Marlene Kuntz: the setlist from the Turin show and the other dates of the tour for the 30th anniversary of "The Vile One"

After the first leg of the club tour (here's the review of the Rome show), Marlene Kuntz are getting ready to continue their live activity with a summer tour set for June, taking in several Italian cities including Vicenza, Brescia, Milan and Pordenone.

Meanwhile, the band led by Cristiano Godano is busy with a series of celebratory shows marking the thirtieth anniversary of "The Vile One", a pivotal album in their discography. This is the context for the double Turin date: on Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 April the band will take the stage at Hiroshima Mon Amour.

After the Piedmont dates, the schedule continues with the last two shows of the spring tour: April 16 at Casa della Musica and April 18 at Demodè Club.

Here's the likely setlist for tonight's show in Turin (and the upcoming dates of the tour), based on the setlist played yesterday in the Piedmontese capital:

• 3 of 3
• Retrattile
• L’agguato
• Cenere
• Come stavamo ieri
• Overflash
• L’esangue Deborah
• Ape regina
• Ti giro intorno
• The Vile One
• The end is dear
• Sonica
• Swimming in the air
• Sad party

Encore:

• Infinity
• Lieve

Thirty years after its release, The Vile One by Marlene Kuntz is back with a celebratory reissue and a tour that plays it live in full. Released on 26 April 1996, the album marked a turning point in Italian rock of the Nineties: abrasive guitars, dynamics suspended between fury and rarefaction, lyrics able to turn 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 The Vile One", 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 always ask myself: how do I manage to explode the way I did thirty years ago - Godano commented - but I know it happens the moment the first date starts. 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. It'll be exciting". Here is the schedule of the tour's remaining dates.

• April 9 – Hiroshima Mon Amour – Turin (sold out)
• April 16 – Casa della Musica – Naples
• April 18 – Modugno, Bari
• June 11 – Bra, Parco della Zizzola
• June 12 – Bastia Umbra, Umbriafiere
• July 29 – Argenta, Delizia Estense di Benvignante

When it came out on April 26, 1996, "The Vile One" marked a clean break in the Italian music landscape. A record defined by abrasive guitars, extreme dynamics, oblique melodies and lyrics able to combine rawness with poetic tension. Not simply a collection of songs, but a compact organism, crossed by 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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