Marlene Kuntz, reissue and tour for “Il Vile”: “Existential rage, then as now”. Tour dates

Thirty years after its release, Il vile by Marlene Kuntz returns with a celebratory reissue and a tour that will present it live in full. Released on April 26, 1996, the album marked a fracture in 1990s Italian rock: abrasive guitars, dynamics suspended between fury and rarefaction, lyrics capable of turning unease and fragility into a shared language.

The new edition, available from March 6th on limited-edition colored vinyl, will come in an illustrated version with artwork by Alessandro Baronciani: a 16-page A4-format comic-style booklet, with one illustration per track, enriched by three collectible postcards.

Cristiano Godano recalled the instinctive nature of the project: "When we played those tracks," he explained, "all we had were purely aesthetic anxieties. We just wanted the record to sound as good as possible, that's all there was to it". Listening back to it today, its impact remains strong: "I heard it in the car with the volume up," Godano said, "and I got really into it, as the kids say. It was exhilarating: a confident, radiant sound, but above all cohesive and compact. There was a very precise idea behind it, and hearing it so clearly even today gave me a kind of rush". Back then, he admits, "we had no way of understanding the potential we were unleashing. We could only hope people would like it". As for the connection to grunge, he clarifies: "It's the closest thing to that idea we could have made," Godano added, "but it wasn't our only reference point. We had clear models in mind, but above all we wanted to find our own sound and not come across as provincial".

The emotional tension has lost none of its power: "The anger it expresses is existential," Godano commented, "not directly social. Today, though, it almost feels justified. You'd have to be completely out of touch not to realize this is a difficult time". His songwriting, too, has changed over the years: "My writing has shifted in subtle, intangible ways," Godano said, "but I don't disown the past, I just try not to repeat myself. Those lines were perfectly consistent with who I was back then. The fire is still there, but it changes shape. The intensity is tempered by awareness, not out of convenience but through natural evolution". And he reiterates: "Lyrics have always mattered to me just as much as the music. I've always given everything I have to the writing".

The tour "Marlene Kuntz suona Il Vile", with eleven dates between March and April, will bring those songs back to the stage in their entirety. It will be a physical test too: "I keep asking myself: how do I explode like I did thirty years ago – Godano commented – but I know it'll happen at the first show. I'll have to scream a lot, which isn't exactly my comfort zone these days, but it'll be fun to go back to shouting my lungs out. It'll be exciting". Here's the tour schedule.

• 5 marzo – The Cage – Livorno
• March 7 – Mamamia – Senigallia
• March 12 – New Age – Treviso
• March 19 – Estragon – Bologna
• March 20 – Orion – Rome
• March 25 – Hall – Padua
• March 26 – Alcatraz – Milan
• March 27 – Viper – Florence (C/O Cdp Grassina)
• April 8 – Hiroshima Mon Amour – Turin (new date)
• April 9 – Hiroshima Mon Amour – Turin (sold out)
• April 16 – Casa della Musica – Naples
• April 18 – Demodé – Bari

When it came out, on April 26, 1996, “Il Vile” marked a clean break in the Italian music scene. An album defined by abrasive guitars, extreme dynamics, oblique melodies and lyrics able to fuse rawness with poetic tension. Not simply a collection of songs, but a compact organism, running through constant contrasts: sonic violence and sudden lyrical openings, emotional fullness and emptiness, fury and suspension.

Listened back to today, three decades on, "Il Vile" doesn't come across as a relic of the past, but as a work that has kept its expressive power fully intact. Its anxieties, its cracks, its urgency still speak to the present, proving how certain records don't just define an era, but manage to withstand the passage of time, renewing their meaning with every new listen.

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