Titled after a Twitter meme, Autosmile by @ plays out like a series of private jokes told between friends. Those friends—Filipczak and Victoria Rose—got their start as folk-pop pranksters, but on their 4AD debut, they’ve leveled up into a brain-rotted Rawlings and Welch. Before Autosmile, you’d never hear Rose sing a lyric as nakedly sincere as “I don’t know how I belong to you, but I do somehow.” For the first time, the band with the most un-Googleable name in showbiz sounds marginally legible.
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The Avalanches: No Bad Memories [Modular]
Those of us over a certain age all have that one jingle—a corporate ditty imprinted in our memory like a painting at Lascaux. (Mine? Education Connection. My Gen X mom’s? The original Big Mac theme.) Leave it to the Avalanches, masters of making up for lost time, to run with this phenomenon. The duo’s first proper LP since the pandemic draws inspiration from lost jingles and now-defunct technology like those two buddies pictured above. The features across the 31-song project bring a similar “old becomes new again” spirit to the group’s anhedonia-flecked electronica, uniting legends such as Yellow Magic Orchestra cofounder Haruomi Hosono with fresher-faced experimentalists Portraits of Tracy. Who knew hauntology could be so fun?
