here’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.