Photo by Ingmar Chen

In @’s case, less is more, and these pages aren’t just talking about their chosen band name. In 2024, the Philadelphia-based duo of guitarist Victoria Rose and Baltimore producer/musician Stone Filipczak made an experimental detour with their EP, Are You There God, It’s Me, @?, which heard them spindle-working the freak folkisms from their promising 2023 debut LP, Mind Palace Music, into avant-pop shapes.

It kept things weird and was a welcome venture outside the box, but in stripping their sound back to just barebones chords and fingerpicks, time-shifting arrangements, and fleshed-out harmonies with their newly-released sophomore album, Autosmile, they’ve managed to take the best of that experimental trip and apply it to the foundation. It’s what they do best in recontextualizing psychedelic folk in their own light (or lack there of.)

Moving into these darker, quieter moments of the year, Autosmile hits as it presents listeners an opportunity to be still as plane-transcending wormholes which the duo have built out of pure, raw emotional paintings and an ornate method of creating them in their own strange style take hold of the conscious state. As a body, the album is a complete work of art, but these five songs render its most captivating moments.

5. “Bird”

@ working their weird magic is immediately palpable on the album’s opening highlight, “Bird”. “Give me warmth, give me death, whatever I don’t want it,” Filipiczak declares through a dark web weave of intricately-laced acoustics. Dread is underlying, and with morbidity on the brain at the sight of decomposed baby aves in his doorway, his own existentialist downfall encroaches closer and closer to the surface. “I’m at the mercy of god / I’m taking back what I thought / I’m at the mercy of fate / I will become what I hate.” To call it an unsettling headspace would be an understatement, and even when Rose’s presence moves into the frame during its luminous climax, the retreat into darkness tells you everywhere where his head is at.

4. “Earthly Love”

“The world in a dream turned and said to me / ‘Whether you are winning or losing, it’s all the same / The music and the joy are both tied to the pain.’” As with the album’s title track, “Earthly Love” is another acknowledgement that both feelings are not exclusively mutual and coexist beautifully with one another in the wider view through an impression on our interpretation of it by way of invoking magic and demons to the search for love as regret, time, and luck loom nearby. The more @ are in their folk fantasy pocket, the more it seems they are able to beguile the wonder of this human experience. That it’s the album’s most traditionally finger-picked freaked in its reverence to the greats spanning Vashti Bunyan to Joanna Newsom also makes it its own kind of earthly reward.

3. “I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)”

“This is the most emo song on the record — we met our emo threshold with this one,” said the band of this listen. Well, consider the late autumn and any early winter spells to be the perfect environment to sink yourself into what the band are pondering here. Arguably Autosmile‘s most immediately tangible track, it’s got all of the indie-emo cozy starter pack fundamentals in check: dueling swaying harmonies, warm brush strokes in chord form, keys twinkling, flourishes of strings and a bit of autumnal alt-country rusticism, and a galaxy brain climactic build, this one aspires to a feeling of betterness when togethered. “I know you are but what am I thinking? / I can’t believe that you’re really staying / We made it through with something remaining / I wasn’t sure if I’d recognize it,” Filipczak realizes at its end, with that feeling being one of creative clairvoyance that comes through in the music it carries with it.

2. “Love In the Dark”

“Hey, what’s the game that I like to play? / Looking for signs of another day / 222 Psycho on a license plate / Solo flying 95 on a sunny day,” sings in the opening moments of “Love In The Dark”. The second track off Autosmile is a balming time melt that synergies energy between that which comes from the cosmic unknown and that which we invite through the door by opening ourselves to love. Boundaries are erased by both here, with Rose and Filipczak intertwining organic and electric currents as synths dotting the air signal the emergence of that supernatural connection that happens only when the stars align right. “But hey, there’s line in the sand that is drawn / Between luck and the work of the bond that we’ve won / Lest you walk through the door with your words / And you say, ‘It’s ok to love in the dark’.” Oddly, it’s at this moment the listen sunbursts — a portal to a new dimension.

1. “Autosmile”

There is a duality to the breakup. On one hand, there was a reason why it happened, and sometimes, those reasons aren’t always the best kind of memories. On the other, everything in between the beginning and the end can be looked at with grace for the beauty that allowed it to happen in the first place. We hear both sides in one voice on the title track, with Rose leading the juxtaposition between as Filipczak echoes back. Acoustic guitar builds and deconstructions that repeat themselves over and over again are done in a spirited ring that would make Water From Your Eyes proud, and when a warmer company of tambourine and guiro zips enter the picture, the listen gleams off its skin. “Your sweetness and your ugly doubt / If I wished we’d never met / I wouldn’t know the way I got here/ And I’m in a lovely place.” If anyone was left in a better place than was found, it was by choosing perspective over anything.

@’s Autosmile is available now on 4AD.