2 feels like a dusty VHS tape unearthed from a cupboard at your grandmother’s house featuring a black-and-white puppet show where you can still see the strings. There’s something not just nostalgic, but incredibly tactile and handmade about Foxwarren’s latest album, taking the sweet intimacy of indie folk and running it through the mechanics of sampling and collage. The production is quietly dazzling with pianos chopped into soft loops, dusty drums that shuffle with hip-hop groove, and strings that swirl like something from The Avalanches. 2 leans into something incredibly friendly, like the musical equivalent of a hand-sewn quilt or an Etsy trinket, with everything designed to make you feel warm, held, and delighted.

Opener Dance sets the tone with lilting flutes and soft percussion that feels like chilling in a hammock, weightless and graceful. Wings is a head-nodding, groovy track built with the vocabulary of indie pop but the rhythm section of something closer to soft, jazzy hip-hop. Though technically an indie band, Foxwarren are working with a broader, more curious palette, treating the studio as an open-ended question rather than a fixed set of instruments. 2 is full of vocal snippets, vintage-sounding textures, and found sounds that seem to have been pulled from another era, treated with care until they melt seamlessly into the songs. The result is soft, sweet, and kind, standing in stark contrast to the hyper-digital, algorithmic smoothness of so much modern production, and whilst it draws deeply from hip-hop’s crate-digging spirit, there’s hardly a hip-hop record in the world that sounds this innocent. The tools Foxwarren use don’t come from indie rock, but the effect is closer to Perry Como than Madlib. 2 feels like throwing on a vintage movie reel as a deliberate act of resistance to modernity’s speed, inviting you to slow down and take in something quietly beautiful and delicately sweet.