@ (pronounced 'at')

The name is the first obstacle

@ is two songwriters, Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, and the name is pronounced 'at'. It is a symbol rather than a word, which means the band is close to unsearchable: type it into a search box and the engine discards it. Asked about choosing a moniker that works against discovery, Filipczak was flat about the logic — 'That was totally just downstream of us deciding to call the band what we decided to call it.' The unfindability was a consequence, not a strategy.

It fits the music all the same. The symbol carries the detachment of an email address or a mention in a feed, and the band's whole working method began as correspondence between two cities. Their own early shorthand for the sound was 'hyperfolk': close acoustic guitar and multitracked harmony threaded through warped digital production and MIDI, nature imagery sitting next to the texture of a computer. One friend's description, quoted back in the reviews of the new album, is 'boomer-pilled hyperfolk' — a nod to the 1960s folk records underneath and the avant-garde habits layered on top.

Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia

Accounts of the first meeting differ. One version places it at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2015; others put the connection in Boston's DIY house-show circuit around 2017. Either way they were friends before they were collaborators, each with a separate catalogue. Rose was releasing music as Brittle Brian and asked Filipczak, then drumming in noise-rock and experimental bands around Baltimore, to add percussion to a track.

Spring 2020 turned that into something else. With Filipczak in Baltimore and Rose in Philadelphia and nowhere to play, the two began trading voice notes and iMessage snippets, becoming what they have called musical pen pals. The band existed as a pile of files long before it existed as a room with two people in it. That remoteness was not a stopgap they later abandoned; it became the method, and it has survived every change in their circumstances since.

Mind Palace Music and the Carpark years

Mind Palace Music appeared in 2021, self-released, assembled almost entirely at a distance across the autumn and winter of 2020. Rose has said the two were not even trying to make an album — the songs accumulated out of the exchange. Carpark Records then picked the duo up and reissued the record in 2023, which is when most listeners met it; Treble later named it among the albums people had missed from the winter of 2023.

The gap between the record and the band as a live proposition was wide. They did not perform together in person until a year after Mind Palace Music came out. A second Carpark release, the hyperpop-adjacent EP Are You There God? It's Me, @, followed in 2024 and pushed further towards the digital end of their palette. It was Mind Palace Music, in its reissued second life, that brought 4AD to them.

Autosmile: three years, two apartments

The duo announced Autosmile on 24 June 2026, releasing the title track the same day, and the album came out on 16 October 2026 — their first for 4AD. It took more than three years of writing and recording, with some material dating back to 2022. Procrastination was part of the problem and the two are candid about the rest of it. 'We had to just make ourselves start recording,' Rose has said; Filipczak noted that the label deal 'made it a much higher-pressure situation'. Rose put the period plainly: 'We were both kind of struggling, individually and together.'

Both now live in Philadelphia, about twenty minutes apart, and they still recorded alone in their own flats. Studio offers were turned down deliberately. Filipczak's reasoning is practical — in a studio 'there's just a lot of pressure to get whatever take you're doing perfect', whereas at home they can double and triple vocals, walk away and listen in the car. They pass songs back and forth exquisite-corpse style and make a point of not explaining to each other what the lyrics are about.

The instrument list is the product of that domestic setup: Rose's clarinet, Filipczak's flute, a saz, a sewing box used for percussion, and a handmade PVC pipe whistle bought on Etsy for roughly twenty dollars plus sixty in shipping, which turns up on the opening track 'Bird'. West Philadelphia neighbours filled in the rest — Nina Ryser on backing vocals, Nino Soberon on cello, Garrett Burke on drums, the first live kit on an @ record. Filipczak has cited the prog-leaning black metal band Agriculture as an influence on the album. Eleven tracks run from the two-and-a-half-minute closer 'Amity' to the six-minute-39 title song.

Where they stand this month

The reviews landed in the days either side of release and broadly agree on what has changed. Writing on 15 October 2026, Exclaim! identified the arrival of live drums as the structural shift, and heard the record pulling between dark, unsettled passages and bright folk-shaped choruses — an album, in its reading, about change and stasis and 'the comforting, frustrating eternity of both happiness and doubt'. Our Culture, on 16 October, framed it as acoustic guitar braided with cello and flute and experimental production, folk instincts carrying surrealist and emo-inflected songwriting. The multitracked vocal interplay that defined the first album is still the centre of it, both singers holding single notes at a deliberate distance from each other.

The attention has arrived in a cluster. The Fader ran the duo in its GEN F new-artist slot on 13 October 2026, Crack published a profile around the release, and Stereogum had them walk through the album track by track. Both members still hold day jobs. Rose has been dry about the economics of the format they chose: 'It's easier to collaborate with one person, and you also make a lot more money on tour.'

Playing it in a room

A band assembled from files has had to learn the stage late, and the hardest version of that lesson came on a Brooklyn rooftop in the summer of 2026, where wind fought the harmonies all night. Rose called it the hardest show they had ever played and Filipczak said he felt bad for everybody in attendance; the vocal blend survived regardless, which is the part audiences tend to report back on.

The autumn 2026 touring behind Autosmile was announced alongside the album, and it is a support run rather than a headline campaign — dates alongside This Is Lorelei and YHWH Nailgun across North America, with the New York stop at Webster Hall on 6 November 2026, doors at 7pm for an 8pm start, 16-plus. Several of the late-October shows sold out before release week.