Worldpeace DMT arrived last year with a debut album title — The Velvet Underground & Rowan — that announced exactly what they were: hyperliterate, irreverent, and fully aware of their own absurdity. Leo Fincham and Rowan Miles, also of the Femcels, built that record on a foundation of plunderphonics and heavy sampling, draped in a palette that felt like NME circa 2011 somehow made to sound cool again in 2025. Making Grouplove and Darwin Deez feel urbane is not a small trick. The second album arrives after an August mixtape — Flowers Powers — that largely dropped the sampling toolkit in favour of live instrumentation, stretching from Spiritualized to outlaw country. Stick Around for Tea is a course correction and a consolidation: the goofy, Sung Tongs-esque sound design returns, but it's now structural rather than decorative, serving songs that are more confident than anything on the debut. Loosely, this is a concept album about childhood — and the fit is natural. Worldpeace DMT's inherent whimsy suits material that finds dry humour in spiders, tigers, and anthropomorphised guitars. The lyrics operate in a register that is self-consciously childlike without being coy about it: the joke is always visible, and the duo are in on it with you. But the musicality underneath that goofiness is the real story here. Munich Gyaru has a lush, Van Dyke Parks-adjacent jauntiness — the kind of harmonic richness that takes real arranging chops to pull off while maintaining a cartoon surface. The title track demonstrates a command of bulletproof pop structure that the debut hinted at but didn't fully deliver. The songwriting is doing more work now, and it shows. The result is what the review rightly calls 'devastatingly contemporary' — a record that manages to be of-the-moment without being trend-chasing, and classically literate without being museum-piece stiff. Whether Stick Around for Tea cements their status at the forefront of laptop twee or helps them outgrow the label entirely is probably the more interesting question heading into whatever they do next.
