Whatever You Do, Don’t Call Worldpeace DMT Twee

I met with Worldpeace DMT and Rowan Please at Cable Street Studios around a month ago ahead of the release of their second album, Stick Around For Tea. Worldpeace DMT, AKA Leo Fincham, is a London-based musician who debuted with an EP, Brass Invaders, in 2024, followed by the full-length record The Velvet Underground & Rowan, where he first collaborated with Rowan Please. Indie band, laptop twee, Beatles impressionism, call it whatever you want. Fincham and Please make music because they “just really love it.” Rowan told me that Leo looks like a Portuguese marching band member on stage, and Leo told me about the saddest song he’s written, “Luftwaffe.” 

Everyone says “Rowan of the femcels,” but it should be “of the femcels and WPDMT,” as she probably spends as much time in the studio, if not more, with Leo. Apparently things can get desperately awkward if neither of them has anything to talk about, and Fincham’s bright white walls don’t help either. Their meet-cute happened when Please came to visit Fincham and Ike Clateman (of Bassvictim) at their flat with a song to record. Even before then, Fincham says Please influenced him via “osmosis” with her “sixties vibe.” As of right now, the band is looking for a guitar shop in New York City where they can film a music video for “Stick Around For Tea.” Leo will be disguised as a guitar bro, while Rowan plays a “super attractive girl trying to buy a Stratocaster.” Please let them know if you know anywhere, because this year marks the start of their “70s era.” When we met up, we also talked about the Beatles Illustrated, being popular online but being unpopular at school, and their first impressions of each other.

MONDAY 3 PM SEPTEMBER 7, 2026 LONDON

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LYDIA ELIZA TRAIL: This is quite a twee vibe.

ROWAN PLEASE: My favorite song is “On God.” Leo doesn’t like it. No one knows why.

TRAIL: Why did you choose the album cover you chose?

PLEASE: I saw a picture of The Beatles Illustrated projected onto a building, and I was like, “What if we projected ourselves onto smoke?”

LEO FINCHAM: Originally it was going to be called “School’s Out.” We were at a bar in Glasgow, and Rowan had a song called “Stick Around For Tea.” She said it would be a better title. Thank god it’s miles better. “School’s Out” is fine, just too on the nose. Too child-oriented.

PLEASE: Both are too twee.

FINCHAM: Don’t say twee.

TRAIL: I won’t ask about laptop twee. But to what extent are children involved in the album production?

FINCHAM: There is a children’s choir on the album.

PLEASE: The name is asking you to wait around. Like you’ve stayed this long, you may as well stay longer.

FINCHAM: It’s super British, which is important. 

PLEASE: “School’s Out” is too American.

FINCHAM: Yeah, it’s also an album by Alice Cooper. But we changed the name and then chose the Beatles Illustrated book for the visual. 

PLEASE: That book is so good, it’s a compilation of illustrations by Alan Aldridge, who used to do various Beatles things and send letters to all his famous friends who were good artists. They would all make illustrations for all the Beatles’ different songs. 

TRAIL: Someone said to me recently that they think WPDMT and Rowan are the Britpop of our generation. How does that make you feel?

FINCHAM: I think that there is a British sensibility to our music. It’s a combination of both mine and Rowan’s personalities. The Britishness is more Rowan than me. I think I’ve absorbed some of it and want to match up to it. But Britpop, to me at least, has a lot of issues.

PLEASE: But Britpop is a reinvigorated ‘60s or ‘70s thing.

FINCHAM: But it was also the pop music of its day.

PLEASE: And we want to be popular.

TRAIL: Is Indie music popular anymore?

PLEASE: I guess there are more avenues to be popular. I want to be more popular. 

FINCHAM: We are operating in a more guerrilla style than the bands of Britpop, who were absorbed into the Rule Britannia machine. We don’t have that kind of popularity, so we can make more decisions independently.

PLEASE: Because we consider ourselves cooler.

TRAIL: Moving away from the political implications of calling yourself a guerrilla indie band, what is the dynamic between you two?

PLEASE: During the first album, Leo convinced me that I had influenced his previous songs before we worked together, with just my “presence”. I wrote two songs on the previous album and four on this one.

TRAIL: How did you guys meet, and what were your first impressions of each other?

PLEASE: I met Leo because I brought Cobra Snake to a Bassvictim show and Leo was doing a DJ set. Apparently Leo said, “She’s so cool,  she would never be friends with me.” Little did he know.

TRAIL: Why did you think she was cool, Leo?

FINCHAM: I just didn’t have any friends at the time. No direction, I didn’t go out. I mean, she is cool. I sat in proximity to her at a club, but we didn’t speak. Then a week or so later she turned up at my flat with this song.

PLEASE: We started recording “Say the Sky Is Grey.” Ike just said he’d written a song about a rabbit, so I went to Leo and Ike’s apartment.

TRAIL: When did you first start making music, Rowan?

PLEASE: In year three, that’s the first one I remember. I wrote them in the playground because I didn’t have any friends. It was called “Jazz is the music in me.”

TRAIL: It’s cool that not having friends is a theme. Is it weird now that you’ve both made it to have a record deal, to have support, to have fans? 

PLEASE: We haven’t got a record deal yet, just people jumping up and down and waving. They are signing everyone. They are signing the worst band you know.

TRAIL: Has it got to your head now you’re popular?

FINCHAM: I was actually really popular at school.

PLEASE: Not really. I’m just happy. But I measure my circumference a couple of times a week to make sure.

TRAIL: Leo, what is a “Noah’s ark of music”?

FINCHAM: I guess, like a big boat full of my favourite musicians. Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Marley, The Raincoats, etc. To me, this project is split into two parts: one is a craft thing, where everything comes from a genuine place of loving songwriting. Like any craft, you hone it over time. The second part, then, in my mind, is an art-oriented perspective where there’s a question mark over the legacy of contemporary music. I am questioning what it means to be a songwriter in the 21st century. 

PLEASE: It’s cool that the history of pop songwriting is so short compared to other art forms. It means you can just learn it all, then get on with it. 

TRAIL: Which of you takes yourself more seriously or uses humor as a coping mechanism, and how does it come across in the album?

PLEASE: I feel like I’m a jokester.

FINCHAM: Rowan can take a song or a subject and come at it diagonally. All her lyrics approach a subject from a diagonal perspective. Increasingly, I’m looking at things head-on. 

TRAIL: Do you ever wish you were a hot woman in the music industry for PR and image-making?

FINCHAM: Purely in terms of dressing, boys have it boring, and I’m not trying to be Ziggy Stardust. 

PLEASE: In terms of writing lyrics, I wouldn’t mind being a man, because being a woman—maybe I just need to get better. FINCHAM: “Stick Around for Tea” is an example of you taking very personal subject matter and turning it into an entertaining story. It’s not less personal, it’s just a different angle.

PLEASE: In that song, there’s a section about being roofied. I started writing it and then had my boyfriend do an ad lib saying “But BABY” in a funny voice, so it has serious subject matter but a silly overtone.

FINCHAM: You have a dark sense of humour. Sometimes you even shock yourself. I like it when Rowan gets really dark with that shit. It frightens me. 

TRAIL: Leo, you do not have as much of a create mode story presence online or across the internet as Rowan does. Nobody knows who you are. Who are you?

PLEASE: He’s a serious musician, and I’m not.

TRAIL: This is not Pitchfork, it’s Interview Magazine, so you can lower your music nerd wall a bit. 

FINCHAM: It’s not a wall. If I seem like I want to talk about music, it’s because I’m trying to dissolve a wall, if anything. I shall be more jovial.

PLEASE: I’m good at talking to strangers but can be extremely awkward in the company of people I’m closest to.

FINCHAM: The first time Rowan and I made music, it was desperately awkward. It still sometimes is.

PLEASE: I’d blame your various rooms for that. They are just blank white rooms. There’s nothing to pick up and play with.

FINCHAM: Our recording process is not fun. I sometimes have fun by myself late at night, and I guess Rowan does.

TRAIL: Your album has a CBeebies happiness to it. Why do you write such happy songs? Leo, you once told me that you started writing happy songs when you met Ike and also because of Kanye West.

PLEASE: When I first met Leo, I was so confused. There’s a darkness in him, but he writes really happy songs. I didn’t trust him.

FINCHAM: Yeah, my new song “Luftwaffe” is a pretty sad song. It’s about having difficulties in love and how time changes you. There’s no rule about having to write happy songs. At the start, there was a conscious attempt to do so. I’d always tried to write what would appear to be “serious” music. I mean, Kanye has songs about his mum and then meme songs. “On God” is just a straight-up breakup song. Other songs like “School’s Out” are more positive. I got the confidence to start WPDMT because I made friends and met people. It was the first time in my life that I made music that meant something to other people, not just for myself. 

TRAIL: Have either of you proved your parents wrong?

PLEASE: My mum left when I was 3 apples tall, so I hope she googles me and gets pwned by my indie micro microcelebrity status.

FINCHAM: I feel like I have, not that they were against me. There was an unspoken delineation in where I was brought up between artists and fans. You could love music, but the idea of you being considered in the same sentence as your idols was crazy. I mean, I only began making music that was even relatively popular in my mid-twenties. I didn’t even like my music before then, and nobody else liked it. So the fact that other people like it is, to me, a success.

TRAIL: Rowan, how do you balance success on two fronts: the femcels and WPDMT?

PLEASE: It’s great, the best a girl can get. I don’t feel successful yet. I want to be really rich and really famous.

TRAIL: Is there competition between the two acts?

PLEASE: Yeah, Leo and Gabriella can’t be in the same room. I guess we sit right in the middle of the boy-girl electronic duo type and the indie band. Sometimes I listen to Mumford & Sons and think, if our songs were recorded differently, it would sound like them. 

FINCHAM: We are more artful. But in their heart, everyone would like to be a single person with a voice and an instrument and make something that has an effect on people. That’s the direction I want to head in. Not forever, but it feels like a personal challenge as I tend to sublimate myself, diffuse my personality across a wide range of instruments, working with choirs, even in my songwriting partnerships. But, in truth, a lot of WPDMT has been to build up the confidence to do songs like “Luftwaffe,” where there are as few elements as possible, and you can still have an effect.

TRAIL: Would you want people to cry to this album and laugh? Or both at the same time?

PLEASE: My songs are great for looking out the window. 

FINCHAM: I can’t hear them anymore. The ones that are too emotional are too emotional, the ones that are silly sound too silly.

TRAIL: What do you think each other looks like on stage when you’re recording?

PLEASE: He looks like a Portuguese drummer.

FINCHAM: Rowan looks funny. She’s a stage comedian. There’s nobody I would rather be on stage with than Rowan if something’s going wrong, because she has a knack for slapstick comedy. In Berlin I had to restring a guitar on stage, and there’s no one better qualified to hold an audience’s attention than Rowan.

PLEASE: Oh yeah, I held a dating show. But no one put their hand up to go on a date with them, so I had to be their lover.

FINCHAM: I couldn’t do that. I think I’m a bit standoffish to the audience.

PLEASE: Good cop, bad cop. 

TRAIL: Summer of 2025, we did an exhibition called Lap Dance, and Rowan saw Bonnie Blue filming in the same warehouse as our show. Which was funny because the gated community the warehouse was in complained about the show having a suggestive title. 

PLEASE: A couple of us were invigilating in this huge warehouse in Hackney Downs, and next door, loads of guys were coming in and out. We asked an invigilator what was happening, and he said: “It’s a Lily Phillips gangbang”. We looked inside, and there were about 25 men sitting around on plastic school chairs. We planned to find Lily Phillips and save her. I thought it was going to work, but we couldn’t get past the evil people who make money off her. Anyway, I saw her BBL from far away, and it looked good. 

TRAIL: What surgery should Leo get, Rowan?

PLEASE: I think he should dye his hair black and get a tummy tuck. He’s already skinny. He told me his waist is 27 inches. 

TRAIL:  Leo, you once said to me you’d rather die than be on BBC Radio 6, is that still true?

FINCHAM: I don’t know what it is. What does it mean to be on BBC Radio 6? 

PLEASE: I wasn’t allowed the internet till I was 17, so I just listened to BBC Radio 4 all day. My grandma gave me her iPhone 3GS secretly so I could go on it on the bus on the way to school, in secret. I’d just text boys.

FINCHAM: I was an offline kid. 

TRAIL: Why do you think people will like your album, and what do you think Pitchfork will rate it?

FINCHAM: Two thumbs up, because it’s better than everyone else’s. Because of Rowan’s hot and huge boobs. 

PLEASE: They will like it because it’s good. 

TRAIL: What do you guys do on the tour bus?

FINCHAM: Rowan, thinking it would be really wholesome, took shrooms and then sat silently on the bus for hours. 

PLEASE: I took two bits because they said four was a microdose, and I was tripping balls. I thought it would be like drinking a CBD drink, and then the van was Paisley. Gabriella’s face was the print of Louis Vuitton. It’s over now.

FINCHAM: People think we’re on LSD when we’re performing, but this is literally as trippy as WPDMT gets. That was our 1967, now we’re going into the ‘70s.

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