A band name like Worldpeace DMT comes with certain associations. When it first crossed my screen, I assumed the London duo made some kind of bleary-eyed art-school scumbag music. In reality, last year's debut album The Velvet Underground & Rowan was a sampledelic shout-along pop album that landed bandmates Leo Fincham and Rowan Miles on the vanguard of the so-called laptop twee movement.
Songs like "Love Yourself" — with its acoustic strums, rumbling digital bass, cascading video game sounds, and childlike singsong vocals — did make sense as a more boisterous counterpart to ear. Or maybe a brighter, friendlier answer to Bassvictim, wherein the Go! Team factored in more heavily than Crystal Castles. But it seems Worldpeace DMT weren't about to lean into their trendy subgenre designation. Over the summer, they ditched the electronics on their Flowers Powers mixtape, a playful indie-pop exercise that featured a "Big Yellow Taxi" cover and multiple songs about Jesus.
Now comes another LP, and it sounds like neither the laptop twee of their debut or the bleary drug music of my imagination. Instead, today's new Stick Around For Tea begins with some prime Belle & Sebastian cosplay. "School is out/ And I never did like it anyways/ Stupid exams/ I never could pass them with straight A's," Fincham sings over stately piano chords and whimsical violin. "Do you play guitar/ Do you like rock 'n' roll?/ We can start a band/ I'm trying to prove my parents wrong."
On a concept album steeped in childhood, "School's Out!" works as an origin story and a bashful anthem. The skippier "Love You Too" brings back some of the digital trickery without going all in on it. The weight toward live band instrumentation continues from there. The band evokes Los Campesinos! on "Gabriel," with its smiling refrain, "The world is a better place with you in it! Go out and be your best self! We love you, Gabriel!"
It's the kind of album where string quartets and squealing synths convene on a ballad about rockstar dreams called "Stratocaster," where a droning twee dirge called "Tiny Speakers" coexists with a chipper gang-vocal about spiritual searching on a track called "Ringtone." A rich text, in other words. Listen below.
Stick Around For Tea is out now. Buy it here.