CHIELLO - Agonia

I'm Leaving

There's a time when we all have to say goodbye to each other

Alongside Nayt, Chiello has been one of the names straddling niche and mainstream that the latest Sanremo presented to the widest possible audience within our rap scene. While Nayt came away with a solid sixth place, Chiello had to settle for twenty-fifth. As for the rap scene, Chiello only belongs to it by lineage: after his beginnings with the ultra-violent trap collective FSK, he launched a solo career with the likeable, melancholy, pastel-toned it-pop of "Oceano Paradiso" (2021), a feat not repeated by the subsequent, more singer-songwriter-oriented and depressed "Mela marcia" (2023), nor by the more muddled "Scarabocchi" (2025), caught between it-pop and vintage references. This "Agonia" captures a moment in which he seems to show several affinities with Achille Lauro, at least in his "rock" period (so to speak...).

While the lyrics remain steeped in tragically depressed messages, full of images of death and despair that are well summed up by the album's title, the sound builds on what we heard on the first and third albums, with few traces of the second. From the bedroom singer-songwriter feel of "A testa alta" and "Salvami da me stesso", sung in a hushed near-whisper, we move to the electronic, slightly wave-inflected pop of "Vulcano" and of the Sanremo entry "Ti penso sempre".

Holding it all together is a mood and a way of confessing one's own brooding thoughts that often becomes touchingly intimate, even as it borders on the naïve.

Halfway through the tracklist, the surreal "Polynesian Village", a chamber piece built on vintage crackle and hiss, offers a welcome moment of bolder creativity.

Then the rock guitars return ("Desaturarsi"), along with drowsy electronic beats and oddly unexpected cacophonous edges ("Lupo"), plus fresh desperate confessions ("Spero almeno").

That the ghost of a pianistic De Gregori should surface on "Scarlatta", elegantly arranged and sung with the enthusiasm of a dying man, is only a partial surprise: the lyrical dimension is heavily pursued, if with a certain narrowness of approach, across much of the album, and serves as its defining trait.

Once again, the spectre of death emerges on the closing "I'm Leaving", which ends in a rock crescendo that fades into a melancholy music-box tune. It's the closing statement of an album that it would be unfair to dismiss as indistinguishable from the rest of Italian pop. Chiello has a style of his own, which he pursues with substantial consistency, cracked only by the odd, non-dominant, more pop-leaning flourish. What's missing, rather, are stronger songs and a more mature language capable of pushing these small pieces toward something deeper and more complex. As it stands, all too often, "Agonia" is a depressive postcard from a young singer in existential crisis.

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10/04/2026