It’s hard, these days, to move through the world feeling optimistic. Violence is everywhere. Prices are steep, jobs are scarce, AI fakery is ubiquitous, and everything seems to be in a state of collapse. It would be natural for me to turn to any of the harsh or melancholy-tinged AD 93 records stored in my iPod. But I’ve more often found myself hitting play on The Velvet Underground and Rowan, a brilliant and irreverent underground pop album released last summer that’s edgy but not irony-poisoned, silly but not unserious, darkly funny and giddily joyful. Its 14 songs, totaling just over 30 minutes, brought the skip back to my step and the song back to my heart like little else in recent memory.
The Velvet Underground and Rowan is the work of Londoners Leo Fincham, a visual artist and producer who records as Worldpeace DMT, and Rowan Please, government name Rowan Miles, a member of the Teenagers-esque pop duo the Femcels. Fincham and Miles are part of the ’00s-fetishizing London scene that tangentially includes fakemink and Bassvictim, but The Velvet Underground and Rowan makes the pair feel like a scene of two: They may give entertaining and slightly crazy interviews, maintain messy Instagram pages, and put on hyped shows with little advance notice—and Fincham may live, or have lived, with Bassvictim’s Ike Clateman—but their music is a melange of hyper-uncool early-’10s indie references and pathos-heavy lyrics, delivered with Donny & Marie Osmond-level chumminess.
The first time I listened to The Velvet Underground and Rowan, I felt like I’d just been king hit by Carles: Fincham and Miles may talk up their love of the ’60s in interviews, and shades of both the Beach Boys and their album’s namesake may crop up at times—along with a chirpy cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Ledge”—but, for the most part, The Velvet Underground and Rowan feels like the work of two people who came of age in the late ’00s and early ’10s. Fincham and Miles draw liberally from the primary-colored soup of post-landfill-indie bands like Darwin Deez, Grouplove, and Cults, cheerfully yelping choruses and layering them with chimes, programmed drums, and finicky guitar riffs. There are less outré reference points, too—Sung Tongs-era Anco, the sunny plunderphonics of the Avalanches—but never anything that would warrant a second glance from anyone in the bar queue at Ormside or OTO.
In this sense, The Velvet Underground and Rowan feels of a piece with Callahan & Witscher’s Think Differently, pairing two underground musicians who put a cheeky, throw-everything-at-the-wall spin on relatively unfasionable sounds. But where Callahan & Witscher use their ’90s rock pastiche in service of blackpilled anti-Boomkat nihilism, Fincham and Miles seem like optimists. Their music is certainly funny, but their lyrics often scan as totally earnest, even when they’re droll. “Wrote this song just so you’d know/To love yourself no matter what,” yelps Miles on the sweet, glitchy “Love Yourself,” before, a few verses later: “Leo wrote this song for you/Sorry that I fucked your dude.”
Fincham’s production is inherently bright, and his maximalist approach allows for surprising emotional range: The glitch-pop of “B-Side Story” and “Sound-waves” is dazed bordering on goofy, while “Hey Marshmallow” is directional and euphoric, building toward a punch-the-air orchestral hook halfway through. (Someone is screaming in the background at the same time; it doesn’t sound like David Comes to Life, but it does sound like what I remember David Comes to Life as sounding like.) As if leery of seeming too in thrall of the straightforward positivity of 2010s indie, he still grounds the music in the metacommentary of a lot of underground pop: “If the music’s bad, you haven’t paid for it,” sings Miles on “Neighbourhood Announcement Squad,” an interlude that sounds like the Bugsnax soundtrack. “You can press skip, pause, and add it to a playlist!”
A lot of so-called indie sleaze warrants blasé nihilism because it sounds louche and unbothered. Miles, working within the framework of Obama-era indie optimism, maintains the extremely contemporary themes of the Femcels without any of the edge. “Say the Sky Is Grey,” a highlight that sounds like one of the dusty private-press curios from the 2016 compilation Sky Girl, is a bittersweet ode to a porn addict; her worn-down vocals imbue the scene with a surprising amount of pathos. “Do you still want me to stay in this room where you keep the window closed/Lay in bed and blow your loads?” she sings. “Nut on me, nut on me/Can’t you ever do it on me?” It is a deeply unromantic love song for exceptionally unromantic times, rendered with nostalgia for a time when couples like Matt & Kim and Dave Longstreth and Amber Coffman were headlining festivals.
It’s easy to be skeptical about music that’s so indebted to past sounds when a good chunk of what’s being released now is designed as a game of spot-the-reference. The Velvet Underground and Rowan is more confrontational than your average pastiche: Rather than imagine a universe in which they were hitting Misshapes at 14 or palling around with Uffie and Busy P, Fincham and Miles have chosen to trawl the depths of that scene’s less cool, far less sexy aftermath. It might feel awkward to look back on that period now, but Worldpeace DMT and Rowan Please find pleasure in the discomfort.
