Worldpeace DMT turn the bleeps down and find a band

Worldpeace DMT have put the toys down and listened to the room. Stick Around For Tea, out since 16 October, is the record where the London duo let a bar go by without a bleep in it. Leo Fincham and Rowan Please sound wider with less in the way.

The pair arrived tagged as laptop twee, and the tag fit. The Velvet Underground & Rowan, their 2025 debut, was a sampledelic shout-along pop album that put them at the front of that scene. Over the summer came the Flower Powers mixtape, a looser indie-pop run with a "Big Yellow Taxi" cover and several songs about Jesus. Please also plays with The Femcels. Both of those records are busy. This one is not.

Stick Around For Tea was built at the same time as it was released, so nothing sat around long enough to be reconsidered. Fincham's account of the change is blunt: the bleeps and bloops had been done, he says, and the challenge was working out what to fill the space with. Often they filled it with nothing. What is left is a live band, stately piano chords, a whimsical violin, string quartets, and a low digital bass that still rumbles under the floorboards when it wants to.

The register is domestic. Vocals come in a childlike singsong, often doubled, closer to a playground chant than a lead line. Guitars get strummed rather than hit. The electronics turn up as cascading video game sounds, at the edges instead of in walls. What holds it together is the pause. Tracks stop before they overstay, arrangements leave holes, and the record moves from the playground to the front room without ever getting loud.

The opener puts the whole story in miniature: Fincham lists the exams he never passed, gets to the guitar and the rock 'n' roll, and starts a band mainly to prove his parents wrong. It works as an origin story and as a bashful anthem, and it is gone before you can clap. "Love You Too" skips in behind it, lets a little digital trickery back through the door, then decides not to sit down. "Gabriel" is the soft one, a smiling refrain that the world is better with the listener in it plus a nudge to be your best self. It could be mawkish. It isn't.

"Stratocaster" is the ballad, a rockstar dream with a string quartet on one side and a squealing synth on the other, and it makes the best case for the new method: the strings carry the joke and the sincerity at the same time. "Ringtone" goes chirpier still, a gang vocal about spiritual searching from people who plainly enjoy being in a room together.

Put it next to The Vaselines, whose humour it shares, and next to the shy end of Belle & Sebastian. Los Campesinos! fans will recognise the shout-along instinct underneath. Anyone who liked the mixtape but wanted guitars will like this more. It suits a kitchen with somebody else in it, and it suits a walk home in the rain. It will lose anyone who needs a chorus to arrive with a firework. Worldpeace DMT play ICA in London on 3 November.

What does not work is "Tiny Speakers", a droning twee dirge that takes a joke, repeats it, and mistakes the repetition for the punchline. It is the one place where the new emptiness reads as an unfinished idea rather than a choice. "Love You Too" has a smaller version of the same problem: it skips out before its idea has arrived, charming once and thin the second time. The record's humour is domestic, two people laughing at something in the room, and a couple of tracks ask you to laugh along without telling you what at.

Most of the time the space is the joke, the arrangement and the point. Four, then, and earned by the gaps: a band took its own bleeps away, found a live band underneath, and had the nerve to leave the rest alone.

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