Rumspringa

Two decades ago, when Rose Melberg described to this website the “big, simple words” and “simple melodies” of twee, she could also have been describing punk, which was founded on similar principles. She could not have been describing ear, a New York duo whose little-pop confections—dynamic patchworks of voice notes, muffled singsong, and the occasional fat wub—evoke the restlessness of both genres, but the simplicity of neither. Instead, Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avatan make music that sputters and sprawls, like a groggy SD card sifting between memories: the open chord drifting into the TikTok audio, the TikTok audio dissolving into the dubstep break, the dubstep break bleeding into the embarrassing voicemail. Since bonding over “twee shit” and “digital hardcore” at Bard College, the pair have become lodestars of “laptop twee,” a young canon that holds youthful bliss in tension with digital debris. ear’s debut single incites moshpits at their shows; it was recorded into an iPhone in a campus library.

Last year, “laptop twee” crystallized with Bassvictim’s Forever and Worldpeace DMT’s The Velvet Underground & Rowan, although each project presented a slightly different iteration: the former, deliriously giddy; the latter, winkingly precise, as if executive produced by Clippy. What distinguished ear from those exemplars was a unique vision of “laptop” as a verb, a thing to be done to “twee” delicacy. Their sparse debut album, The Most Dear and the Future (2025), was glitchy and alluringly entropic, its gestures toward songcraft—whispered mantras, percussive refrains, dainty ditties—set adrift in digital bile. By decentering themselves as performers, Paz and Avatan “laptopped” their twee sensibilities, simulating the strange voyeurism of a buffering livestream. Conversely, their second album, Rumspringa, cements their active, human participation—as on lead single “Ne Plus Ultra,” which begins by acknowledging the camera. Asks Paz, in the opening seconds: “Are you videoing me right now?”

Rumspringa is advertised by ear as a “choose life” record, and its namesake—the Amish period of exploratory adolescence—invokes suitably organic imagery of frolicking youth. Nonetheless, I’m more inclined to read “Are you videoing me?” as the thesis statement, and “choose life” as the methodology: embracing authorship by deemphasizing digital clutter. That newfound clarity begets vivid, immediate music; it almost feels sarcastic, on the crystal-clear “Coil,” when a sampled soundbite asks: “Are you able to hear the sound of my voice?” More rewardingly, the leaner atmospheres of Rumspringa also reveal Paz and Avatan as maturing producers, attuned to negative space. “Threads” squeezes its twitchy flux into a snowglobe, and the sparseness of “F” miraculously stabilizes its zany songcraft: not only do the dirgelike lullaby, dubstep break, and sampled child’s voice coexist, but somehow, neatly cohere. In the interplay of motley elements, ear fulfill the open-field implications of a title like Rumspringa, as well as their own namesake, this voraciously ingesting organ. Their inventive musicianship is inextricable from their childlike wonder, sauntering through this strange world, absorbing all of its strange sounds.

That awestruck gaze anchors their vocal performances, which—though crisper than before—remain hushed, bordering on religious reverence. Avatan and Paz approach music conceptually, and float through their creations like curators roaming a gallery space. The wispy “Amsterdam” is hymnal but certainly not hollow, despite its deceptive lightness: rustling thickets, droning pads, and a lilting Avatan, her voice another chirp in a bustling ecosystem. Your friend who really likes Biosphere might enjoy this song, and perhaps even stick around for “Good Day Will Arrive,” whose own dainty palette—keys that tiptoe, chimes that waft—invokes the youthful naivete of its central claim. It is ambiently deflating, midway through, when that desire drifts away. “A good day will arrive,” Paz mutters, trading non-sequiturs with Avatan. “And then I remember/The cold air in the street.”

Is this album as happy as it sounds? Paz and Avatan have described their music as a “constantly outstretching thing,” though you might read that in several ways. At its most inventive, Rumspringa stretches with gleeful abandon, stringing together spare parts until they come alive, wriggling. Simultaneously, its stripped-back palette operates on two levels: illuminating life while implying death, as if the survivors of an apocalypse decided to sing and dance while they still could. How long until this open field is a deserted island? (For the child sampled in “F,” it already is: “They dropped me on the deserted island.”) Listen to those subdued vocals, crisp but never quite confident, arms outstretched—constantly outstretching—for the good day they were promised. That day is not today, and it sounds like they know it.