@, 22° Halo
House Show
Philadelphia
Oct. 16, 2026
You know tfw things feel spooky? A touch amiss? Light horror movie opening scene vibes? Standing on a sidewalk in West Powelton, wind blowing through thin, fraying branches, with slight rain slowly building into something heavy enough for umbrellas, I was wondering if I’d ever been in quite this situation: lined up outside a house show spot over an hour early, hoping to make the cut for a highly-anticipated album-release set from Philly’s @. Their new album, and 4AD debut, Autosmile, was freshly unleashed into the world yesterday, and I was among dozens of folks – many already there when I showed up well before doors – and the line steadily increasing behind me; there were questionable ethics going on as far as line-cutting goes, but when a space has a mind to dutifully enforce a hard cap on attendance, cutthroat maneuvers make some sense. I’ve never seen anything quite like it at a DIY punk spot, in Philly or elsewhere. “A fuckin’ anomaly!” someone else (who'd drawn the @ symbol on her stomach in permanent marker) in line agreed. Maybe not spooky or creepy or unnerving, but definitely a little bit bizarre. Though I’ve seen @ play basement shows in West Philly many times since 2022 – shout out and RIP to Planet Earth – that was before they signed to the legendary and venerable 4AD, before all the beaming profiles in PASTE and BNM nods in Pitchfork; the secret’s out. When the house finally let us in, the more anxious among us were openly pontificating about safety and exits.
There was nothing to fear: as far as DIY stuff goes, this is one of the most professionally-run venues in Philly – more professional and thoughtful than many above-board spots – with a pro sound engineer and really good lighting throughout the show, as it should be for a bill showcasing some of the best bands in Philly for the last several years. 22° Halo (and @ for that matter) might be new to some folks, but the band, through many iterations, has been putting out wonderful records since 2017: gentle, wooly, homespun slowcore with traces of krautrock and post-punk, but full of coiled energy that is as purely listenable as it is cathartic live. Guitarist/singer/bandleader Will Kennedy slashed at his Jazzmaster, slung high on his chest, with dogged insistence, the band in total lockstep, each song a sort of humming machine of rhythmic interplay and warm, pounding melodies, the guitars typically open-tuned and capo’d super high – almost like mandolins in register – with questionable intonation and tuning that drifts from all that intense strumming, yet everything sounding clean, chiming, chords as bright and sizzling as a batch of sauce-red balloons rising in the sky. The band mostly played songs from 2024’s stunning, evergreen Lily of the Valley, one of the decade’s most heartfelt and heartbreaking records, hands down – the songs mostly trafficking in observant, detailed and precisely real accounts of loving someone through thick and thin, through health and sickness. (See mid-set song “CVS On A Walk,” a song that's so light and so heavy, its trip to the pharmacy depicted by two pointillistic electric guitars ringing frail, fast-dying notes, drums and bass keeping an ambling pace, music so gentle and plainly pretty you’re blindsided and devastated by the lyric, “When you revealed to me / The noise you made when you seized / Was you struggling to say my name / I lost it.”) One of the things I love most about 22° Halo’s music live is the irreducibility of it: sure, the songs are great enough that they could work if one person sang them alone on one instrument, but the sound and the arrangement of the parts is so singular and so integral to the feeling it gives you, a reminder that banding together works best when it serves a purpose. The band’s set closed with Lily’s “Orioles At Dusk,” a basically perfect love song, its driving rhythm met by a golden bouncing melody that sounds as in love as its narrator; the band snuck in the refrain from 2021’s “Dinner At Davey’s” for good measure.
After that set, seeing @ again (I covered their Bartram’s Garden set back in summer) was another rich layer of cake, though with enough drops of musical poison to bring back to mind the spookiness of the season: their songs flow between harmonic styles and textures, from the simple chills-giving euphoria of consonant chords and complementary acoustic guitars strummed and picked in folk-duo tandem to more intensely dark, unexpectedly dissonant – peep the Neapolitan chord in "Love in the Dark" – and distorted stuff nicked from grunge and proggier fare (their choice of Yes’s “All Good People” for walk-out music, case in point). It’s this all-the-apples-have-razorblades quality that makes their music especially enticing: their love songs never stray far from the fact that it’s both absolutely sweet and absolutely bitter. The pair of Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak really do sound like musical soulmates, their voices blending as though they’d sung together from birth, in tightly-controlled, close-following harmony that makes me wish I’d never stopped doing choir as a kid; they write melodies in this elevated way where you almost can’t decide which of the two is singing the primary part. Their performance of the new album’s title track “Autosmile,” an instant classic, was that gorgeous yin-yang thing in action, Rose’s high melody like a ring of light, Filipczak’s lower harmony shading it with deliberate parallel tension before leaping above both melodies in wordless falsetto. They're clearly at the height of their powers, and as a duo, @ hasn’t ever been this good; it felt like a stroke of luck to catch them one more time on the ascent. I guess the real horror would have been in lining up too late...
