to the music. I do try to write more often than not. And then parts of it sometimes do get chopped up and blended into the soup.
NA: It’s a perpetual stew. Every once in a while, we take some stuff out and that’s an album. But the broth has been cooking for a decade.
KA: You’re one of those delis where there’s a big pot simmering something unnameable for ages.
NA: Exactly! (laughs)

There’s a palpable sense of melancholy running beneath these outwardly joyous songs. By Amos’ admission, some of the material carried over from the previous album—a time marked by pain, doubt, and faltering mental health. But the band insists their next chapter should come from a more positive place.

NA: There is something to be said for music that’s borne out of tension, but it is by no means a hard rule. You can choose what you throw into this band, but you never know what you’ll get out of it. Might as well go in with some positivity, see what happens.

We end our chat rambling about overgrown vegetables at state fairs (a tangent sparked by Amos comparing their music to a neglected garden), Grey’s Anatomy killing more characters than it saves, and the upcoming mayoral election in NYC—with the duo enthusiastically supporting Democratic beacon Zohran Mamdani. Minutes later, they’re rushing off to check out and hit another stretch of highway toward the next show.