Is that Water From Your Eyes frontperson Rachel Brown making an allusion to “6 God” on the band’s new single “Life Signs”? Really, they’re mumbling “sick sky,” but the mondegreen reveals something about the song’s associative, densely rhyming spoken verses––“Tick tick you’re alive sunlit sick sky scraped by bright eyed short sight online.” The first single from the forthcoming album It’s a Beautiful Place operates like language poetry, preserving the band’s freneticism and oddity in doomscroll onomatopoeia.

Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing the self-described “dance-punk” outfit perform it as a quartet (Brown and Nate Amos added Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz of fantasy of a broken heart) on their third-annual rock cruise. A moshpit formed in seconds and soon tipped starboard. A violent duet of rhythm and lead guitars opens the track, one taunting and the other charging after it. The resultant clash strikes somewhere between Metallica and Title Fight, but Water From Your Eyes haven’t forgone dynamism and experimentation in the quest for hardcore power; Brown’s diaphanous chorus floats through the maelstrom like a valkyrie lifting soldiers from the battlefield. After five and a half albums, Water From Your Eyes are coming for blood.