Management - All the melancholy I need

Luca: We really did choose this melancholic mood among the many songs we'd written. As you know, when you write an album, you don't just write ten songs, you write many more! And we realized that a lot of them shared a thread, a concept: even though “Sumo” isn't a concept album, there's a common thread running through the tracks, and it's melancholy, made up of memories, past stories, experiences. Both pleasant memories worth reliving, and sad ones that you bring back up to cry over: absences, abandonments, people who are no longer here. There's a desire to reconnect with these people, with these memories “that make you sad, a bit melancholic”. Alda Merini used to say: “Melancholy is the joy of sadness”. Even the joy of remembering something beautiful brings a bit of sadness with it, if it comes from the past. Melancholy is a beautiful feeling and every artist loves to wallow in it and amplify it. We try to work on that sensitivity that's capable of moving both us and other people. It almost takes a course of psychoanalysis to deal with these subjects.

Marco: It wasn't even that much of a forced choice, more of a natural one, really. When you realize that 42 out of 50 tracks are sad ones... You sacrifice even a good song if it has nothing to do with the theme or feeling you wanted to express, and so you choose that guiding thread.

Luca: That was exactly the point...

Marco: Self-sabotage!

Luca: "Come La Luna" was a song that was very heavily arranged and produced: we decided to strip it right down, even though listening to it now it actually becomes something more difficult. It's not the big radio single, but it forces you into an atmosphere. We're in a room: it's dark, we see what's inside. That way you step right into the thoughts and story of the person being described. Marco rightly made this minimal choice to immediately draw the listener into this small, dark thing that is our deepest, most intimate self.

Compared to your previous records, on “Sumo” we hear fewer guitars and the lyrics are much sharper: if before your lyrics were a slap in the face, now they're a foil's precise thrust.

Marco: This record is absolutely packed with guitars! But there are ways and ways of using them! It's a period where distortion bothers me, so I used a lot of synths. But a lot of sounds that sound like synthesizer are actually guitars, while the drums are all drum machine. It's a new way for us of using guitars.

Luca: As for the lyrics, you used a nice image, so I'll borrow it. For me, these lyrics are a kind of harakiri. A foil to strike exactly the emotion you want to draw out of the listener… but also out of myself! I dug deep, even psychoanalytically, to find the words for “Sumo”. We used to be much more impulsive in our choices, with that adolescent force, energy, and even arrogance. Now that we're more mature, with a bit more humility, we've given ourselves more time to choose the exact words: because they have to be right, and people have to understand them. We've often and deliberately led the listener toward confusion, to make them think, but also to give them 10,000 interpretations of a song, even leading them astray: maybe a song has 46 different interpretations! In this case, talking about emotions, listeners might have different interpretations too, but they're all rooted in the same experience we're telling in the song.

Some of our old songs contain secrets in their meaning that we'll never reveal… Once, about “Il numero otto”, a fan wrote a beautiful email: “If you watch seagulls flying and crossing paths, they make an 8…”, and I said: “You're crazy… but how beautiful though!” (laughs, ed.)

Luca: I only know how to write about things I've actually lived. There are so many wonderful ways to write and tell about lived experience. Even “from the bar”, the way it was so beautifully done De André in “La Città Vecchia”: I just can't do that. It's another choice we made to focus better on the feelings we know how to express, musically too. I want to say something I feel I can say and that represents me now, because it's mine, taken from an autobiographical experience. “Sumo” is super-autobiographical, which is why it hurt to search for it, to write it.

As for the “you” – who is always a woman – sometimes it gets blurred. Sometimes it's a love, sometimes it's an encounter, the heavy absence of someone important, sometimes it's a love that's ended. It's lots of things, and they all carry very strong emotions with them, and when emotions are that strong they start to resemble each other and blur together at the same time. Losing someone you loved is very similar to the end of a relationship. It's nice, and it ties every track together as if it were a single love story: but in reality there are lots of stories of death and abandonment in there. I don't want to make the joke, but… someone out there is going to end up making love to a song that's actually about someone who's no longer with us.

Marco: Just think of “Naufragando”, put on Spotify's “Indie Triste” playlist: for us, that's a point of pride! (laughs, ed.)

Marco: I work a lot at home, and I won't say it was ready, but almost! The studio work in Naples lasted months, with several trips, but the “super-focused” period lasted a couple of weeks. Only one track was a bit less ready than the others and needed a few more days (“Per i tuoi occhi tristi”), but let's say it was already set in stone. I was “only” able to take advantage of the wonders in the studio, full of amazing vintage gear.

Luca: The thrill comes from finding yourself in a magical place, in a historic studio where your childhood idols once passed through – from film, theatre, television – and it makes you feel a bit more responsible about what you're doing. It's really moving: Maradona walked through here, I can't just walk in and mess up the pass!

Marco: It's the Italian Abbey Road.

Luca: You get carried away and the energy that comes through makes you make certain choices… which then almost always turn out right, especially the most personal ones, but also the strangest. Same goes for the lyrics: they were more or less ready, but the emotion you put into them when you actually play them there…

When we listen to Mozart, we're not really hearing him: we're hearing an orchestra, people performing him. Every musician, every conductor puts their signature on it and makes each performance performance different. When we went in there, we performed it and made choices “guided” by that magical energy inside. The song selection happened there. The minimal, melancholic spark, the electro-singer-songwriter formula between lyrics and music, comes from the choices made there. We could have picked ten other tracks and had a completely different record now, but when four or five elements align, that's the result…

Marco: On the record, references to the universe keep coming back, both poetically and lyrically…

You got ahead of Saturn's return!

Luca: We anticipated everything, even the Moon: but do you think I knew it was the fiftieth anniversary?

Marco: The Auditorium Novecento has a huge hall, and being able to crank the amp up to 10 in a space that big really helps… the guitars become spatial, gigantic.

You're on your fifth album in just a few years: is it too soon to take stock of your career?

Marco: Honestly I'd never looked at it from that angle, you're making me think about it right now…

 

Luca: Our first official album, the one after the "provincial self-productions", was conceived to be played live in the round, in venues, for performing. Making an album to take "on the road"…

Marco: Also backed by other players, labels and press offices. I don't believe much in luck, and having someone behind you who believes in you and invests in you made a big difference in "Auff". Then the album had its impact and from there things exploded pretty quickly and we never stopped again.

Luca: 2012, first official album… here we are in 2019: seven years, five albums! At the start we never got tired, we'd tour, write new songs, record them, the tour would end, a week later the new album would come out and a month after that the new tour would start. We went crazy! This time, for the first time, we took two years off, and I think it'll surprise you when I say I never want to stop again. Those two years were awful! We could put out another two albums over the next three years. So we could end up with 7 albums in ten years! Personally, I can't stand staying still that long. But on the other hand, it was a good break, because it led us to this album, which I consider our best.

Is it too soon to talk about this as your "mature" album?

Marco: Just the simple fact that we self-produced it… Five years ago I couldn't have done what I've done now.

 

Luca: A metaphor comes to mind: between lyrics written by a rapper and the freestyle. The freestyle is a contest of skill, seeing who comes up with the best rhymes on the spot, fresh, thrown out there. And I don't know how they do it: if I don't spend two days thinking about a rhyme, it just won't come to me! They're masters. This time, compared to our past work, we thought things through more. Whereas before we did more freestylethis time we really thought carefully about the notes and the words, giving them the weight they deserve. "This has to have some depth," we told ourselves, meaning putting our experience and what we've lived through into it.

How did the collective song "Sessossesso " come about?

Marco: It was a promise! It's a track we wrote with our fans on Instagram through the stories. They always accused us of using social media media really badly, so we tried to do something that would involve everyone, and we tried to write this collective lyric, starting from choosing the themes. Obviously they suggested tons of them, some even quite serious – like migrants, death, politics – but out of respect we decided not to go there, and so the most popular theme won out: sex! From there we picked out various angles, and they started sending us loads of funny material, like personal traumas. We'd basically become our fans' sex therapists.

Marco: You just don't say that! (laughs, ed.).

Luca: I don't think there is one! Anyway, these things always come out after months. Right now it's still too early, we're still happy and satisfied!

Marco: At least I don't go back and listen to the record once it's out. When we finished mastering, I was feeling sick of it, I didn't want to hear it anymore! I'll get back to it in my own time. Also because the tour's coming up soon…

Just as we were transcribing this interview, the first tour dates were announced:

February 7 Pescara // Mega'

February 14 Turin // Cap10100

February 15 Bologna // Locomotiv

February 21 Conversano (Ba) // Casa Delle Arti

February 22 Naples // Galleria 19

February 28 Segrate (Mi) // Magnolia

February 29 Rome // Monk