There’s something enigmatic at the core of @, the indie-folk duo consisting of 25-year-old singer-songwriters Stone Filipczak and Victoria Rose – and it’s not just the fact that their name is a single, unsearchable symbol. Take ‘Bird’, the opening track of their new album ‘Autosmile’. It features a dark, delicately picked acoustic guitar and an eerie vocal melody as Filipczak sings about baby bird corpses showing up on his front porch. The first moment the song, and the album, delivers on its intrigue is when it reaches the hook: a transcendent melody backed by Rose’s harmony that shifts the song’s momentum, before it quickly shifts back. That slippery, ungrippable nature – elements introduced and taken away, time signatures messed with, lyrics vague yet visceral – is what defines @’s music, and makes them one of the most intriguing entities in modern folk.
Outside the music, the enigma continues. They arrived seemingly out of nowhere, with their debut album ‘Mind Palace Music’ dropping on Bandcamp in 2021 and spreading by word of mouth years later (they re-released it with tastemaking indie label Carpark in 2023, and this album comes via indie big-leaguer 4AD). They both live in Philadelphia, but write and record apart, in their separate houses, because it gives them more room to think. Rose is a beekeeper when she’s not making music, and Filipczak a self-taught computer programmer.
All of this to say, @ are a band that arrive with a lot of lore and an air of mystery. Over the course of our hour-long interview, a quiet and insular pair emerges, good at continuing each other’s trains of thought; occasionally, they’ll simultaneously offer clashing answers to a question, then work their way to one they both agree on. It’s easy to see why they work well together as collaborators, even if they struggle to put it into words themselves. “Working with Stone, the songs that I’ve written come out differently. Just… differently,” Rose offers.
Rose grew up in Connecticut and sang in choirs from around nine to around 19, something that shows in her limber, impressive vocals and inclination for harmony. Meanwhile, Baltimore-born Filipczak’s first introduction to music was through the live traditional music at parties that his Croatian grandmother would host. Both eventually gravitated toward lo-fi, accessible songwriter music like early Grizzly Bear and Elliott Smith, spurring them both to start writing songs themselves.
The first time Rose met Filipczak, she didn’t know she wanted to start a band with him, but she knew she wanted to be his friend. He was the brother of one of her friends, and they were introduced to each other in a chance meeting in Boston, where they were both living at the time. “He seemed kinda extreme,” she says with a laugh. “He was running a lot of miles every day, and wearing kind of funky outfits. He had a braided rattail. He just seemed cool, in a way that was maybe a little different than the people that I knew at the time.”
“I feel like we just became friends, and then the music stuff came much later,” Filipczak adds. “We were in pretty different modes at that time – we hadn’t yet really discovered that we both love Neil Young and stuff like that.” Filipczak played drums in noise-rock and punk bands, while Rose made haunting, lo-fi folk music under the name Brittle Brian. “It was a pretty experimental time in life,” Rose says of those Boston years. Filipczak agrees – adding, to stifled laughs, “I don’t wanna say too much on record.” During one early hangout, they listened to a Violent Femmes record and got stick-and-poke tattoos from a mutual friend; Filipczak pulls down the neckline of his shirt to reveal one on his chest that simply reads “Beach Boys”.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, by which point Filipczak was living back at home in Baltimore, they began sharing song ideas over text. It quickly spiralled into their first album, ‘Mind Palace Music’. “It was not a slow burn at all. We kinda had the album halfway done before we were like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna start making music together,’” he says. Both were used to dropping music to a small community of friends and local fans, and they didn’t expect this release to be any different. But at some point, it had quietly gathered enough listeners that Carpark Records reached out to re-release the album.
After that, not ready yet for another full-length, they messed around with some electronica ideas that became their 2024 EP, ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, @’. It was a chance to get a little less serious than the more earnest songs on their full-lengths. “[The EP is] very comedic, and weird as s***, and just very fun,” Filipczak says. “I think it’s pretty likely that if we do another EP, it’ll again be a total genre shift. I think that would be funny and awesome.”
“We have made an effort to remain rooted in our particular music community. We like to keep a foot in the DIY world” – Stone Filipczak
Though they were both living in Philadelphia by the time it was time to make ‘Autosmile’, and they had the resources of a bigger label to play with (4AD had got in touch shortly before the EP dropped, with a signing process that felt like “a massive game of chicken”), the duo opted to keep recording at home as they had always done. “We did try once or twice in a more traditional way to record some of these songs, but it just didn’t work great or feel that good, so we abandoned it,” says Filipczak. It was their first time making a record on purpose, and the process felt more focused and structured, the songs more complete.
The almost seven-minute title track ‘Autosmile’, for example, feels like their magnum opus, with its interwoven vocals, entrancing harmonies and flowing, unfurling structure; meanwhile, ‘I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)’ shows a simpler, jauntier side to their writing. Songs like ‘Love In The Dark’ and ‘I’m Not In Pain’ lean into chamber-pop; on the former, Rose’s vocals reach their most gorgeous heights, while the latter is driven by impatient, foreboding cello. @’s reference points are somewhat untrendy in modern indie-folk; while other artists go for hushed and intimate, they hew closer to the extravagant arrangements of Fleetwood Mac, Fairport Convention or late-era Elliott Smith.
They were thinking for the first time about how songs would work as live arrangements – ‘I’m Not In Pain’, for example, features a rare appearance of a full-band line-up – but they didn’t let that constrain them. “Making ‘Mind Palace Music’, there were no shows to be played [because of the pandemic],” Rose says. “It was more of a hybrid this time of arranging things that could be played live, versus just trying to adapt everything that we had added to the songs. But there’s still a lot of adaptation.”
“Sometimes it feels like we’re covering our own songs in a weird way – kind of distilling them down to their most primitive form in order to play them live,” Filipczak adds. “It’s a songwriting project at its core, and [that allows us] a lot of freedom in how we present the songs.” They’ve been playing ‘Bird’, for example, as a duo with guitar and clarinet, while Filipczak has had fun trying out “ridiculous” guitar tones for the songs that have solos. Now bordering on indie-darling status, and with ‘Autosmile’ undoubtedly in the conversation for albums of the year, there’s some trepidation for the duo about entering the belly of the music industry.
“When we were making music pre-pandemic, nobody I knew was trying particularly hard to get signed or brought into the music industry. A lot of the fulfilment came from self-releasing, or releasing on a friend’s small label, and playing DIY shows,” Rose says. “There was a strong community to be had in real life,” Filipczak agrees. “Back in the day, it was very distasteful to be comparing your online numbers to other people within the scene. But now we’re all doing it all the time without even thinking about it.”
“Sometimes it feels like we’re covering our own songs in a weird way, distilling them to their most primitive form to play them live” – Stone Filipczak
“We’re not immune to it,” Rose muses. “When you hear a lot of people are listening to your music, or you’re at some industry [event], it’s hard to escape.”
“But at the same time, I do think that we have made an effort to remain rooted in music communities and our particular music community,” says Filipczak. The release show for ‘Autosmile’, he points out, is set to be a house show in Philly at a secret address (it was announced with a day’s notice shortly after our interview). “We like to keep a foot in the DIY world just because that’s where our friends are and what we like.”
There’s a simplicity to @, regardless of their mysterious presentation and the complex push-and-pull of their songs. They’re two kindred songwriters, devoted to the craft, and not too bothered about the rest of it. “I don’t think there’s a huge line for either of us between what’s an @ song and what’s maybe a song for one of our solo projects or something. I think we’re both just songwriters and we’re just writing songs,” Filipczak says. Whatever the magic is that comes out when they write together, neither of them can seem to place it. But you’ll know it when you hear it.
@’s ‘Autosmile’ is out now via 4AD.
Listen to @’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Spencer Hughes
Photography: Matt Baron
Photo Assistance: Gui Cha, David Herrera
Styling: Jessica Rohr
Label: 4AD
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