One of the best psych-folk albums of 2026 was made by a beekeeper and a part-time wizard. If that sounds like a joke, allow us to add some more context: They’re a duo from Philly who have built a seriously impressive word-of-mouth buzz since forming six years ago. The name of the band is @, like the punctuation symbol. If you’re talking about them out loud, you can just say “at.”
This would be a good time to think about how to pronounce that name, because they’re about to have a lot more fans. Autosmile (out Oct. 16), @’s first album for the venerable indie label 4AD, is a tour-de-force of baroque orchestration, pristine vocal harmonies, and piercingly direct lyrics. The music is quiet but powerful, blending pitch-dark tones and sunny melodies in ways that can recall Elliott Smith, Joanna Newsom, and Animal Collective, among other left-field heroes. Mitski has praised their unique sound, and when they played some of their new songs this January at a charity show where they opened for Geese’s Cameron Winter, they held a New York club in awed silence.
Singer-songwriters Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, both 32, spent more than two years recording Autosmile. But the band’s story starts in the cursed summer of 2020, when they reconnected over text during the long months of lockdown. At first, they were just catching up as two friends with no thought of collaborating.
“We did not mean to be a band, actually,” Rose tells me when we sit down for lunch at a Sichuan place in Brooklyn last month.
“Yeah,” Filipczak agrees. “This album is a culmination of six years of hard work that happened completely by accident.”
The two of them had met a few years earlier when they were both living in Boston and playing very different kinds of music. Back then, he was the drummer in a noise-rock band, and she was an eccentric singer-songwriter (who was also beginning her career in beekeeping). By 2020, Filipczak had landed back in Baltimore, where he grew up, and found himself in an aimless state. “I was living with people I didn’t really know as roommates, going to the skate park every day, smoking a lot of weed,” he recalls. “I had no real structure.”
When Rose sent him a song she was working on and asked him to add some percussion, he figured he’d give it a try. That first song led to Mind Palace Music, an album that they recorded relatively quickly that summer, trading tracks remotely at the height of the pandemic. They uploaded it to Bandcamp in the spring of 2021, and that was that, or so they thought.
But a funny thing happened over the months that followed: @ turned into the kind of band that people told their friends to check out, an if-you-know-you-know sensation in indie circles. The fact that they had a strange name — chosen “because it was cool,” Rose says, and because Filipczak had a vision of an @ symbol on a kick-drum head — and no easily findable backstory only made them a more perfect candidate for cult-favorite status.
“We didn’t do anything with [Mind Palace Music],” Filipczak says. “We just let it sit there… But it seemed to grow for a while, and it just kind of kept growing.”
In those early days, well-meaning friends and music-industry acquaintances would often suggest that @ find a new band name. “People are like, ‘Are you aware that it’s impossible to Google?’” Rose says.
“Everyone’s always really sure that they’re helping us out,” Filipczak says. “They all think they know better than us.”
Rose smiles: “No one is telling us that now.”
They played their first live show about a year after self-releasing Mind Palace Music, at a music venue located in a former mausoleum showroom. Philly indie legend Alex G was in the audience, as was someone from Carpark Records, the small label that ended up re-releasing @’s debut in 2023. Though they’d never consciously sought out a record deal, it felt like too good a chance to turn down. “Why not?” Filipczak recalls thinking. “We might as well take this opportunity, because it’s pretty unlikely to ever be presented again.”
By last year, Rose and Filipczak were both living in Philadelphia, and trying to figure out what to do next. “The first album came about pretty unexpectedly — it wasn’t even intended to be an album at first,” Rose says. “We were just kind of finding our footing again. We were not really sure how to start, honestly.”
Most of the songs on Autosmile began as solo compositions that they recorded separately at home and gradually embellished together before editing it all down on Filipczak’s MacBook. The two of them provide most of the gorgeous orchestration themselves: Filipczak plays flute, Rose plays clarinet, and they brought in friends to add cello and violin to a handful of tracks.
It’s an unusually rich sound for a self-produced indie band, but like so much else, they explain it as simply something that happened naturally. “It’s literally just what we know how to play,” Filipczak says. “Flute is a very practical instrument — it’s easy to carry, it’s easy to mic. I think more people should play them.”
He acquired his first flute a few years ago, “for like 30 bucks,” at a Renaissance festival. He’s been attending similar events since he was a kid, and he’s particularly fond of the Maryland Renaissance Festival, located outside Baltimore. “It’s in a permanently built fairy village in the woods, as opposed to some Renaissance festivals in parking lots,” he says. “There’s jousting and animals. I really like the owls.”
When I ask if he ever wears costumes, he perks up. “Yeah, I have a cape,” he says. “I’ve acquired all the pieces of a wizard outfit that I like to wear from time to time. I actually got a really sick wizard hat with Victoria in Wales.”
Caity Arthur*
Rose, for her part, started playing clarinet in school, and picked it back up a couple of years ago, when Filipczak’s brother got her a new instrument for her 30th birthday. “I still don’t really know how to read music for it or anything like that, but I can make it sound pretty good,” she says.
Lyrically, Autosmile often hints at heavy subjects, ranging from a breakup to deeper emotional challenges. “Things were hard after the pandemic,” Rose says. “Even if you don’t notice that it’s hard, it creeps up on you, and I think it just kind of seeped into the songs. I just felt tired and sad.”
The album opens with some intense imagery from Filipczak: “Give me warmth, give me death, whatever, I don’t want it/I walked out on the deck to put a hole in my head.” But when I ask about those words, he downplays their significance.
“That’s about going out on the deck to smoke weed,” Filipczak says.
“That’s funny,” Rose says. “Because it sounds more like you’re going to shoot yourself.”
“Yeah,” Filipczak adds. “That line could be interpreted as being about suicide or whatever. But that song is very silly as well.”
The name of the album comes from a meme about getting stoned that Filipczak found. “It’s like, ‘When you and gang faded and auto smile gets turned on…’” he says. “And it’s just a picture of a smiling flower.”
The lyrics to the title track, “Autosmile,” seem to deal with the end of a relationship and a painful journey toward acceptance. But the gentle vocal harmonies and trippy acoustic strumming, like the jokey title, transform the song into something else.
“It complicates the message in a way that I think is cool,” Rose says. “If you’re writing a musically dark song with dark subject matter, it’s just like, ‘This is what it is.’ But adding a little bit of beauty or softness to something dark processes the emotion better.”
“It’s always both,” Filipczak adds. “I don’t think we really make songs that are just crushingly dark. You have to throw in other stuff in order for it to feel real.”
They finished recording the album at the top of this year, and its release this fall on 4AD — the famed alt-rock institution that launched Pixies, TV on the Radio, St. Vincent, and more — will give @ their most prominent platform yet. It’s a turn of events that still feels a little surreal to this pair of friends who somehow ended up in the indie spotlight, but these days, they’re OK with that.
“People are listening to our music,” Rose says. “It felt good when, like, 50 people were into it, and it feels good now that there’s more people. I’m just glad that it’s not being thrown into a void.”
