3 days ago
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Indie-rock is everywhere again: on Apple ads, Saturday Night Live, even the ARIA charts. But amid the generational boom in which genius status has been bestowed upon the likes of Cameron Winter and MJ Lenderman lies the connoisseur’s choice: Nate Amos.
As half of mischievous art-pop noise-makers Water From Your Eyes (with his ex-girlfriend Rachel Brown), and his own solo project This Is Lorelei – not to mention My Idea, his short-lived-but-beloved project with Lily Konigsberg – the 35-year-old has become indie-rock’s not-so-secret sauce.
The acclaim around This Is Lorelei in particular – the project’s named after a planet in Star Trek: The Animated Series, not the mum in Gilmore Girls – following 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star and last December’s Holo Boy has expanded Amos’ profile exponentially. He’s suddenly found himself labelled a “generational songwriting talent” and “your favourite songwriter’s favourite songwriter”, after Lenderman turned a lilting cover of This Is Lorelei’s Dancing in the Club into an online hit.
For an artist who’s been recording under the moniker for a decade, it’s a surprising development. “It’s definitely a little unnerving,” says Amos. “But it’s also gratifying because that’s the dream as a songwriter, for your songs to take on a life of their own that doesn’t involve you. The thing that’s difficult is then trying to write more good songs when that’s the bar that’s been set.”
More bizarre is that, until last year, This Is Lorelei was Amos’ bedroom project, a private place where he’d indulge tendencies that didn’t fit the oddball serialist experimentation of Water From Your Eyes. There are so many This Is Lorelei songs floating around Spotify and expired Bandcamp accounts that Amos has lost count.
“It’s slightly nerve-racking because that project has always been a bit more personal to me,” says Amos of the attention directed to what was essentially his musical sketchbook. “With Water From Your Eyes there’s more of a character, whereas the whole point of Lorelei is to accurately, and in as uncompromising a way as possible, capture the normality of whatever I’m trying to do, so it’s been weird to have lots of eyes on Lorelei.”
Amos is speaking from his studio in Brooklyn, surrounded by countless guitars and tech doodads. “I’m hesitant to call it a studio,” he says, as he alternates between vape hits and sips from a Gatorade bottle. “It’s the room where I make music and where the merch lives.”
Born in Denver, he split much of his early childhood between St Johnsbury in Vermont, a rural town in what’s known as “the NEK” (the “Northeast Kingdom”) with a population of about 6000, and Winchester, Virginia, where his dad, a professional bluegrass musician, plied his trade. An hour-and-a-half away was Washington, DC, where his mother worked in “early cybersecurity stuff”.
“They both had degrees in geology, which I could never figure out,” says Amos. “If I ever have a question about rocks or volcanoes, they spring into action. There’s another timeline where they’re both just geology professors, but we’re in the bluegrass and cybersecurity timeline.”
His father and sister still perform bluegrass, both as a duo and with a full band. Do they view Nate as the black sheep who went off to make noise music? “No,” he says, laughing, “we’re all interested in what the other ones are up to musically.” On the deluxe reissue of Box for Buddy, Box for Star, they even pop up on a cover of Amos’ country-tinged Angel’s Eye.
After graduating high school in Vermont, Amos followed a friend out to Chicago. It was there, around 2016 while he was working as a studio producer, that he met Rachel Brown. Water From Your Eyes began partly by accident.
“I was on this tip where I was putting together different people from the music scene and doing one-off projects on Bandcamp, and Water From Your Eyes was one of those. But somebody found it on Bandcamp and wrote about it online,” Amos recalls. “It was the first time anyone had ever written about anything either of us had done, so we were like ‘OK, we should probably stay on this.’”
After five albums, the duo was signed by Matador Records – the famed label of Pavement, Liz Phair et al – and became instant critical darlings with 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed and last August’s joyously demented It’s a Beautiful Place. With “ambition” barely in his vocabulary, the idea he now has dual successes tickles Amos.
“I never really thought of either as a viable option. I was recording and producing for other people, and that was very much where my focus lied. Nothing from a business sense began to happen for either project until years after I had totally given up on that being my life. So it’s a nice surprise, like getting a second run at it or something.”
Despite the equal prominence of both, Amos views This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes as vastly different projects. “They’re kind of antithetical to each other. Water is very much about rejecting tradition, and Lorelei is about embracing it. Finding a middle ground between those two things would inherently compromise both ideas, so I might as well just have separate projects that can be unapologetically what they are.”
The reverence that greeted Box for Buddy, Box for Star is undeniable. Amos described it as a “delayed recovery album”, forged during early sobriety as an attempt to make music without getting high. There’s a stoic humour to its melancholy, and a simple sincerity to Amos’ writing that feels like wisdom. It moves through rain-soaked bedroom folk that’s led to comparisons with Alex G and Elliott Smith, to witty indie-pop that sounds like Stephin Merritt-penned tunes for The Postal Service.
Considering the playful wordplay in Dancing in the Club (“I know it’s only cards/But love, I feel your heart in spades/While you were dancing in the club/I gave my diamonds all away”) and the apocalyptic imagery in All F---ed Up (“I watch my good God like a movie and I scream … I got a nosebleed and my blood tastes like God”), it’s almost outlandish that Amos once treated lyrics as an afterthought.
“When I made [2020’s] OK N8, I don’t think I spent more than 45 minutes on any song. It’s stream-of-consciousness, which I really like, that flow state where you’re just making stuff and it doesn’t matter if it’s good or not,” Amos says. On Box for Buddy, his completion rate slowed to one song a day.
“I’d spend three or four hours figuring out the lyrics, which is something I never did before. It’s something I’m more concerned with than I used to be, specifically because Lorelei turned into a more traditional songwriting project where the music functions as a backdrop for the vocals. So if my focus is the words, I feel I owe it to whoever’s listening to at least spend a couple of hours on them, instead of singing the first thing that comes to mind.”
Absurdist humour and self-deprecating nuggets (“A loser never wins and I’m a loser, always been”) are natural parts of Amos’ world-view. “I’m a child of Tim & Eric. It was on when I was in high school and I feel like they broke a lot of walls down on stuff that’s really common in comedy on social media now. Also, I’ll always love Norm Macdonald, especially his longer jokes that aren’t even really jokes.
“The thing is, music is silly. You’re up in front of people playing a little song you wrote. It’s silly and embarrassing, and the way to get the best of that is to lean into it and make that part of the whole thing.”
The plan now is to ride both Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei as far as they can go. “Theoretically, I hope I’ll continue to at least hit one release a year for the foreseeable future, which is incredibly slow compared to how Lorelei used to be,” says Amos. “But with more eyes on each project, I feel like I have more of a responsibility to make sure whatever it is, is good.”
This Is Lorelei perform at Sydney’s Mary’s Underground on March 4 and Melbourne’s Howler on March 5. Water From Your Eyes perform at Melbourne’s The Night Cat on March 9 and Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory on March 11. Both acts will also perform at Golden Plains.
