Worldpeace DMT – Stick Around For Tea
London-based Worldpeace DMT, the duo of Leo Fincham and Rowan Please (The Femcels), releases their new album Stick Around For Tea today.
Primarily written by Fincham and Please and produced by Fincham, the new album includes the previously shared single “Gabriel” and closely follows the mixtape Flowers Powers released this summer.
Next week, Worldpeace DMT will bring their ebullient live show to North America where they will perform sold out shows in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. This Sunday, Worldpeace DMT will perform a special, acoustic show on the [untitled] rooftop in New York City presented with Perfectly Imperfect and live streamed on YouTube.
Across the last year and change, London duo Leo Fincham and Rowan Please have cut a thrilling figure as Worldpeace DMT, achieving a blend of 1960s psychedelic pop and modern-day production touches that have resulted in truly timeless-sounding art. On Stick Around for Tea, Fincham and Please continue to deepen and develop their increasingly singular songwriting approach, paring back to the essentials of their sound to reveal more of themselves than ever before—all the while remaining just tantalizingly out of reach. At once whip-smart and sincere, unadorned and teeming with inventiveness, Worldpeace DMT are staying unpredictable to great aplomb across Stick Around for Tea, further justifying their reputation as one of the UK’s most exciting groups right now.
As one would expect from a band that’s set to release three records within the span of 18 months, the genesis of Worldpeace DMT relied on quick thinking and an embracing of the moment at hand. The moniker itself originated from Fincham’s avant-leaning solo alias, under which he’d pretend-DJ a set of pre-recorded electronic music while playing support slots for friends. “There weren’t any vocals—there weren’t any songs,” he recalls. “I hadn’t really worked out how I was going to develop anything I was working on.”
What was originally intended as a break from his more serious creative pursuits gained serious traction after his chance encounter with Please in 2024, who’s also a member of the similarly cheeky indie-pop project the Femcels; she reveals that the first time they spent time together, the pair that would become Worldpeace DMT listened to the Beach Boys’ bummed-out masterpiece Surf’s Up in total silence. After swapping in-progress demos with each other, creative kismet was borne. “It was the first time in my life where I met someone whose musicI could imagine existing alongside my own,” Fincham states. “Her love of music, which I’d allowed to go more dormant in my life, made a huge impression on me. We accidentally stumbled into being a band together.”
A year later, Worldpeace DMT’s debut The Velvet Underground & Rowan was out into the world—a sprawling and delightfully weirded-out collection of songs that combined ones-and-zeroes electronic flourishes with lovingly ramshackle psych-pop reminiscent of the storied Elephant 6 collective. “A lot of those influences were really important to me, but I hadn’t worked out a way of employing them in my own music,” Fincham says regarding the pair’s love of ‘60s pop and how it’s transmuted into their utterly unique sound. “Meeting Rowan and being influenced by her passion gave me permission to work with her on drawing from them, without feeling too retro. We were adamant on making something that felt new to us.”
Earlier this year, the duo released the Flowers Powers mixtape, comprised of a batch of songs from the same sessions that brought forth The Velvet Underground & Rowan and further showcasing their seriously shaggy approach to creation. “I’m quite inhibited by my lack of musical experience,” Please laughs. “I’ll write a song on guitar, record it on a voice note played really badly, send it to Leo, and eventually it becomes a song.” In Fincham’s words, she’s being far too modest, as he describes the first time he heard her demo of “Say the Sky Is Grey” as a formative experience for himself as an artist: “It was the first time in my life where I met someone whose music I could imagine existing alongside my own. Her love of music, which I’d allowed to go more dormant in my life, made a huge impression on me.”
Written and recorded across the last year, Stick Around for Tea is at turns raw and deceptively complex, as Fincham and Miles dial down the electronic textures in favor of an airy and intimate sound not unlike indie-pop luminaries the Vaselines. “We want to keep things fresh, interesting and inspiring,” the former says about the aesthetic aims that drove this new record. “The bleeps and bloops—we’ve done that already. The challenge was to find out what to fill that space with, and in a lot of cases, we didn’t fill that space with anything.”
Far from content to be stuck in the past—whether it be the immediacy of their origins or the prismatic nature of the music itself—Worldpeace DMT are continuing to move forward on the eve of Stick Around for Tea’s release, from a multi-continent tour with a full band to work on a third album that’s tentatively set for release next year. With Stick Around for Tea, Fincham and Please continue to sharpen their capacity to surprise at every corner, every song a jewel with gleaming edges that continue to reveal themselves after repeated listens.
10/18 – New York, NY @ [untitled] rooftop
10/20 – New York, NY @ Baby’s All Right [SOLD OUT]
10/21 – New York, NY @ Baby’s All Right [SOLD OUT]
10/23 – Los Anglees, CA @ Scribble [SOLD OUT]
10/24 – Los Angeles, CA @ Oblivion [SOLD OUT]
10/27 – Chicago, IL @ Schubas [SOLD OUT]
11/01 – Brussels, Belgium @ Les Nuits Weekender
11/03 – London, United Kingdom @ The ICA
11/04 – Manchester, United Kingdom @ The Deaf Institute
11/05 – Reykjavík, Iceland @ Iceland Airwaves
11/07 – Paris, France @ Pitchfork Music Festival Paris
11/10 – Berlin, Germany @ LARK
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