Live at Lending Rooms in Leeds: @

Songwriters Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak have a pact, a devotion to each other and to the music of @. In their solo existence, Victoria works as a beekeeper and Stone as a self-taught computer programmer, but when they get together, they become a singular, avant-garde song force. The East Coast house-show circuit first brought them into each other's orbit. Both Victoria and Stone are long time participants in the D.I.Y. music world, with their own separate histories in basement noise shows, warehouses and all ages spaces (Victoria has several records under the name Brittle Brian, and Stone has most recently gone by the pseudonym E.R. Visit). Overtime, the two began collaborating long distance, and soon developed the @ formula – half Victoria songs, half Stone songs, with each filling in the cracks of the other’s compositions. On their new album Autosmile, the band’s first with the legendary indie label 4AD, @ have harnessed their unique process to reimagine the psychedelic folk tradition as an undeniably contemporary art form. @ are a coalition, a team, a two-headed cat, and their collaboration has led them, once again, to fascinating and timeless results. The mysterious channels of the internet brought the songs of @’s first album, Mind Palace Music, into the lives of a much larger audience than Victoria and Stone had ever encountered. The album’s organic success story is miraculous considering the aggressively un-searchable nature of their deliberately obtuse moniker. Before their debut album, @ had never played live or even sung a harmony together in person. The collaborations were entirely distanced. In the years that followed, @ figured out how to have a band practice, how to perform this music for audiences of all sizes, how to sing together in shared air, and how to make each other laugh on stage with absurdist guitar-god solos. The process of becoming a formidable live band was highly influential on the way they decided to approach arranging Autosmile, opting for more reproducible experiments and relying far less on digital production flourishes than in the past. During the making of Autosmile, Stone relocated to Philadelphia and the duo had the benefit of finally living in the same city. However, the band still chose to work on their songs individually; as the adage goes: If it ain't broke… Instead of booking out studio time, they hired close friends to guest on the album, adding cello, violin, and live drums to their already expansive arsenal of instruments. Victoria recorded her parts, as always, on a cheap 80’s microphone inherited from their step-mom’s old polka competition days. In lieu of a mic stand, she regularly props it up in a coffee mug, recording from her couch. Stone’s preferred setup is also remarkably low tech, yet the resulting sounds of their home-wizardry somehow remain lush, complex, and occasionally quite hi-fi. Both Victoria and Stone are incisive, classic songwriters, and their occasionally-baroque arrangements and production touches give the songs a rough-hewn yet virtuosic quality. This inventiveness, applied to songs that hold up against classic psych folk records, sets @ apart, somehow looking backwards and forwards all at once. Album opener “Bird” begins with an eerie, chromatic trance of acoustic guitar & cinematic flutes that spins out into an uplifting pop chorus before crashing back into its introspective verse. There is a consistent darkness to the moods of Autosmile, but @ is also an inherently playful enterprise, unexpected prog flourishes lurking behind incisive indie rock song craft. Victoria explains, “Neither of us is afraid of being over the top musically…. being unafraid of getting dramatic or comedic lends itself to really emotional moments.”On the epic, near 7-minute title track “Autosmile”, Victoria poeticizes a mysterious breakup into questions of demonology, no stone left unturned as the duo quests towards respective and mutual resolution. Whatever private matters are examined, mystery is key—Victoria and Stone don't tell each other what their songs are about. @ believes “if we are writing a song that can apply to many aspects of our own lives, then it makes it more relatable to the listener's life.” In keeping, the lyrics throughout the album bounce between adversity and possibility, exploring the inner and outer worlds with curiosity and prismatic awe. The nostalgic earworm “I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)" seems to laugh at the beauty of change and decay. This ability to twist a negative impulse into something beautiful also gleams on the standout “Punish My Mind”, an expertly arranged song complete with dense harmonies and intricate chord progressions over which @ sing about the twin instincts to punish and comfort oneself, eventually envisioning a pristine state of pure acceptance. Across Autosmile, Victoria and Stone carefully balance beauty and pain while remaining one of the most musically adventurous duos operating today. These eleven songs nimbly shift between black hole heaviness and patient understanding, never abandoning a sense of wonder. In the face of darkness, miraculously, perhaps impishly, an Autosmile forms.