There’s a band called @ (pronounced “at”), and this week they released their second album Autosmile on 4AD — which, given they began as two friends texting voice notes and song ideas to each other, counts as one of the great organic ascensions in recent indie music. The final single, “I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking),” is the warmest, most immediate thing Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak have put out, and the right doorway into a record that has turned into one of the year’s press-week stories: Clash 8/10, a Paste rave, an Our Culture rave, a Crack Magazine profile, a Stereogum track-by-track interview, a FADER GEN F feature, and Pitchfork’s Best New Track for the seven-minute title track.

The song itself is acoustic-forward and harmony-filled, a triplet rhythm racing ahead of Rose and Filipczak’s interlocking vocals. The band’s own description — “this is the most emo song on the record, we met our emo threshold with this one” — is funnier and more accurate than most press-release quotes. In the Stereogum interview they break down the construction: Filipczak’s regular, melodramatic chord progression and classical-choir-meets-Beach-Boys melodic lines from Rose (ten years of choir as a kid), building from darkness — “I’m simply not a person / Who wants you to think that I’m worth it / I want you to think that I’m worthless” — into light: “I can’t believe that you’re really staying / We made it through with something remaining.” The video, directed by Sage Caswell and shot with thermal imaging cameras in collaboration with the band, gives the track’s unconventional character a visual to match.

The context around @ matters. Rose (beekeeper, West Philly) and Filipczak (coder) met in Boston’s DIY scene in 2017, formed the band during lockdown in 2020, and self-released Mind Palace Music in 2021 (reissued by Carpark in 2023). They home-record and mix everything themselves — they reportedly turned down offered studio time because “we didn’t want to,” and the crystalline, empty-space production of Autosmile is the reward for that stubbornness. This fall they’re supporting This is Lorelei and YHWH Nailgun across North America (several sold out), with their own UK/European headline run in November.

If you haven’t yet waded into their psych-folk jacuzzi — to borrow Consequence’s phrasing, who picked this track for their best-of-the-week list — “I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)” is the introduction. A melody this warm shouldn’t feel this precarious. That’s the whole trick, and nobody does it like them.

RATING: 4.6/5

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