Cosmo talks about the new album: "La Fonte is a caress. Morning concerts? Don't call them soft clubbing"

Ten years on from “L’ultima festa“, Cosmo changes direction and returns to a more intimate dimension, moving away from dance territory to embrace a new singer-songwriter approach. The new album “La fonte”, out April 17th, was born - as he himself explains - out of “Italian song, the simplicity of certain feelings and of the way they're expressed”: a conscious return to the song form, with the dance component temporarily set aside.

This sixth studio effort moves toward a more classic style of songwriting, while still leaving room for experimentation. Cosmo pushes beyond his usual boundaries, “experimenting with something that would step a bit outside my comfort zone”, running through the urban sounds of “Totem e tabù”, the Balearic loops of “Ogni giorno/ogni notte” and even the waltz of “Parlare con te”.

The live dimension will follow the same evolution. The tour kicks off on May 24 at Milan’s MI AMI Festival with a series of matinée shows, a choice the artist clearly sets apart from current trends: “I completely distance myself from soft clubbing, I don’t believe in that model”. And again: “What I distance myself from is this ideal of restraint, this attempt to tame what you do at night by bringing it back into a daytime, Apollonian dimension”. His shows, he points out, “won’t be a version of soft clubbing, but simply a matter of moving a concert to the morning to feel the energies shift and to play with the timing”.

In terms of content, “La fonte” scales back the explicit presence of politics, though without eliminating it entirely. After releasing “Brucia tutto”, tied to the war in Gaza, here Cosmo channels his thinking mainly into “La fine”. Reflecting on the album, he explains: “In a historical period like this, with everything falling apart, I asked myself afterwards why I'd made an album with so little politics in it... and I answered that for me it was a kind of therapy, I needed to hear these sounds, to comfort myself a little, given how harsh these times are”.

The track features lines like “il male sta alzando la voce”, paired with a less final outlook: even if everything seems to be collapsing, “il male non mette mai la parola fine”, because there is always a part of humanity that pushes back.

The finale opens with “Venite a vedere”, one of the most suspended moments, drawing on Italian beat from the Sixties and gospel-like openings, referencing the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963: “When I saw that image I said, ‘There it is, that person has the source running through them'”. From this comes the idea that a deeper contact with that dimension could change things. The closing passage into “Sboccia il fiore” brings the journey to an end: “the album passes through pain a bit, but from that pain, in the end – he smiled – we make a flower bloom”, within “a kind of psychomagic ritual” that also echoes the spirit of his live shows.

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