Andrea Laszlo De Simone – The Craftsman of Unease

2025 has confirmed that the Italian singer-songwriter universe is far more fertile than a cursory glance might suggest. While strong figures capable of chipping away at the dominance of homegrown rap in the mainstream (or pseudo-indie) sphere are admittedly scarce, there's no shortage of talented personalities who have carved out valuable underground niches for themselves in recent years. The leading name in this teeming undergrowth is undoubtedly the very long one belonging to Andrea Oliviero Laszlo De Simone Saccà, known to friends simply as Andrea Laszlo De Simone. A foreign body within today's Italian music scene, in truth, but perhaps precisely for that reason one of its finest exponents. Three albums plus an EP, together with a handful of evocative live performances, have fuelled a cult following that ranks among the most devoted on the contemporary national scene, kept alive by the charismatic yet deeply reserved personality of this gentleman of unease, allergic to the spotlight and devoted to a handcrafted, highly personal approach to composition.

But since the old saying still holds true – especially in Italy – that "nemo propheta in patria", it took the French, with the awarding of a prestigious César Prize in 2024, to point out that we might have had a new champion hiding under our noses all along. So let's retrace the remarkable rise of the mustachioed Piedmontese storyteller, starting from his beginnings, tucked away behind the drums of a band called Nadàr Solo.

Ecce Uomo, Donna

Andrea Laszlo De Simone was born in Turin on 18 February 1986. Passionate about music since childhood, he immediately showed a self-taught, reserved approach. He writes, plays and produces almost entirely on his own, working mainly at home and favouring a climate of creative isolation. Over time he has explored a wide range of production approaches, from electronics to forms close to classical music, bringing in selected musicians along the way for the final stages of the arrangements.

His first real experience, however, wasn't as a solo artist but as drummer for Nadàr Solo, a band that also featured his brother Matteo as singer and leader. He also played in the Turin duo Anthony Laszlo alongside his close friend Anthony Sasso, former guitarist and singer of Milena Lovesick. But that wasn't his natural habitat, and so Andrea Laszlo gradually began to form the idea of writing and producing his own music.

His solo debut came in 2012 with the self-produced album Ecce Homo, a highly experimental project whose title echoes Friedrich Nietzsche's work of the same name. The record, recorded alone in the proverbial bedroom with makeshift means, presents itself with a deliberately compressed quality and painstaking post-production work, which even included transferring the tracks onto magnetic tape to achieve a warmer, more authentic sound.

Shot through with an unsettling psychedelic streak, Ecce Homo oscillates between confession, irony and an expressive urgency that finds its true mark in the sonic details. The songs work like imperfect but sincere snapshots, starting with the restless opener "I nostri piccoli occhi", built on a kind of dazed lo-fi singer-songwriter style that winks a little at Enzo Carella and Lucio Battisti. The pulsing electronics of "Il buco nero", "È colpa mia" and the title track itself instead recall Bluvertigo (or Battiato as reread by Morgan and company), amid plasticky keyboards, disorienting chimes and nonsense lyrics.

"La causa delle intenzioni" works in a more classically singer-songwriter register, with jittery guitar riffs trailing De Simone's vocals and drums that ebb and flow in a surreal rise and fall, while in "Good Goodbye" the English survives only in the title, making way for another surrealist sketch marked by crooked, irregular rhythms.

There are also early traces here of that unmistakable vintage-ballad format Laszlo would go on to develop more fully later, turning it into one of the defining features of his songwriting: "Perdutamente" is already a captivating study in that style, with his filtered voice lost in the void and a dreamlike gait marked by chiming keyboards, while the sharp lines of "Spostamento per inerzia" already reveal that formidable gift for writing that, over the years, has produced some of the most striking lyrics in recent Italian song.

Voler essere ricco

È sciocco

I soldi: un labirinto

Da allocco

Se quello che possiedi

Dopo il decesso

Torna da solo

Al proprio posto

 

La morte non esiste

La morte non esiste

Esiste per chi è vivo

E io sono vivo

 

Ed anche il sogno non esiste

But those who have never dreamed seem sad

The second half of the album leans further into experimental territory, with fragmented electronics in the vein of Radiohead's “Kid A”-“Amnesiac” period, while still essentially holding to song form. “In aderenza” is another unhinged shard of lo-fi (and high-creativity) songwriting, built around disorienting choruses and a tight tangle of keyboards and guitars forming a biting arrangement, while the filtered, distorted vocals of “Rasségnati” get swallowed into a vortex of keyboards, flowing into the other gem, “Sola”, an electronic mantra worthy of Battisti's white period. The two closing tracks (“Senza peso” and “Felice”) close the album on increasingly dissonant, dreamlike tones, amid childlike choruses and terse lines like “Felice di non esserne certo”. It's an ending that paints the picture of an artist fully aware of his own limits (of resources, first and foremost) but determined to turn them into a language all his own.

Ecce Homo is a decidedly rough debut, but it already offers an effective self-portrait of De Simone's style. More than a “minor record”, it's the document of an artist building his own lexicon from scratch, starting from a strong existential urge and entrusting it to a deliberately imperfect sound. Behind the raw, bare-bones production, in fact, lie precise choices, a way of constructing emotion within song form that anticipates the maturity of his later work. It's an album where nothing is yet definitive, but everything is already deeply personal.

After releasing a few music videos (“Solo un uomo”, “11:43”, “I nostri piccoli occhi”), in early 2014 De Simone crossed paths with some highly active musicians from Turin's underground scene, and after months of rehearsals a proper band emerged: Damir Nefat (guitar), Daniele C (bass and backing vocals), Filippo Cornaglia (drums), Zevi Bordovach (keyboards) and his inevitable friend Anthony Sasso (backing vocals and percussion). This is the prelude to the birth of the album that would finally reveal De Simone's talent: a small Italian indie prodigy, hidden behind a bulky Frank Zappa-style moustache.

The album is titled Uomo, Donna (2017) and shows striking elective affinities with some giants of Italian song. Take, for instance, the second track “Sogno l’amore” and ask yourself whether you've ever before come across an artist able to get this close to Lucio Battisti. Moving the needle to the opening track, it won't be hard to notice how much the title track harks back to the era of the best Italian prog, a kind of celebration of the path once trodden by Le Orme.

As the title suggests, the lyrics narrate the interrelations between man and woman, recounting the thousand facets of love: pursued and attained, invented or real, often at its end, suffered, burned to ashes and buried. Everything is written in a simple way, as if these were nursery rhymes steeped in feeling.

The interludes placed between the songs are frequent – perhaps too frequent, to be honest – shaped with the help of violins, pianos, ambient sounds and assorted noise effects, often intent on evoking rural settings, even edging toward structures reminiscent of Radiohead: it's probably no coincidence that “Sparite tutti”, the closing song, sounds very much like a direct reply to “How To Disappear Completely” from “Kid A“.

There's no shortage of more aggressive moments either, where De Simone's music knowingly veers toward homegrown Italian alt-rock: “Vieni a salvarmi” and the oblique ballad “Meglio” bring to mind Verdena, while the wholesome lightheartedness of “La guerra dei baci” drifts toward surf-tinged sixties territory.

If “Solo un uomo” stands as the manifesto of the finite nature of being alive, “Eterno riposo” instead confronts us with the moment of death (whether of a love, a friendship or an entire life matters little), bridging Wilco and Battisti, who remains the most natural point of reference for the whole record.

Potential singles like “Fiore mio”, which surprisingly would go on to become a genuine TikTok hit!, and acoustic sketches recorded somewhere between bedroom and garden (“Che cosa”) round out a rich tracklist, which comfortably runs past the seventy-minute mark.

Although some moments can feel redundant (“Questo non è amore”), dragging on in a somewhat long-winded fashion (see the first five minutes of the lengthy “Gli uomini hanno fame”), Uomo, Donna stands out as a pleasantly overflowing and, in many passages, unpredictable work, in which Andrea draws ideas from the past and recontextualizes them in the present with great ease, establishing himself as one of the most singular and intriguing names on the current Italian independent scene.

Beyond Immensity

Instead of capitalizing on this success, however, the Turin-based artist pulls off another disorienting move. More than two years after the major breakthrough achieved with Man, Woman, he releases a new project, Immensità (2019), which almost feels like a work from another era. Not only for its sonic attitude, unmistakably indebted to the '60s and '70s, but also for the structure of the work itself. An album that can be listened to in two distinct ways: either just the four main tracks, taken separately song by song, or as a 25-minute journey in which the pieces merge into one another to form a suite, enriched by a prelude, three interludes and a conclusion.

The dominant point of reference remains Lucio Battisti, but this time plenty of international influences also come through strongly: if “Lo spazio” carries none-too-subtle echoes of Radiohead's “How To Disappear Completely“, the connection between the arpeggio of “Conchiglia” and Portishead's “The Rip“ feels even more deliberate. These are significant proximities, small tributes paid by a personality in constant growth, one unafraid to measure himself against untouchable figures who loom large for anyone. The feeling is similar to the days when great international hits were translated into Italian, except De Simone manages to transmute everything into his own image and likeness, without any fear of stumbling.

We're light years away from so much of today's musical wallpaper: here we return to an old-fashioned way of listening, to a spirit of artisanal production. Amid cosmic effects, prog expansions, dustings of strings and folk drifts, “Immensità” is an album that confirms the unpredictability of one of the most singular and intriguing songwriters of our time, remarkably skilled at drawing good ideas from the past and recontextualizing them in the present. Just four tracks, but all of tremendous worth.

A year later, De Simone released the single “Dal giorno in cui sei nato tu,” a song dedicated to his children, backed by a Super 8 video made by his eldest son Martino.

But the true knockout blow came a few months later, in January 2021, with the gorgeous ballad “Vivo,” accompanied by a same-named platform animated by live-cams streaming in real time from all over the world — his first genuine production work at his new studio, Ecce Homo. “Vivo” isn't just the perfect reworking of that 1950s-60s ballad style he'd already sketched out early in his career. It's a new, wonderful Italian song that resurrects the spirit of that era of melancholy crooners and dimly lit nightclubs, while updating it with a modern sensibility. As if a new “Amore che vieni amore che vai” had suddenly surfaced from some old tape by Fabrizio De André, performed in a radically different style. Equally luminous in their beauty are verses like:

Lo so bene

La vita è breve e pure stretta

But your mind is a great seamstress

Che cuce in fretta

Il tempo di una sigaretta

Che fa bene

A chi ha la luna maledetta

E dalla vita non si aspetta

Che sia perfetta

Si gode quello che gli spetta

Perché si muore troppo in fretta

Underpinning them is a slow, almost liturgical progression, with strings shaping a subtle crescendo, while De Simone's filtered voice seems to come from another dimension, from an almost ancestral past. It's an estranging dislocation that isn't just the product of a mere technical trick, but has roots in his childhood, when little Andrea Laszlo used to sing into the distorted microphone of Canta Tu: “It was a karaoke machine with two cassette decks to record onto. At five or six years old I'd record all the time, to the point of wearing out the tapes. I've always heard my voice that way and I'm fond of it. It's a parallel timeline that connects me to the child I was and reminds me that I'm always the same person. That filter protects me. By personal inclination, I tend to shift music into a magical context parallel to existence, as if it ran on a timeline passing right alongside ours. I like that music comes from there, and I like that it converses with this world here, without ever fully belonging to it,” he would reveal.

So far, then, Andrea Laszlo's path has been marked by a strong poetic coherence and a constant sonic evolution. But there's an invisible thread linking all his work "and it's partly a conceptual thread," he claims. "A certain idealism, a certain existentialism I can't do without. And alongside that, my reservations about exposure."

At the end of August 2021, the Turin-born artist returns to live performance with the Immensity Orchestra: just three concerts, in Turin for TOdays festival, in Rome at the Cavea of the Auditorium Parco della Musica, and in Bari, in front of the Basilica di San Nicola, for Locus festival. On the occasion of these three dates, he announces the suspension of live activity "indefinitely" in order to keep devoting himself to his family and focus on composing. An activity that begins to pair effectively with cinema, as shown by his first original soundtrack, for Amanda Sthers' film "Promises", presented in October 2021 at the Rome Film Fest.

In 2022, the single "I nostri giorni" comes out instead, accompanied by a music video directed by Donato Sansone and Enrico Bisi, and followed by the photo book "Vivo/I nostri giorni". It's the second artistic meeting between father and son, and it contains the film photo-portraits shot by Luciano De Simone in the 1970s, along with a 7-inch single featuring two tracks to listen to while flipping through the book's black-and-white pages.

France's adopted son

A year later, Andrea Laszlo De Simone is called up for a prestigious assignment: scoring the French film Le Règne Animal by Thomas Cailley, presented in competition in the Un Certain Regard section at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. The bond linking the Turin artist to France has developed along largely spontaneous lines. There's no need to dwell on the reasons for such a "correspondance d'amoureux sens". Songs like "Conchiglie" or "Dal giorno in cui sei nato tu" have won over French hearts with their shy, pure, disarming way of expressing a broad palette of feeling, happiness included. Thanks to their impact on the French audience, De Simone was thus brought on board for Cailley's film, one of the leading names of the newest generation of French cinema.

After the much-lauded "Les Combattants" (released in Italy as "The Fighters – Addestramento di vita"), winner of the 2015 César for Best First Film, Cailley has finally returned to the director's chair. The film, despite earning 12 César nominations, didn't quite live up to legitimate expectations this time, notwithstanding the great talent of rising star Paul Kircher and the slightly more mannered performances of French stars Romain Duris and Adèle Exarchopoulos, and despite Cailley's own enormous creative and conceptual effort. "Le Règne animal" had to go up against a juggernaut like "Anatomy of a Fall", perfectly calibrated for international success, which duly followed.

It was "Le Règne animal", however, that landed the coveted award for Best Original Score for De Simone, making him the first Italian to win the French film world's equivalent of the Oscars — and deservedly so, since this is a score of real distinction. Although the music was made available both on digital platforms and on physical formats (in Italy through 42 Records, and in the rest of the world through Ekleroshock), it's listening to it alongside the images that truly reveals all its charm and intensity. The images unfold, and a small orchestra of strings, wind instruments and voices, backed by keyboards with a faintly kraut flavour, gives rise to a kind of sensory experience. Nature within nature. The composer must have worked entirely in service of the film, working by subtraction, in search of the primal innocence of inspiration and storytelling.

"Le Règne animal" is a visionary, ambitious film, dense with meaning. Different grammars intertwine within it, ranging from fantasy to drama, moving easily from the relentless pace of a thriller to the dwelling rhythms of introspection. The philosophical subtext — the ineluctable, simultaneously terrifying and liberating necessity of a near-metamorphic regression of humanity to an animal state — intertwines with a taut language of expressive rawness. What emerges is an unbalanced, imperfect narrative, constantly at risk of excess, starting with its 128-minute running time. Andrea Laszlo De Simone's music opens up compelling emotional landscapes, magnifies the green vastness of the outdoor settings, and deepens the weight of every glance. And so the animal kingdom takes shape, able to speak to each person's unconscious and to the collective 'we' that one hopes might still emerge from it.

In the film, humanity is plunged into chaos and witnesses the awakening of its animal side. The intensity of this fantastical story lies in an emotional journey, both funny and moving, between a father and his son. The composer leaves his mark, blending acoustic, electronic and classical elements. The result is a powerful musical composition, shaped around the film's tone, its naturalism, and its telling of a universal mythology. "My friend and French publisher Raphael Hamburger brought to my attention a screenplay written by Thomas Cailley and Pauline Munier, 'Le Règne Animal' — De Simone recalled — Reading it, I realized it held most of the themes that have driven and motivated me in recent years: the father-son relationship (which life has allowed me to explore both as a son and as a father), the human being understood as a creature, as an animal faced with a reality that seems ineluctable; society as both habitat and chain, the relationship with otherness, the fear that can turn into wonder, amazement, hostility, phobia; the transformation of our bodies and identities through time and the events life imposes on us. In short, for me, this screenplay contained the whole world," added the Piedmontese artist, who, after personally recording the music, wrote the arrangements for a small orchestra of strings, wind instruments and voices. At the end of the process, De Simone also added a title track, which, although not featured in the film, was included anyway at the close of the soundtrack.

After this international success, De Simone retreats into his studio, from which, surprisingly, at the end of August 2025, a new single emerges, "Quando", a taste of his next studio work. "'Quando' represents a moment of disorientation, in which the mind searches for justifications for mistakes and contradictions," the Turin artist explained. "It's the phase that precedes taking responsibility, the irrational passage in which you delude yourself into thinking you can avoid it. An awkward but deeply human search for understanding." The single is accompanied by a music video and features lyrics that weave together fragility and intimacy: “Quando/ Parli/ E quando ridi e piangi/ E tiri i calci e spingi/ Cercando di guarirmi/ Quando tu mi stringi/ Sei in grado di ferirmi/ Ed io non so spiegarlo/ E tu non puoi capirmi”.

A luminous shadow

The release of A Very Long Shadow (2025), however, began a few days earlier. To be precise, on the first day of 2025, a year in which, right from the start, it was hard even to find a moment's peace, or to avoid asking "where did I go wrong?" or where the world had gone wrong alongside us, no one excluded. "Un momento migliore" came out, the album's opening track, a way of "thinking about the World" — these are the author's words — as if it were a flesh-and-blood person, full of flaws and a victim of their own mistakes. A person like me, and surely like most of us." The better moment never came, nor, in the end, was it something to wait for. Because everything always happens now: the darkness, the light, every "Diffrazione" and "Rifrazione" of it, the distant warmth of the sun, the chill of the "Neon" that empties out rooms, the fear, the love and the hopes of the most romantic among us. Everything now, everything, indeed, forever, or for L'immensità, which Andrea had already contemplated back in 2019 and which now returns as an existential legacy: “Non voglio pensare al futuro/ perché sono quasi sicuro/ che sbaglierò per sempre/ Ma nessuno/ nessuno/ nessuno/ nessuno/ ha mai avuto un momento migliore / nessuno”. More than a wish, a consolation, or rather a flash of affectionate, even civic, awareness in recognizing ourselves within that single 'no one' that makes up the 'we' we sing to exorcise the shadows.

"...No one is innocent anymore", Montale wrote in 1938, in "Primavera hitleriana". "Colpevole" is the title De Simone now gives a track that, listen after listen, often stops the heart cold. "It's the more or less latent sense of guilt that stays with us," the author says again. "It's the image I have of the present... and it's a rather severe image."

Then time starts running again, it's already tomorrow, "Quando" is time to move beyond oneself and feel alive again, to "discover that you've understood nothing of existence except the fact that there is probably less to understand than there is to accept."

The "endless shadow" lives within each of us, in things, in events, in the dark outline our bodies cast when struck by the only reliable light, or ultimately the only possible one — the one that "Non è reale". In this reciprocity of brightness and darkness, eternity and time, pain and desire, fatherhood and anxiety about the future, clumsiness and flight, reticence and solidarity, Andrea has lingered for a long time, as if to free himself from the last intellectual residue and reconnect with a larger, more all-encompassing whole that the mind cannot grasp, but which music, poetry and image help us sense as a kind of epiphanic glow.

The other backstory behind the album is the author's passion for film and photography as means of expression. In May, a 67-minute video was released, shot entirely by Andrea, in which filmed tableaux unfold along a thread of symbolic, introspective identification, accompanied by their own ambient audio. Fragments of text also appear on screen, chosen - as we now know - from the album's lyrics. "A Very Long Shadow" is "an audiovisual project," the author explains, "in which I tried to bring to light intrusive thoughts, the ones that are constantly present inside us even when we're thinking about something else, and that end up casting long shadows over our existence. To do this, I used a simple metaphor: the process by which shadows are formed. I chose to represent a 'point of light' through fixed shots of reality, an 'object' through the song lyrics, and 'the shadows' through the music. Why did I do it? Because of my own shadows, I'm afraid." And ours too. A Very Long Shadow is a fraternal, universal record. An embrace.

Now that the project is complete with the album's release, its depth and breadth can be fully grasped, where the meticulous, artisanal condition of being in love with music and its imagery - which has always shaped Laszlo De Simone's poetics - measures itself against the vast horizon of existential inquiry. The result is a set of beautiful songs, whose painful intensity coincides with their luminous lightness.

The musical discourse builds on L'immensità, the rightly acclaimed previous album, enriching its palette with new nuances, adding for instance a few touches of electronics ("Quello che ero una volta") or some extra rhythmic drive ("Non è reale"). One can still find the unconscious echoes of Battisti, Le Orme, Battiato, Modugno that the author has accustomed us to, as well as the influence of the work done for the soundtrack of Thomas Cailley's film Le Règne animal (2023).

But above all, what is confirmed here is the consistency, inspiration, and expressive urgency of one of the most original and powerful artists on today's Italian singer-songwriter scene. A man capable of grappling with the complexity of our time, immersing himself in the very long shadow that is both the outcome and the precondition of light.

Contributions by Federico Piccioni ("Uomo, Donna")

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