Water From Your Eyes has never been easy to pin down, their music has always hovered somewhere between anxious noise and surrealist pop. But with their new single “Playing Classics,” the duo leans into something unmistakably joyful: a sweaty, spinning, dancefloor anthem for the end times.

The track arrives as the second preview of their upcoming album, It’s A Beautiful Place, due August 22 via Matador, and it already feels like a centerpiece. Driven by a pulsing groove and a bassline that plays tag with the beat, “Playing Classics” builds a strange kind of euphoria out of repetition and release. It’s chaotic, it’s playful, and it doesn’t care whether your arms are in the air or your eyes are full of tears — it wants you to move.

Nate Amos originally wrote the song as a long-form guitar experiment before reshaping it into a disco number at Rachel Brown’s urging. “The original version was 12 minutes long,” Amos admitted. Brown took to it immediately. “I love disco and dance music, and I had been begging him to make a super dance-targeted track,” they said, describing the song as a kind of escapist club fantasy written during “Brat Summer,” nodding to Charli XCX’s manic pop influence.

That Charli connection isn’t just aesthetic—it’s spiritual. “Playing Classics” shares her penchant for weaponizing glossy beats to hide emotional collapse. Brown’s lyrics slip between flirtation and dread, embracing the tension of dancing while the world burns just outside the venue walls.

The song’s accompanying tour will take Water From Your Eyes across the U.S. and Europe this fall, including a string of dates with Her New Knife, Winter, and Dutch Interior. “Playing Classics” isn’t nostalgic, and it’s barely classic—but it’s urgent, alive, and undeniably fun. In their hands, the club becomes a bunker, and joy becomes a form of protest.