Autosmile — @

Autosmile — @

@, the avant-folk duo composed of the Philadelphia-based Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, came onto the scene with their debut album, Mind Palace Music, in 2023. Their sophomore effort, Autosmile, takes all of the foundations of that project—the intimate guitar strummings, the ever-tangible strings, and the vocalists’ gentle and carefully constructed harmonies—to new heights, collapsing and swelling into a work not just of heartfelt admiration but of a distinct and unavoidable bitterness. 

It is rife with emotion, but it’s less the narrative swings that capture the listener and more the pure, unbridled ecstasy of the duo’s arrangements and experimentations.

It is, in its own way, gentle and intricate, like a slowly spun silken web spread wide across the gaping mouth of a dusty barn. A track like “Love In The Dark,” with its steadily urgent guitar strummings and arpeggiated melodic movements, subsists purely on the strength of the duo’s vocal interlockings, playing clearly into the airy, ethereal nature of both artists’ voices while using Filipczak’s, as the band often does, to set the baseline of the melody. “Earthly Love,” with its Simon & Garfunkel-esque vocal interplay, is another excellent example of this sort of application of @’s sound.

A track like “Your Dog,” meanwhile, certainly doesn’t shy away from that motif—if anything, it makes a broader and more impactful use of the duo’s vocal arrangements—but it receives its power from the pure strangeness and intricacy of the instrumental. A short picking intro quickly gives way to a rutted bassline and a sporadic rhythm track, one which stabilizes the song just long enough to establish the main verse and melody before collapsing into the series of vocal runs and toned guitar pickings that comprise the second half of the song. 

It’s notable, also, that “Your Dog” is the only track on the album that truly makes use of a traditional rhythm section. Everywhere else, it’s the tender, reverberating sounds of an acoustic guitar—played often with a sense of staggered urgency—that guides each track forward. The vocals, and any other embellishments, float above and around that sound in the mix, creating a unique, atmospheric sort of environment that is difficult to evade as a listener. 

If there is an emergent narrative theme across Autosmile, it expresses itself in sly glances and recurring tones more than it does pure lyrical cohesion. It is at times bitter, like on the staggering chorus of “Your Dog” or as Filipczak sings about repression (and euthanasia) on “Bird,” the album’s intro. But it is, in equal parts, placid and gently sweeping; “Amity,” the final track on the album, exudes a sense of forgiveness and release, and “Earthly Love” does the same.

It’s not as though the lyrics can simply be cast aside—in fact, they’re brilliantly written across much of the project—but they operate primarily as another piece in the project’s spellbinding puzzle. 

Autosmile is not wholly decipherable, and it often feels like the heart of the album is resting, beautiful and pure, behind an only half-penetrable shroud. But it’s beautiful and heartwrenching enough that it has no need to be accessible, or even intelligible (although it certainly is, and it’s biting and witty at its most poignant moments). 

Autosmile, in its intricate arrangements and free-falling melodic workings, simply provides something new with each successive listen.

Grasp it if you will, but try not to suffocate it.