‘It’s easier when nobody’s watching’: inside the secretive and sublime freak-folk of @

Victoria Rose arrives at Philadelphia’s 30th St Station and apologises for the sticky streaks covering her car’s interior. She’s a beekeeper, and it’s just propolis, a resinous sealant for gaps in the hive. Her bandmate, Stone Filipczak, is riding shotgun, and her protective gear occupies the rear passenger seat. We’re heading to one of their favourite spots, an Ethiopian restaurant that doubles as a venue. The dining room quickly gets boisterous – a challenge for our interview given that Filipczak and Rose are relatively soft speakers, and not wildly keen to divulge specifics about the music they make as @. Like Rose’s bees, they’re a secretive and self-sustaining pair.

As you might guess, @ is pronounced “at”. It’s a tough Google. The name, Filipczak explains, came from “a vision of an @ sign on a kick drum head”. Not that they have any need for one: @’s art-folk is rooted in acoustic guitar, woodwinds and vocal harmonies that furrow and frolic. Their fantastic second album, Autosmile, is their first with the venerated indie label 4AD. (The name is a reference to a meme showing a dopey sunflower: “When you and gang faded and auto smile gets turn on …”)

Photograph: Ingmar Chen

Rose offers a concise summary of Autosmile’s themes: “Turmoil, processing and acceptance.” They don’t always know the context behind each other’s songs, either. “We’re close enough friends that we can infer,” Filipczak says. “It’s better if we give each other a little bit of space and don’t crawl up each other’s asses around every lyric.” It’s an album open to the possibility that darkness can always be tinged with light or levity. Punish My Mind is about the ouroboros of discipline and pleasure, but comes down on the side of play thanks to a recurring sample of a shrieking primate.

The duo met while living in Boston, where both had moved to attend college, though Filipczak quickly dropped out. Each was active in the city’s DIY scene: Rose was making solo acoustic music as Brittle Brian, while Filipczak hailed from noise and experimental scenes. They were introduced through mutual friends. “We went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to look at the taxidermied animals,” Rose recalls of their first hang. “I was a little nervous to talk to you because you were really looking at everything,” she tells Filipczak.

He had run there, wearing leggings covered in lightning bolts. “It’s so to my taste,” he says. “Dead animals and stuff – that’s the type of museum that would hold my interest, looking at actual, real things.”

Photograph: Caity Arthur

They fell out of touch when Filipczak returned to his native Baltimore in 2017. He remained there during lockdown, passing the days skateboarding and recording music. Rose was still in Boston, working at a farm with plenty of time to spare. They reconnected and began sharing works-in-progress material. Rose wondered if Filipczak could add some soft drums to one of her songs. The song became Star Game, and the start of the long-distance collaboration behind their beguiling 2021 debut, Mind Palace Music.

“Messing around” led them to a gently strange, freak-fried folk sound evoking Animal Collective’s 2005 EP with Vashti Bunyan, the music of Linda Perhacs or maybe Zelda’s Ocarina of Time set in the Shire. The record had become a sleeper favourite among indie fans by the time @ played their first show in 2022. Representatives from the Washington DC indie label Carpark were in attendance, and reissued Mind Palace Music the next year. “We were like: ‘All right, I guess this is a band now’,” says Filipczak.

Both bandmates lived in Philadelphia while making Autosmile, but they still wrote and recorded separately from home. “Various people tried to ply us with studio time,” Filipczak says. “It didn’t work.” Their setups are simple, and each appreciates the time, space and privacy. “It’s easier to get something to where you want it to be when nobody’s watching you,” Rose says, “and that includes Stone.” The pair convened at Filipczak’s to add final touches, and local peers Nina Ryser and Garrett Burke (Gloorp) contributed to several songs.

While their 2024 EP, Are You There God? It’s Me, @ was proggy and processed, Autosmile is an acoustic guitar record in the vein of their debut. It’s enchanting, unassuming yet hypnotic in the vein of Jessica Pratt’s early releases. The compositions are expansive and unfurl with greater intention. Case in point: the nearly seven-minute-long title track, a tender ballad built around the duo’s intertwined vocal melodies and guitar playing. The emotional terrain is candid, yet ambiguous: “I don’t know how I belong to you but I do somehow / I don’t know how I came to stand up to you but I have no doubt.”

Amid so much diaristic songwriting elsewhere, @ want to leave room for interpretation. “That’s kind of what folk songs are, something that can travel from person to person and be played by many different individuals,” Filipczak says. “If the song starts out in a hyper-individualistic place, it’s not really going to be able to make that jump.” The conceptual hive mind can get a bad rap as an echo chamber of groupthink, but @ tap into the idea that, like bees building their home, collective creation can lead to something greater than the sum of its parts.