Post Nebbia - Under a roof of "Pastafrolla"

The reason, actually, is fairly practical. All our previous records were born at home, on the computer: written to be played, but not the result of collective work in the rehearsal room. This one had similar starting points too, but there was much more exchange between me and the band during the writing stage. We got into the rehearsal space and reworked the arrangements so that everything would sound natural. When you write parts on a computer, alone at home, sometimes you don't even realize you're forcing things. The band is a great filter that lets you pick out what a song really needs.

It's a project that has taken many forms over the years. And it may well change again. We started out as kids, working together. The next two records, especially “Entropia Padrepio”, where the contribution of Fight Pausawas essential, I made on my own, partly because it was the height of the Covid era. But by the time this album's lineup came together, I'd already played live a huge amount, and we'd also developed a bond of friendship.

I've been making music since I was 16. I needed to face a studio setting without anyone lending me a hand. The approach I took owes a lot to what Fight Pausa taught me. As a producer he has a great sensitivity toward artists - the record he recently produced for Valerio Visconti, for instance, is beautiful. “Pista Nera” was mixed by him regardless, and it's from him that I learned to compose and arrange while keeping in mind a sort of mental image of what the record could become at the mixing stage.

Now that you make me think about it, I'd say yes. Necessarily so. First of all because of the drum sound, recorded live, and then because I worked a lot on the lyrics to make them “sound”, even during rehearsals. Italian isn't a language made for rock, and yet we wanted this record to have a rock sound in the truest sense of the word.

Yes (laughs), that's basically what it's about. The idea of using the resort's loudspeaker audio on the first track was Giulio's, our keyboardist. We had this instrumental track, but it had no narrative character to tie it to the rest, and it felt a bit wasted. So we said to ourselves, "let's try putting in something like kids getting lost on family outings," and we asked our manager, who's from a town near Belluno, to record us some audio of people with a genuine mountain accent.

Yes, it's an image. I tried not to be didactic, not to over-explain. Music is amediumthat has to stay simple and direct.

In a way, yes. My generation was born just before 9/11. We got a sort of taste of the the '90s, we savored the tail end of that peak of civilization, when there seemed to be peace, political stability, prosperity and so on. When the first troubles started, I was still too young to understand. By 2008 you'd watch the news and it had turned bleak, there were parents of school friends of mine losing their jobs, but I struggled to grasp what was actually happening.

And disgust along with them, as a result. That's the strong emotion I tried to bring out in this record. Disgust at the fact that everyone in my generation has in front of their eyes the paradigm of how things are supposed to go, of what the future is supposed to look like. Think of Fantozzi's films. He's portrayed as a loser, living an alienating life. And yet he has a car, a house of his own, a family, a stable job, and he'll get a pension. That cosmic-loser condition looks like a mirage today. Experience is slowly teaching us that if you expect to live the life your parents lived, to study, find a job right away, retire at a decent age and actually build things, well, that's pretty hard. Actually, it's not even hard. It's practically impossible.

Exactly.

It tears you away from the illusion, and to some extent from the doom, of living day by day. So it's a kind of disorientation that, if it doesn't have a happy ending, at least aims for a good one. At the start there are the questions. "Why do I have to bust my ass? Why study? Why bother trying?" And at a moment when you can't find answers in immediate everyday life, music is one of the things that can give you a gaze that reaches beyond it.

All of your records are a bit like concept albums, in the sense that the lyrics revolve around a theme. How does this kind of writing come about?

There's always one track I start from. A song that clarifies my ideas about what I want to say and opens the way for everything else. On “Entropia Padrepio” it was “Cuore semplice”, on “Canale paesaggi” it was “Televendite di quadri”, and here the turning-point track was “Pastafrolla”, which is somewhat the image of a nest collapsing, of a civilization falling apart.

"The Simpsons" is for me an inexhaustible source of gems, especially the early seasons, which have the merit of telling you complex things in a super-immediate way. Music works the same way. You have to manage to take something complex and compress it into an instant, turn it into a punch. Even for "Pastafrolla", the track I mentioned to you, which served as the inspirational core of the album, I drew on a scene from The Simpsons where the Springfield mafia, after winning a contract, builds a school using crackers instead of bricks, which of course dissolve at the first rain. The genius of it is that while it hands you back a problem like corruption, it manages to entertain you. It goes deep. It's not just a meme; it's a powerful emotion, but one that makes you burst out laughing.

While you were drying out the sonic magma of the previous records, the harmonic exploration also grew deeper. In fact, here and there in the writing, I can hear the influence of Brazil emerging. Does that check out?

I love Brazilian pop music, it completely bewitched me from the moment I discovered it. I started, in a rather unromantic way, by making myself a playlist on Spotify and gradually listening to everything the algorithm suggested. The Spotify algorithm is “Evil”. But when an evil does you good, what can you say to it? I discovered Milton Nascimento, the Brazilian phase of Ornella Vanoni, the record by Chico Buarque de Hollanda with Ennio Morricone.

This is our first album that really breaks away, in my opinion, from the whole vein indie we've been mining since 2015, which, I'll say it without hesitation, has always been present to some degree in our style. Given the subject matter and tone of the record, we went back to listening to some more dark, more intense stuff. It reminds me of a Teatro degli Orrori, who are actually getting back together now. Obviously we're very different, but I saw them when I was 15. They were at a point where they were about to give it all up, but they played in a way that ripped your guts out and scrambled them before shoving them back in. Those are examples I feel emotionally close to. 

The great thing about that kind of situation, which we already experienced playing at the Transmusicales in Rennes on the previous tour, is that they get you performing in front of a huge crowd, because over the years audiences there have learned to check out the flyers for the bands coming through each year, listen to them beforehand, and then go see them live. And you sense an interest, an attentiveness that's almost moving. It wouldn't be a bad thing if a more systematic space opened up in foreign circuits, even for projects sung in Italian.