BLACK HEART PROCESSION - Amore Del Tropico

Plenty of surprises await listeners approaching the fourth album by Black Heart Procession. The first and most obvious one is the title: having dropped the numerical sequence of their previous three records, the band led by Tobias Nathaniel and Pall Jenkins (now Paulo Zappoli, his mother's surname…) has titled this fourth work with an Italian phrase, albeit a grammatically shaky one, "Amore del tropico". Listening further, we discover this isn't just a formal shift but a substantial one: after a very brief intro, the opening of the first real track, "Tropics of Love", is a genuine shocker for anyone who knew Black Heart Procession as champions of a genre it's fair to call American gothic. Here they kick off with Latin rhythms and sounds bordering on bossa nova, which for us Italians might recall the atmospheres of Capossela. The die is cast, because from here on new sounds and timbres await, unheard of for the group before, like the obsessive, very '80s synth of "Sympathy Crime" and "The Visitor", or the sprightly rock of "Did You Wonder", which will perhaps come as less of a surprise to those familiar with Pall Jenkins' side project, Three Mile Pilot.

This isn't a revolution, though: there's no shortage of tracks with a dark, crepuscular atmosphere (the best examples being "The Water #4" and "The Invitation"), but rather a general enrichment of the band's tonal palette, also traceable in a greater use of strings and the addition of female choruses. Sunnier sounds and moods are confirmed too, in languid ballads like "A Cry for Love", or in following the path set by the opening track with "Why I Stay", which carries clear echoes of Calexico.

This shift hasn't diminished the quality of Black Heart Procession's music - if anything, it's enriched their career, at a point where the third album had probably exhausted the possibilities of their spectral gothic-folk. Not every track fully hits the mark - perhaps trimming 2-3 songs would have sharpened the focus of this new musical direction - and by the end a certain repetitiveness and fatigue creep in. But patience is rewarded by the closing "Fingerprints", which reconciles us with familiar territory: a crepuscular, melancholy track in the best tradition of the San Diego duo, rounding off, in classic style, a work that arrived at just the right moment in the duo's history.

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30/04/2026