Fast Animals And Slow Kids - … e veniamo da Perugia

It's 2010, three in the afternoon. On one of those July days when the heat wears down body and soul alike, Fast Animals and Slow Kids are playing the stage of Italy Wave, in Livorno. The band's name, born of a cartoon and a few scant moments of reflection, is tangible proof of a project conceived to last only as long as a fleeting urge, a teenage crush, a season spent in some rehearsal room in central Italy. It's July 2010, and it's not just any day, because FASK are playing on a real stage, at a festival hosting famous names. For four kids who still have to borrow their instruments, nothing is a given.

Time is stretched thin. You go up, you play for as long as they tell you to, and you leave. You're allowed to because you won the regional competition, but it's best not to abuse the privilege you've been granted. Fast Animals and Slow Kids finish their set, then, from backstage, the signal arrives: time to get off. The four of them get it, but they know this could be their first and last time on a stage like this. It's not about "seizing the opportunity" — it's about enjoying the moment and having as much fun as they're allowed. Even more than they're allowed. Like a mother yelling at her kid that dinner's ready, the Italy Wave staff orders FASK to get off the stage immediately. A few minutes later they're dragged off by force, instruments still strapped on, cables still plugged in.

Needless to say, if you want to make an impression on someone like Andrea Appino, there's no better way to introduce yourself. Zen Circus are there as the backing band for Alessandro Fiori, and they watch the performance with curious enthusiasm. At the end of the festival, Appino will offer to produce FASK's first record — the band having meanwhile won the Italy Wave Band 2010 award, breaking every rule of common sense and without even knowing they were in the running. It is anything but an ordinary afternoon. Fast Animals and Slow Kids go back to Perugia with a producer and a pile of new instruments, kindly provided by the festival's sponsors. Among them: a guitar, a bass, a drum kit and a guitar amp head. If you want to make music, instruments matter too, in their own quiet way.

Essere i Fast Animals And Slow Kids e venire da Perugia

If you cut Umbria open, deep down, green blood would pour out. It's the blood of the mild plains, of the small woods, the blood of the hills on which villages and towns huddle defensively. Towns like Perugia, with barely a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, aspire to stand as a regional capital — and manage it. If you go there and cross beyond the shabby, unkind ring of modern buildings, you realize that Perugia, since the Etruscans, has never really left. It has stayed there, defended by man and defended by nature. Those who have spoken of it through art have often painted it as a mysterious, at times dark place. One of them is Brad Mehldau, an adoptive son of Perugia and its celebrated festival, so attached to it that he wrote a song about it.

In that Perugia — partly the Perugia of today, partly one that no longer exists — begins the story of Fast Animals And Slow Kids, a story that, if it were set down in some predictable, by-the-numbers book, would be told from the start, from when Aimone Romizi was in high school and played drums in two different bands. In one of them was Jacopo Gigliotti (FASK's bassist), in the other Alessandro Guercini (FASK's guitarist). In the first case, what they played was a mix of punk, rock and hardcore, not far removed from what was blasting through headphones in those high-school years: NOFX and Rage Against The Machine, but also Bad Religion and Lagwagon; in the second, it was alternative rock following the path laid down by Matthew Bellamy and his Muse. Alessandro also played in another band, alongside Alessio. These are the teenage years, when, if you can play, you only hang around two places, and those places are school and the rehearsal room.

The urge to get together springs from the desire to stop. To stop taking themselves seriously and start playing just for the fun of it. What Aimone, Jacopo, Alessandro and Alessio want is to have fun, and the first day in the rehearsal room is the day when, closing the door behind them, ambition and dreams of glory are left outside. They assign roles and hand out shirts, like in a pickup five-a-side game among friends. The mic should have gone to the most skilled of them, Alessio, who had already held that role in previous bands, and with decent results too. In goal, hidden away and furthest back from everyone, should have sat Aimone, who had grown up with drumsticks in hand and had never once thought of singing or picking up a guitar. Aimone Romizi was the perfect keeper for the friendly net, and it was obvious that's how things should start — if only the proverbial case of force majeure hadn't intervened, which in this instance consisted of an arm out of action, immobilized in a brace. So the drumsticks went to Alessio, and the microphone to Aimone. In the end, none of it really mattered, as long as they were having fun.

In those months, whoever followed FASK outside the rehearsal room did so out of friendship or word of mouth. The band sang in English and won people over with energy and irreverence. They played "Ludwig", "Rabbit To Rabbit" and "Icarus", all original songs that would never be recorded — at most just etched onto tapes hidden away on some forgotten shelf, never to see the light of day. Their local popularity grew, in step with their urge to express themselves, which little by little clashed more and more with the plain difficulty of doing so. It was fun, but English made communication clumsy and limited. When Aimone started writing in Italian, the first EP began circulating around Perugia. It's 2010, and the recording is nothing more than a demo, with the singer's phone number written on it. The blank CDs are burned at home and put together with the help of Luca Benni, who, between Perugia and Umbertide, was livening up the Umbrian music scene to the great delight of the local youth. The record is titled This is a chocolate, released on the "To Lose La Track" label. Along with the record, FASK gave away an actual chocolate — naturally, the most famous and romantic one in the world. The idea was simple: if you hated the record, at least you got a little treat out of it.

FASK embrace the maxim that disappointment can't exist without expectation, and they take the concept to its logical extreme. When, after their shows, people line up to buy the album, all that's ever left is a pleasant surprise. Given the demand, 800 extra copies are pressed, and on February 6th FASK get the precious chance to open for Zen Circus on the stage of the Norman. It's the tour for "Fuck off, all of you", the very period when Appino and co. are starting to become known across the whole country. No sooner have Fast Animals And Slow Kids parked the van than they have to deal with firecrackers that Zen Circus hurl at them as a sneak attack. Luckily for them, that night, another fuse gets lit too. The Tuscan band is struck by the four Umbrian kids opening for them and decides to take their EP home. From the Norman to Italy Wave is a short step — a bit like the one from Livorno all the way to the recording studio.

Self-defense

Maybe you'll agree with me

that the banality of a love song

is only comparable to that of a political one

full stop, full stop, full stop.

Cavalli (Ice For Everyone, 2011) draws on the artistic production of Appino and the technical production of Giulio Favero, bassist of Teatro degli Orrori and a true craftsman of sound. The recording sessions last just seven days and take place near Lari, a little medieval gem on the outskirts of Pisa. There, Zen Circus had recorded “Nati per subire”. For FASK, who had virtually zero professional grounding behind them, it's a real trauma. Some songs from their repertoire are scrapped, others are reworked with the addition of seven new tracks. In terms of distribution, Cavalli is a damp squib; artistically speaking, with hindsight, it doesn't express the band's true identity — if anything, it represses it.

Cavalli is an irreverent, direct album with no digressions, its irony already peeking through in the cover's subtitle: “il tuo album da colorare” ("your colouring-in album"). The scruffiness and lightness of the early songs in Fast Animals And Slow Kids' discography are, above all, a form of self-defence. The debut album recalls those people of indeterminable personality, who have a habit of constantly wavering between seriousness and jest, making themselves, as a result, hard to decipher. Moravia said that words, when not spoken in earnest, come out of the mouth attached to elastic bands and then snap back in, as though they'd never been uttered at all. In Cavalli there's already a pulsing urge to bare oneself, to tell stories by telling one's own, and the shift from English to Italian is the clearest symptom of this. However, this need can't yet be said to be fully satisfied.

The eleven tracks – stripped-down, sharp and neatly trimmed in their lo-fi essence – bring back the days of the bus ferrying high-schoolers to class and the evenings of frantic pogoing in venues reeking of smoke and teenage sweat. “Nervi” is a jolt of high-voltage energy, and “Cioccolatino” is a taste of Guercini's knack for churning out riffs that stay lodged inside your skull. There's a bit of Alex Turner in there, and the odd explosion that recalls Teatro degli Orrori. Amid all this, “Copernico” and “Guerra” are physiological pauses, necessary moments to catch one's breath. The former, in its schizophrenic outpouring, recalls the lucid madness of Marta Sui Tubi; the latter, apocalyptic and incredibly removed from its eight sister tracks, closes out the record. More than a song, “Guerra” is a signal, probably a clue, perhaps simply a warning. It's the farewell left by someone departing while passing over a goodbye, mumbling a more reassuring “see you later”, as if to say “I'll be back… and when it happens, it'll sound roughly like this”.

Dare, find yourself and lose everything

⟦Q1⟧

⟦Q2⟧

⟦Q3⟧

⟦Q4⟧

⟦Q5⟧

In 2013, the Umbrian band proves itself wrong. It sails past its own pillars of Hercules and beyond, giving birth to a new band. It's still called the same thing, but it's the same skin wrapped around something that has changed and that, one way or another, will almost always end up talking about love.

Proving oneself wrong in order to self-determine — that's first and foremost what Hỳbris (Woodworm, 2013) means, and it's a show of solidarity through courage. In an increasingly artificial society, where the priority is choosing the best way to present and show oneself, arrogance lies simply in being what one is — and finally, in Hỳbris, FASK reveal themselves for what they truly are.

The Perugia band don't have transcendental gear or a rig to speak of, but they're well aware of their huge potential in live performance. This awareness drives a clear intent: to bring in a sound expert to work alongside them. The band's new sound engineer will be Andrea Marmorini (guitarist of La Quiete), who will meet FASK at the Karamaski in Bologna and quickly become an integral part of the group. Thanks to him the family grows, and so begins the relationship with “Woodworm”, which will take on the shape of a genuine, unbroken, ongoing partnership. The message Fast Animals And Slow Kids send to the label is clear: they need to work in the way that suits them best, placing sound quality and precision on the altar of sacrifice, so long as they can celebrate the pleasure of being together, of playing around, of having fun, of performing and recording, without being forced to keep these phases in separate watertight compartments.

So Hỳbris, then, has a less rigorous production than Cavalli. Released as a free download and recorded at Macchione – a farmhouse dating back to 1777 facing Lake Montepulciano, which would, over time, become one of the band's symbols – the second album by Fast Animals And Slow Kids springs from much clearer ideas than its predecessor and a far more solid sense of self-awareness than that of two years earlier. It's not a best of collecting the songs played live around town: Hỳbris is a record that speaks, and knows how to speak, if you're able to listen.

The symbiotic assimilation of artists like Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus (“The Monitor” in particular) shaped the gestation of an album in which the latter's folk-punk especially takes centre stage. The symbolism of the cover art that clothes Hỳbris – closely tied to the album's lyrics – seems like a tribute to Neutral Milk Hotel (“In The Aeroplane Over The Sea”). Truth be told, the opener “Un pasto al giorno”, in its initial unfolding – classical guitar, organ, odd time signatures and strings devoted to brilliant melodic intuitions – doesn't even seem that far from the indie-folk atmospheres of the Boston band. The opening triptych is coherent, compact and cut from the same cloth. “Fammi domande”, with a palm mute meant to recall the Who of “Baba O'Riley”, in the way it builds could almost pass for an early Killers B-side; the guitar riffs and the stretching horns of “Combattere per l'incertezza” blend together and breathe life into an ancient flow of energy. The music of Fast Animals And Slow Kids is perfectly and miraculously itself, so much so that you wonder whether these are the same guys who released Cavalli.

“Dove sei” – rarely played live, and particularly cherished by the person who wrote it – is a song about family, with clear autobiographical references – the Lego bricks, above all, a constant presence in the singer's childhood. Its placement within the album turns it into a runway for take-off. Its closing feedback is the thrust behind a track that, in time, would become the Perugia band's anthem.

“A cosa ci serve”, in its thunderous march, seems to carry on by sheer inertia and hover in mid-air. This song is unimaginable without a live performance, just as a live show can't exist without “A cosa ci serve”. The repetitive, hypnotic opening itself seems built to last forever. It feels placed there to be talked over, to welcome a roar from the crowd, to host a band's introduction, or simply to be stepped into. To be used for anything at all. In the end, as always, Guercini puts it to its most effective use: arpeggiating over it. “It was finally a real flight, and not merely a glide,” said Orville Wright at the end of his first journey through the air. The FASK could say the same. “A cosa ci serve” is about flying over a love affair that's ended, looking down on the wild landscape of central Italy. Analysing the phenomenology of an artistic movement, or a single expression of it, is the same as studying its historical context, both on a macro and a micro level. Well, the most interesting side of Fast Animals And Slow Kids is their visceral, proud, almost self-indulgent attachment to the Umbrian land: rural and uneven, mystical and primordial. “Mi troverai marcio in un lago”, they sing at the close, swept along by the horns. That lake, with its three islands, is Trasimeno, shallow yet so vast, far too vast for such a small region. A bit like a grief too big for one man alone.

If “Farse” was written first – and it's objectively the track that best matches the sound of their early days – “Maria Antonietta” is one of the rawest things Fast Animals And Slow Kids have ever produced, both lyrically and in its arrangement. It's a song about loving each other, about hurting each other, and about the razor-thin line that separates the two (“io morivo e invece davo morte”). Hidden behind the girl's fictitious name is an old relationship, from which the singer ultimately emerges as a dying executioner.

What's left of Hỳbris, then, is an extended meditation on the unstoppable passage of time, the word used most often by Fast Animals And Slow Kids throughout their entire discography. There's the utopian notion of reality as something fixed in place (“Calce”), the essential image of fir trees that, as the years go by, grow taller yet remain always the same, unlike men and bands (“Canzone per un abete, parte II”). And finally there are the blinding, dazzling headlights of passing trains, which go by never to return, forcing anyone who sees them coming to make snap decisions (“Treno”).

Hỳbris wins over critics and audience alike. The FASK set off on a tour that will eventually total more than a hundred dates. Everything is going really well. Too well, evidently, because some god, in the end, made them pay for sailing beyond the edges of the world. A few days before the show at Circolo degli Artisti, Fast Animals And Slow Kids are left orphaned of all their instruments. On an ordinary night in early May, between those who sleep and those who can't, someone also sneaks into their van – parked on a street in Arezzo – and strips it bare. Its emptiness belongs to everyone. If you want to make music, even instruments carry their own quiet importance.

The following day, the band releases a statement, oozing a grief that outlines the shape of a sad and final farewell. Word spreads fast, and the FASK, in such a difficult moment, get the chance to realise just how big a following they've built and how many fellow musicians are rallying around them in sincere, heartfelt solidarity. Even the gods realise they've overdone it, and since you don't steal that many instruments only to have no intention of reselling them, the thief is tracked down, and a few days later, behind Arezzo's train station, a grave is found. It's a mass grave of musical instruments buried under the brush. It could look like a funeral, but it isn't. It's the exact opposite of what it means to die.

Letting go a little

We'll be friends,

I promise

The band's third album takes shape while Hỳbris is being toured around Italy. It's dark, at times tragic, certainly the bleakest record in their entire discography. There's death, there's darkness and there's silence. There's the cold of inhospitable places, where the atmosphere feels ancestral and the thought of man stirs up both fascination and fear. If there was a thread tying together the end of Cavalli and the start of Hỳbris, Alaska and its predecessor form a true union, so much so that the former could be called “Hỳbris Volume 2”, except that this time the watchword is “refine” rather than “dare”.

Screaming and purging as the only possible path to redemption, the sole tool capable of numbing the pain, the only way to grow stronger. As in Hỳbris, Fast Animals and Slow Kids are generational but apolitical. They represent no one but themselves and harbour no desire for social vindication. Anyone who labels them punk-rock is putting a coat on them that doesn't fit. Aside from a few musical influences, there's precious little punk in their music.

What begins with “Overture” and ends with “Calci in faccia” is the most accomplished stretch in the band's entire discography, a passage in which they manage to master their talent rather than simply indulge it. Trim a couple of songs and Alaska would be a nearly perfect album. For anyone who, in 2014, loves emo-core, it's manna from heaven, and the Italian kids listening to the Hotelier know they have a homegrown record that comes close to “Home, Like Noplace Is There”, though it smells of the Apennines rather than the forests of Massachusetts. Aimone spits blood from his throat to keep it from pouring out of his heart, and “reacting to the present”, in short, means exactly that.

Someone hits play, and this time it's Alessio Mingoli's cavatina that raises the curtain and sets off a letter of apology titled “Overture”. The sender could well be Explosions In The Sky or Mogwai – the opening strings recall the unsettling atmospheres of “Les Revenants”, released the same year as the soundtrack to the TV series of the same name. Over the relentless bassline, strings and classical guitar arpeggios rise up like mountain ridges tearing through the horizon line. Aimone Romizi's voice is there too, distant and contrite, almost pre-emptively apologetic from the very first instant. He's simply mortified by all the malaise he's about to recount, and that aftermath begins with “Il mare davanti”, which sits near the start of the record but could just as easily soundtrack a film's cathartic ending. Being from Umbria, you can't really describe or speak of the sea, but you can use it as a metaphor. That's why “Il mare davanti” is all about everything still to come, a track about the future and about the sense of inadequacy you feel thinking you'll have to face tomorrow with no energy left in your body (“non ho paura del mare davanti/ma senza i miei denti/ho solo rimorsi”). Strongly evocative and intensely cinematic – its working title was originally “Soundtrack Punk” – the fourth track on Alaska could easily echo through a battle scene; as a closing note to the landings in Normandy, say, or perhaps, more fittingly, to the close of that day when Hannibal, almost twenty centuries ago, slaughtered thousands of Romans among the reeds of Lake Trasimeno.

The following track, "Come reagire al presente," is a tired body letting itself go, because after violence you can only move forward out of inertia. The very first recordings of the song had the working title "Thunder FASK," in honor of Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road", which inspired Guercini. A pure and simple rock song, the most singable on the album, it expands in the chorus and reveals what frames the small window immortalized on the album cover: not simply Lake Montepulciano, but a phase of life, a very specific span of time: being twenty.

Alaska is by far the most reflective album before Maybe It's Not Happiness. The strings on "Coperta" are to the other instruments what the skeleton is to the human body. "Lo sguardo del ritorno/puro romanticismo/disprezzo fra la nebbia/i ricordi che non voglio": a cry like this is equivalent to telling a love story without saying a word. It's three minutes in which the gut twists and turns right up to a sharp, decisive, precise ending, like a door slamming after yet another recrimination. Then silence. Alaska is powerless to heal, but effective at easing the pain. It's a shoulder to cry on and a friendly body to lean against. A friendship that lasts forty minutes and invites you to suffer together.

Comparing the official videos for these last two tracks – conceptually and stylistically poles apart – brings out the confused, conflicted relationship that exists, and has always existed, between the band and this form of artistic expression, for which Fast Animals And Slow Kids have never had any transcendental interest.

"Te lo prometto," halfway through the album, is an introduction to a track with emo-core overtones. It lives on a guitar refrain and lets itself be dragged along by the drums like a chariot pulled by horses. The end of "Con chi pensi di parlare" is the exact moment when you wonder whether Aimone Romizi still has any breath left in his body, at least enough to carry on. "Odio suonare" – paradoxically – is the affirmative answer.

The rest completes the formula by repeating it, right up to a closing that leads exactly back to the starting point, making Alaska nothing more than a circular figure. There's the sound of a tape reaching its end, and if you've still got the strength, you flip the cassette and start over on side B. The first track is called "Overture."

Like an asteroid, but without making a sound

After playing at Sziget and filling Milan's Alcatraz, Fast Animals and Slow Kids decide it's time to stop, without deciding, and without knowing, for how long. It's during this break that Aimone Romizi reaches his Alaska. The real one.

Returning to Umbria means going back to look Alessandro, Alessio and Jacopo in the eye and confess, once again, that without playing music life isn't possible, especially when rivers of words have already overflowed and are just waiting to be sung. Most of the lyrics on Maybe It's Not Happiness (Woodworm, 2017) came out precisely during the solo trip across Washington, Montana and Alaska, resting his limbs on unfamiliar couches and in rooms full of dogs.

Every rule, naturally, has its exception, and this time it's called "Annabelle," born during the tour for the previous album and after repeated listens to the Rolling Stones' "Tumbling Dice". Like a pseudo-Catullan celebration of a female figure – who hovers somewhere between the features of a mother and those of a femme fatale – "Annabelle" is a love story that seems over but isn't, if remembering means still loving a little. "Quando colpisci/so già cosa provano gli altri," Romizi sings, losing himself in a hazy feeling that takes on the shape of jealousy more than of pure love: "un bacio più intenso/la gonna che si sfila lenta/le mani sul viso/provo ancora di tutto qui al buio."

Before "Annabelle," "Tenera età" pushes forward with epic tones, tugging at the soul with keyboards and strings and dragging the imagination into deserted slopes, boundless moors, places where rivers run fast and pour into the sea as if the earth were tilting slightly, reducing the individual to a microscopic being. "Grazie natura/per avermi reso/essere incerto/che si può godere/la tua creazione/la tua grandezza/e il rifiuto al dovere/una quercia che non ha più età/la sua tenera età." Simple, nostalgic and agoraphobic, "Tenera età" best exemplifies the intense bond between nature and the lyrics of Maybe It's Not Happiness, but also between Romizi's inspiration and the single scenes of everyday life: the sight of an oak tree and a lady wrapped in a fur coat, hunched over from the cold. This is what the singer jots down in his notebook, somewhere near Seward, at a bus stop, in the middle of Alaska ("Tenera età"), or the inevitable ritual of tying his shoelaces tight at the start of the green path at Ponte Valleceppi, just below Perugia, every time he's about to start a new run ("Asteroide"). At every show, in every performance, the singer confesses he finds himself facing a collection of polaroids capturing all this and much more, in different colors and shapes.

It's no coincidence that Maybe It's Not Happiness is an album that also contains silences and dynamics with a wider range than the other albums. It feels more colorful, even while working with a palette made up only of dark tones, and it covers a longer, more expansive span of time than Fast Animals And Slow Kids had ever allowed themselves. That's also why it's the most varied and the most considered record of them all. Different contexts, different seasons of the year, conflicting states of mind can all appear within the same song, evidence of a less tightly-wound gestation than usual. On Maybe It's Not Happiness there are lyrics that found their starting point on a given day but were only finished many months later.

The second single, which gives the album its title and closes it, is probably the most beautiful song Fast Animals and Slow Kids have ever written. A tired track, loose like the footsteps of a man in the snows of the north during deep winter; tired is the man, and tired are the heavy guitars that move forward over a snare drum chiseling out statues in honor of the Nineties. In that second when the six strings stumble, right before the song kicks in, you get the exact moment when you know you have to go, but you don't quite know how or where. Then the legs find their strength and the feet start stomping again, because you never forget how to walk. To reach the chorus, you have to wait until the very end, but it's a pleasant wait. If the God of rock had still had a bit of clay left in his hands, he would have kneaded together Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Fucked Up and The Boss: the result would have been the same.

"Capire un errore" dips back into the Rolling Stones' blues-rock, while "11 giugno" fades out into a gothic coda. "L'abitudine fra noi/è la piaga nel mio petto," Romizi sings in "Montana," written on a kayak in the middle of a lake in North America, where the singer found the precious company of a local fisherman. In "Giorni di gloria" there's political struggle as an experience in itself, beyond color and ideology, beyond right and less right. But description remains the primary trait of Maybe It's Not Happiness. It's palpable in "Ignoranza" – close to the alternative rock of Foo Fighters – it's evident in the already-mentioned "Annabelle," and you can pick up on it reading the lyrics of just about any other track.

Listening to the album, it's impossible not to think, even just for a moment, of Eddie Vedder's feverish howls and the ancestral atmospheres of the sprawling "Into The Wild" (2007). It was precisely on the subject of happiness that Christopher McCandless was jotting something down, in Alaska, inside a bus, miles away from anyone else. A man who, in failure and suffering, just before dying, had the rare, lucid and admirable ability to decipher his own mistake and draw a lesson from it, the last one: always share.

It's hard to say what happiness is. It's certainly an infinitive followed by the word "together" – and Fast Animals and Slow Kids know this well – but what is this infinitive? You could quote Tolstoy, as McCandless did. You could wander through the crevices of reason, searching for an answer. Or you could tell the story of four guys who, after losing all their music, found it again intact, in a ditch in Tuscany, and started playing again. Better than before, and louder than before. Maybe that's happiness too.

With Nocturnal Animals (2019), instead, they shuffle the deck and throw in some new cards, hinting right from the title that their most immediate work is also their darkest, gloomiest one. Direct and linear, the record is orderly because it encapsulates the order of the night, the order of the song format (verse-chorus, with no inferiority complex whatsoever) and the order of sound, produced with more care than ever before. The hands of Cantaluppi (Thegiornalisti, Ex-Otago, Bugo) – among the most talked-about in Italian indie – are as steady as a skilled surgeon's, operating step by step with a clear goal in mind. It's thanks to him, too, that the album sounds compact, superbly produced and well played. At times it hits as direct as a punch in the face, at times like a kick to the gut, so much so that listening to it makes you wonder whether the taste of pain always stays the same or changes depending on its source: loneliness ("Nocturnal Animals", "Cinema"), ego(t)ism ("L'urlo"), the decay of a love affair ("Dritto al cuore", "Non potrei mai") — all themes already dear to Fast Animals and Slow Kids, now expressed in a different language.

In the album's better half, the guitar and piano of "Cinema" tear through the silence like a song by The National. "I have only two emotions," sings Matt Berninger in "Don't Swallow The Cap," "careful fear and dead devotion." Over that same fear, Aimone Romizi seems to cast the words of "Radio Radio," another sincere statement of intent, a heterozygous twin to the one found in "Canzoni tristi," which in just a few words says so much about "Nocturnal Animals" (“sai/ per tanti anni/ pensavo fosse alternativo fare il punk/ ma oggi/ ho trent’anni/ vorrei soltanto dire quello che mi va”). Fast Animals And Slow Kids will lose a few diehards here, but they'll win over many more — people who might once have covered their ears at the sound of "Coperta" or "Combattere per l'incertezza," but who could now find themselves pleasantly surprised by the band's daring, and tempted to dig through the discographies of Japandroids, Death Cub For Cutie, The Replacementes and Bruce Springsteen. The guitar hasn't gone away, but rather than smashing everything apart, this time it traces out complex shapes, as in the guitar flourishes of "Novecento," a curtain-call ballad that starts off a bit like Travis used to, before climbing through major-to-minor harmonic passages the Perugia band had seemingly never ventured into before.

On September 17, 2021 comes FASK's sixth album, titled E' già domani, and it perfectly captures a now-adult band: both in age, since the guys have by now crossed into their thirties with a whole new world of responsibilities opening up before them, and artistically, since their fan base has grown over time, and the "handful of diehards" from ten years earlier have become the "several thousand" who can fill an arena. They could have coasted on their reputation, carved out a place in the national pop-culture imagination as the band that could cover the '90s better than anyone, kept leaning on their incredible ability to generate a breathtaking impact — but instead, no: they chose to change course, gradually, avoiding any jarring shocks, putting out work that doesn't always match fan expectations, at times even unsettling, but fitting for a band establishing itself as one of the few alt-rock acts to symbolize their generation. E' già domani opens with the soft arpeggios of an acoustic guitar, with a handmade, old-fashioned sound, over which Aimone Romizi's voice settles in, perfectly embroidering a narrative that doesn't hide its ambition to portray, with great sincerity, the eternal kids of his generation.

"Stupida canzone" brings out the healthy energy everyone expects from a FASK record, along with all the classic ingredients of their visceral approach: grit to spare, the urgency to communicate, an epic stride, the ability to tell universal stories, and those killer choruses that know how to make a young person (and the slightly older ones too) feel like the center of the world. But if you're looking for the seismic jolt of "Nervi" or the invective of "Troia," well, you've come to the wrong place this time. The 2021 FASK are keen to firmly demonstrate that they're a different entity now: the production on E' già domani makes them more "radio-friendly," a term meant with nothing but respect here. A "cleaned-up" direction shaped by a band that wants to at least try to make a living from their art, without betraying themselves, dodging every cliché, careful never to write the same record twice. The new elements also come through unexpected collaborations (the already well-known one with Willie Peyote on "Cosa ci direbbe"), a touch of wave interference (the opening of "Come un animale") and the smoothing of rough edges on tracks that would deserve heavy rotation on radio network playlists ("Portami con te" stands out as a prime example).

Everyone, somewhere, has their own Hotel Esistenza (2024), a place where the rooms look out onto different views, moments or periods of life that for some reason resist the passing of time and the dust settling on things. For Fast Animals And Slow Kids, it stands 15 years on from their debut album, built of doors concealing feelings and emotions that the Umbrian band wouldn't even have dared name in their early years.

Hotel Esistenza is, in fact, an album about love ("Torna" and "Dimmi solo se verrai all'inferno"), about the inadequacy of being part of the world, or simply of a relationship ("Una vita normale"), about the pain of being left behind and exorcised through a mantra ("Torna"), about nostalgia as a side effect of time passing ("Riviera crepacuore").

The record carries forward the stylistic path set out in 2015, with a change in production that doesn't particularly stand out on listening (Pallotti in place of Cantaluppi). Somewhat surprisingly, though, there are also glimpses back to more distant chapters. The irony of the single "Festa," for instance, harks back to the band's Perugia origins, to the first, irreverent Cavalli, while just a few rooms further along, "Brucia" – one of the record's best tracks – brings to mind the pulsing energy of the old Hybris (2013) and Alaska (2014), as if this back-and-forth between tension and release, major and minor keys, concealed the sudden rebellion of an adolescence never truly over, only hidden and dormant.

Through its highs and lows, the record's main strengths are its songwriting – never so self-aware, deliberate and mature – and its natural flow, despite being more varied and multifaceted than their previous work.

This is who Fast Animals And Slow Kids are today. You might catch echoes of Zen Circus, War on Drugs, Jimmy Eat World, Titus Andronicus, The National, Sanremo-style pop or radio rock, but this isn't imitation or an exercise in style — it's simply the expression of an identity that changes, as it naturally does, while following its own path. A path that today, for Fast Animals And Slow Kids, leads to the rooms of Hotel Esistenza.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("E' già domani")

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