On their second album, @ explore love, loss and the strange business of being human through wonderfully peculiar psychedelic folk.
Lots of music is about love and loss. It doesn’t usually sound like this. Autosmile is a very special way to experience what it means to be a person. @ (pronounced ‘at’), the duo of Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, captured universal feelings on their second album, drenched them in absurdist freaky folk rock, and then handed them back sopping wet for you to both cry and laugh over.
@’s sound has done a really great job of dodging any permanent label. Their debut album, Mind Palace Music, showed off the unique balance Rose and Filipczak could strike between strange fantasy and painful earnestness. Here were two people making music remotely over 100 miles apart, coming from entirely different musical backgrounds and styles, yet getting so terribly close that their voices met already braided. As a devotee of the band Tapir!, I was an easy sell on the experimental folk of Mind Palace Music. Then came their EP, Are You There God? It’s Me, @, and people started throwing ‘boomer-pilled hyperfolk’ out as a classifier. To Rose and Filipczak, though, their north star was always ’60s folk rock. You find that and so much more in Autosmile.
You could play this whole album and barely grasp a lyric. The sounds are that enveloping. The opener, ‘Bird’, flip-flops between discordant strings and triumphant woodwinds, creating a hypnotic, horror-movie ambience. Then, only three tracks later, you have a cut like ‘Earthly Love’ that leans into an intimate and peaceful folk lullaby, tucking you right into bed. There are rockier cuts like ‘I’m Not In Pain’ and vaguely nautical ballads like ‘I Know You Are’. ‘Punish My Mind’ uses screaming monkeys as instrumental flair and takes a lighthearted stab at self-torture. Each track tells its story in its arrangement. Strip out every word and you’d still get the gist, the vibe. That’s no easy feat. Rose and Filipczak have never sounded better together. The call-and-response between the two makes it apparent that they each have their own distinct way of working that somehow clashes and is perfectly compatible. Harmonies on this record are nothing short of bliss (‘Judgement Farmer’ being a prime example of pure, heavenly swells).
Every song on Autosmile stands on its own, yet each track can also be broken down into a beautiful pocket universe of sounds. They evolve and devolve as they progress, making it feel like a whole orchestra is waiting in the wings. Listening to the whole @ catalogue, you can see that they really are at the top of their game on arrangements here. This record is the natural evolution of the psychedelic sound that @ find inspiration in, with songwriting and vocals akin to legends like Nick Drake.
I would be remiss not to touch on some of the lyrical content on top of the production. On deeper listens, the words sneak up behind you. Autosmile is about love and what it costs. @ touch on the rock bottom of despair and the highest elation of accepting unconditional love. Rose and Filipczak apparently don’t even tell each other what their songs mean, so take my guesses with a grain of salt. ‘Love in the Dark’ is a road trip in sound and structure, setting off on an unknowable journey dictated only by the whim of something bigger than yourself. It’s scary, and the song wrestles with whether it’s safe to love when you can’t see the road ahead. ‘I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)’ is two people who should have wrecked each other. Think the Titanic surviving the iceberg and the two of them falling for each other: a complete shock for the iceberg. ‘Earthly Love’ is a love song to humanity, even when humanity is excruciating. These descriptions sound quite heady and unapproachable, but the album keeps it light by straddling the line between gorgeous sound and cheek.
My highlight from the record is ‘Untitled’, which feels like frolicking through a delicate field of flowers while trying not to step on any. It has these infectious little string climbs that carry it to lovely, soft blooming. I go back and forth on whether it’s happy or sad, but have since landed: it’s about keeping the light in your eyes into old age. You are unable to comprehend the reality of getting old, so why not live in your dreams? It’s scary and beautiful, perfectly capturing how Autosmile makes you feel as a complete work. You can cry to this. You can get weird looks for playing certain songs publicly. You also experience one of the most creative records of the decade, one that sits unabashedly with its strangeness. @ are not afraid to be at their most human here, close enough that they’re talking straight to you.