Rares – Militant Songs Against Individualism

Three years on from “Femmina”, Rareș's return with “Sincere!” and the live set he's been touring up and down the country seem to shift the centre of gravity of his music: electronics and sonic exploration haven't disappeared, but they now make more room for the song form, with a corresponding new focus on lyrics.
Behind this shift lies a reflection on sincerity, understood not merely as autobiographical material but as an emotional openness to life in all its contradictions, facets and difficulties.
Starting with the phenomenology of love. The real kind, which can also let you down.
A fragility built on empathy, in which showing vulnerability becomes the reason for a deep exchange between human beings, but also the basis of the relationship between experimentation and songwriting. All of it filtered through pop.
It's no coincidence, then, that the album has been so warmly received, even making an appearance on the sales charts (the first vinyl pressing sold out quickly and was followed by a second run), and widening Rareș's audience through the highly immersive experience of his live shows, where people sing, mosh, get emotional, and surrender to the music alongside the other bodies listening with them. We spoke with the artist about it.

Back when you made your previous record, “Femmina”, your work foregrounded electronics, and your live shows back then had an almost dance-oriented sound. Now, on both fronts, I see you somewhere else entirely. So what personal needs, and then artistic ones, led you to embrace this new direction?
It's not really a new direction so much as the distillation of a whole series of experiments, some more acoustic, some more electronic, and right now I feel like I'm somewhere in between the two, in a kind of ideal synthesis. Maybe the sound betrays a leaning towards the more acoustic, more “played” side, but if I hadn't made “Femmina”, with all its missteps, I wouldn't have been able to refine my songwriting process to the point I started from this time — guitar-and-voice songs.
Alongside that, as a personal need, there was a search for truth, both in relationships with others and in the dialogue with myself. It's a real theme for me. I think I've always lived a life divided into separate compartments: family, life with friends, romantic life and so on, whereas I've always felt the need to bring those different spheres together. There are memes going around that make me laugh a lot, like: me inviting every person in my life to the same dinner, with predictably disastrous results. So I'm clearly not the only one who feels this way. I think it's very hard to hold every situation in your life in the same room. But I feel it as a kind of need. I think I've spent a lot of time navigating between sincerity and its opposite, between the said and the unsaid. In my early years of primary school I used to have people call me by my middle name, Gabriel. It sounds like a small thing, but to me it's significant. You pretend in order to feel part of a context. Sincerity, on the other hand, became the subject of the album, hence the title too. I tried to connect the dots, or rather I set out on a path to get there one day. It really is a programme, a manifesto addressed to myself. 

And on a strictly musical level?
The big difference between the earlier album and live show and the way I write, record and play live today is that back then I was much more impulsive. I wrote by improvising: I'd set up some loops and sing freely, sometimes keeping the very first takes. On “Femmina” you can hear me in my bedroom in Bologna, in a state of creativity that was a bit muscular, if you like. But for me it was important to capture a first emotion that I could then play around with, breaking it down, rebuilding it, processing it. And above all I was chasing a sound that was as impactful as possible. This time, instead, what I want is for what I've written to actually come across: I needed to make an album of songs, and I need to play it. While I was writing it, I asked myself what songs actually are. And I'm convinced they're one of the greatest communicative tools we have right now. Maybe they always have been, certainly since the twentieth century onward, once they also became a marketable product, one that circulates in people's homes and acts as a vehicle for emotional connection. I needed to use that vehicle, and through writing I tried to figure out how to make the most of it. I wasn't looking for pure impulsiveness anymore, I didn't want free forms with no choruses, but an album of songs where synthesis was a key criterion. The initial demos are very electronic: my first inspiration was Martin Rev, “See Me Riding”, an incredible record I stumbled on in a playlist by Colapesce. Martin Rev writes in a minimal way, every bar counts as one, there's none of the breathing room you get with played records, the rhythm isn't that of a human drummer. At first the songs were like that — I even wanted to use just a metronome to make the rhythms for the whole album. Then I realised that this kind of musical exploration was, in a way, “hiding” the songs, burying them. So I decided to separate the strand of musical experimentation from the strand of developing an actual, proper song. At this stage, combining the two risked making me lose both the pleasure of musical play and the pursuit of a beautiful, finished song with the right form. I'd like my brother to listen to this album. He's a dental technician, he has a son, he and his wife work a huge amount, they don't have time to listen to music. While I was writing, I was thinking of people like them.

In fact there are instrumentals on the album. Is that where the experimentation you're talking about shows up?
Yes, yes, it was great because the album was already written and in those two moments we just played around a bit. With Tobia, aka Novecento, a brother to me in music, with whom I've made every record and with whom I also play live, for the intro and outro we used elements from the title track, so as to enclose the whole album within the theme that inspired it.

What's the emotional wave of these songs like when you play them live?
Very strong. There are two or three songs that are hard to sing because I've distilled things I've lived through, or stories of people I care about deeply, so it's an album where I put a lot of things I wanted, in some way, to resolve, to close, but also to preserve. During the performance, the demons come out, and when that happens they're extremely delicate, intense moments. People identify with the songs and sing along with me, but living through their own memories, situations and personal stories. What strikes me is seeing their lips mouth the same words back at me, even though on their lips those words carry different meanings, ones that touch them personally. The underlying emotion, though, is the same, and that's the magic of the live performance, a magic that brings the song to completion.

Earlier you mentioned Martin Rev as an influence, at least in the initial writing. Actually, listening to the album, I picked up on an elaboration of sadness that even reminds me of jazz singers. Think of Chet Baker singing “So che ti perderò” in Italian. I ask because in your genetic make-up I can hear this vocal chromosome capable of distilling sadness towards some distant point. Have you ever listened to Chet?
When you mentioned him, I got chills. There was a period in my life when I lived through jazz very intensely, and not alone. And Chet Baker in particular, including Chet Baker the singer, is genuinely an emotional peak in my life as a musician and as a listener. I'm truly surprised you can hear it in my music, because it's not jazz and it's not sung that way. Clearly, though, that influence exists and it spoke directly to your sensibility. You've surprised me in a good way, and at the same time you've brought me back to the genesis of this album.

On an album that grows out of such personal material, though, there are guest features. How did you approach them?
It ties into another of the album's central themes, namely the sense of community. Every so often — and I won't name names, but I'm thinking in particular of one very big artist — you get a figure who thanks their brothers, their family, but then adds that if they've got to where they are now, they “owe it only to themselves”. For me it's not like that, because if, through some domino effect, your label stops working for you, your publisher stops working for you, your management drops you, and so on, you might have reached the top, but if you're on your own, you're bound to fall. For me, making music is also a way of bringing a community to life, not just a musical one, but a human one. Everyone involved is a friend of mine. Before we start playing we always have dinner together, or an aperitivo, we spend time together, we walk, we talk. That's what I want to be. In the three long years when, for various reasons, I didn't do anything, their support really mattered. Tobia, aka Novecento, who weighed up four or five different versions of the new songs and followed me meticulously the whole way through, Jako, who wrote and sang “Giorni di sole” with me, Marco Giudici, who gave me the use of his studio and his gear, Faccianuvola, and Giovanni Truppi himself, working with whom is enriching partly because of our age difference. We're still in touch with him too and working together on other things. And then there's Gaia Morelli, a wonderful singer-songwriter with a beautiful voice, Ok Giorgio, with whom I had a really lovely two-way exchange, and Lorenzo Travaglini, who, after various events tied to the Romagna floods, opened Bosco Studio in the Apennines, where, for instance, he recorded Gaia Banfi. Lorenzo played almost all the piano parts on “Sincere!”, hosted me for two weeks in his incredible studio, helped me arrange the album, and basically taught me how to play piano. Those are things you can't put a price on.

And which, given the names you've mentioned, also seem to carry a political value as a form of cultural resistance. What do you think?
Absolutely. There are also moments of politics in the strict sense on the album, like when in “Giorni di sole” I sing “costruiremo insieme un'altra volta un rifugio/ per stare al sicuro dagli americani”. In that passage of the lyrics I'm responding to a need to take a stand on a strictly political level too, but there's a broader one, just as important to me, that moves in the same direction anyway. On one hand, I've tried to make my songs welcoming, inclusive. On the other, I've tried to stay vulnerable, because I know vulnerability makes you stronger, and that showing a distilled pain can help people feel better, can help build community. A lot of people see their own love, a child, their relationship with their parents, reflected in these songs. That's why I like to think of my music as militant, in the sense that it takes a stand against every form of individualism.

(6 September 2026)

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