Nero Kane - Love, Death and Poetry

Nero Kane is the gothic-dark-folk project of Marco Mezzadri, which began as a solo project under the name Nero before being enriched by the collaboration of audiovisual artist Samantha Stella. Nero Kane's music probes deeply into the dark-folk poetics, its fascination with darkness and death, that intensely gothic feeling that life is just a brief parenthesis between two absolute voids that continually draw us in, as can be gleaned from the videos that are meant to be an integral part of the listening experience. The compositions are therefore metaphors for the fleetingness of life and the futility of contemporary society's headlong rush toward nothingness.

The foundation of Marco Mezzadri's ideas lies in the total absence of percussion and in the slow, dilated atmospheres that – from this point of view – go even beyond standard dark-folk. The settings are the American deserts, which have provided so much inspiration to artists all over the world, and cemeteries, meeting points between life and death. Mezzadri and Stella could be described as the Italian Michael Gira/Jarboe in their works of apocalyptic folk, as heirs to the tragic poetry of Nico in others, at times recalling the pitch-black post-rock of Labradford, with a voice that becomes a mere sigh in the darkness.

The debut under the name Nero is the clandestine Lust Soul (2016), now impossible to find, closer to a more traditional gothic rock that pays homage to Death In June and often sounds somewhere between Christian Death and the Cramps, still far from his imminent future.

In the same year he released a live performance titled Hell23, for the first time under the moniker Nero Kane, the first high point of his discography. It's a long (seventeen-minute) and daring odyssey of cosmic drones, distorted guitars and spoken-word declamations. Devised by Samantha Stella and presented at the OED art gallery in Milan and at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles, this audiovisual performance shows for the first time the shamanic side of the duo, drawing on the Cumaean Sibyl and clearly on the soundtrack music of the Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem duo.

On Love In A Dying World (2018), Nero Kane moves closer to a starker, darker folk, while Samantha Stella handles the experimental on-the-road documentary/film that accompanies the album. The sound shifts from the gothic rock of the first album to a folk-blues close to American frontier culture, captivated by wide open spaces and the sense of freedom they afford. It's clear that the main theme running through the whole album is, as ever, the poetics of death and the transience of everything around us. If the world is dying, love still remains present within it in some cases – the only ones worth living for – to savor the last flashes of freedom and happiness. The stark blues of "Black Crows" follows this path, as do the repeated guitar figures of "Now The Day Is Over" or the apocalyptic folk of "Desert Soul".

To close, the instrumental title track, with its glacial layers of guitar, represents the album's most poetic and experimental moment.

Tales Of Faith And Lunacy (2020) is the project's definitive consecration. Gira/Mezzadri finally finds his Jarboe/Stella, and the symbiosis is palpable. Samantha Stella's keyboards become an integral part of the sound, considerably expanding its sonic possibilities, particularly the concept of music as pure atmosphere, the black backdrop to the lyrics of the two alternating vocalists. The album's masterpiece, and perhaps the high point of their entire discography, is the ten minutes of "Angelene's Desert", which opens on a keyboard drone – sounding like a Nico track declaiming imminent apocalypses – over which the guitar delicately embroiders almost psychedelic notes, like a gothic prayer recited by a priestess/shaman. "Magdalene" seems like an even more desert-like version of "Angelene's Desert", with guitar notes introducing a desolate, lysergic journey. The glacial arpeggios of "Mechthild" recall the desolate poetics of Labradford, just as the doom crescendos of "Lord Won't Come" bring to mind the dark ballads of muse Darkher.

A European tour followed, documented on the live album Tales of Faith And Lunacy – Live Session (2022), recorded in Teramo in December 2021.

Two years later came Of Knowledge And Revelation, an even more macabre and visionary evolution of its predecessor. The desert, understood both as a real place and as an inner desert, is now fully tangible: the tracks stretch out, the voice becomes ever more of a sigh and the music ever more atmospheric. The perfect synthesis of the duo's ideas can be found in the tracks that open and close the album, "Lady Of Sorrow" and "Sola Gratia". The former is a kind of dedication to death, recited in a cemetery while awaiting one's final farewell, where Stella's voice joins Mezzadri's in full Gira/Jarboe style. "Sola Gratia" is the new poetic high point. It opens with keyboards that are then submerged by guitar distortion, like a gothic prayer recited in a catacomb. Another gothic gem is "Burn The Faith", dominated by synths that – once again – recall the darker universe of Nico and Darkher.

For The Love, The Death And The Poetry (2025) is probably their most mature, cohesive and powerful album. A direct work that nonetheless loses none of the poetic coherence that has always set them apart: dark reflections on life, love and death, intertwined to the point of making the three themes inseparable, in the great tradition of the American songwriters who have shaped Nero's writing.

The journey opens with "As An Angel's Voice": a single note pulses like the tolling of a funeral bell, introducing the obsessive, otherworldly vocal mantra "Come to me", as if coming from a threshold between life and the afterlife. With a harsher volume and a more distorted guitar, it could almost pass for a track by the Swans. From the start, Nero Kane's music reveals itself as a poetic requiem, a funeral song where love and death blur into one.

"My Pain Will Come Back To You" shows her dark songwriter soul, with cursed lyrics that sing of the indelible, inescapable pain of existence. The guitar, stretched out and vaguely psychedelic, pulls the listening experience toward a hypnotic finale. One of the album's high points is "Land Of Nothing": Samantha Stella recites words about the horror of life ("Where lovers are only shadows, here is the earth") over two very slow mellotron notes that create a spectral, solemn atmosphere.

"The World Heedless Of Our Pain" sounds like an evocation of Labradford: minimal lines that slowly expand until Stella's voice enters, here coming close to a neoclassical intensity. Dusk takes shape in the apocalyptic folk of "There Is No End", which reflects on the endless cycle of existence, a meaningless eternal return. The closing comes with "Until The Light Of Heaven Comes": two low notes, almost like a cello, supporting words that ask for forgiveness and relief ("finché la mia anima non brucerà"). A suspended farewell, a cathartic goodbye that recalls the atmospheres of "Desertshore".

With For The Love, The Death And The Poetry, Nero Kane delivers, for the first time, an album with no drop in tension: every track lives in a perfect balance, a stillness that is a stylistic signature but never stasis, since it continually shifts and regenerates from one piece to the next. It is a work of full maturity, one that seals a coherent artistic path while also paving the way for a future that promises to be just as long and fertile.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google