FRANCAMENTE - Bitte Leben

When Francesca Siano, aka Frankly, dropped like a bolt from the blue into the glossy machinery of X Factor 2024, singing a spine-tingling version of Chris Isaak's Chris Isaak immortal classic "Wicked Game", plenty of people - not just the judges' unanimous four yeses - picked up on her makings of a self-aware, talented performer: the power, aesthetic included, of her persona, the credibility that stayed intact even in the passages most heavy with pathos. Knowing how to stylize unruliness into introspective essentiality, and welcoming the listener into the contagious embrace of her own self-referentiality, are qualities so ingrained in her persona that they were already evident within a few minutes of her first TV appearance. Even on a song that wasn't her own. And what struck most was that idea of music as "posture", as a way of being in the world, which defines Frankly's everyday identity as an artist.

What the wider public couldn't have known yet was the artist's talent. It's worth remembering that this talent had already surfaced in a more niche but also more genuine setting, when Francesca won the 2024 edition of the SanNolo Festival, an event born out of the hype surrounding one of Milan's liveliest and most gentrified neighbourhoods, which increasingly blends its original playful, queer spirit with its status as a benchmark within the Italian music establishment. At that same edition she was awarded the technical prize, consisting of a production by Goedi, aka Diego Montinaro, a highly experienced producer who has worked alongside names such as, among others, Fabri Fibra and Casino Royale.

"Paracadute", the previously unreleased track that won multiple awards at SanNolo, is a song with powerful lyrics: "Costruirò un’autostrada veloce/ Con strade di carta, di carne, di sangue/ Che portano al tuo nome/ E con cartelli verdi perché mi piace sperare/ Che tra un istante ci toccheremo/ Nella canzone che ti piace abitare".

The topos of amorous distance becomes an urban setting and a personal story, a "train of desires" going against the flow of fate, a procession of signs personified as in the worlds of a Marcovaldo. When the moment for the unreleased track arrives on X Factor, the singer-songwriter takes over completely. "Fucina", at least in its writing, comes even closer to the songwriting quality of her debut album, and features a collaboration with producer Diego Montinaro/Goedi, destined to be a cautious, respectful yet decisive presence also in the patient four-handed workshop that lends artisanal quality to the delicate balances of this first record. It is, then, a debut but not quite a debut, one carrying a great deal of apprenticeship, stubbornness, vision, ups and downs, expectations, fears and feelings behind and within it.

The Turin-born singer-songwriter, who moved first to Berlin and is now based in Milan (though she returns to Turin every weekend), addresses us with a title that, by fusing with her experience in the city-state of Alexanderplatz, definitively internationalises the story.

Let's put it this way. The solution lies in looking at the centre, the mainstream, power, the dominant culture, from a privileged position — precisely because it is peripheral, marginal. That's where the vector of energy that allows itself to be constructive and creative moves from, even as the world burns. Indeed, precisely because it burns. Hoping that poetry, sincerity, the bright side of tenacity can hold back the voracity of this fire, which is all the more violent for being so pointless. That's what one of the album's emotional peaks tells us, "Se potessi", a secular prayer for a young life, to whom one might promise a future, or perhaps rather offer the comfort of an open dialogue within the endless present of our current precariousness.

'Bitte Leben' — in the artist's own words — is an invitation to dive into what seems distant and foreign to us, not just in language but in habit. To meet people we'd never have imagined could become our friends, to take on all sorts of jobs just to pay the rent. To recognise the pain in each of our lives, but not treat it as a monster, as something alien, but rather as an indispensable part that shouldn't paralyse us, but become something to draw strength from.

In these songs — all new, all beautiful — you find, in full, the candour already announced by the moniker itself: a way of looking at the world that is introspective, both personal and political. There are traits of Piedmontese understatement married to a stark, urban aesthetic, in the manner of Berlin, but also of the Milan around Stazione Centrale seen in the video for "5 di mattina".

It's one of the defining places in this geography of character-cities and inner landscapes that makes "Bitte Leben" a world that is at once nomadic and cohesive. "It's not, however" — the artist explains further — "the capitalist movement that skates across the surface of things, but a movement tied to the nature of being." There are the motorway service stations and the crowded balconies of the aforementioned "5 di mattina", whose lyrics, unlike the video, tell of impromptu raves in a Piedmontese province that, already well versed in bans and lockdowns, will remain forever out of reach of any decree. There's the late-imperial metaphor of "Cattedrale", somewhere between New Order and SZA: the body as temple, comfort, safety — another way of saying desire.

In "Sirene sulla luna" there are the settings of the La Luna e I Calanchi festival in Aliano, where the harsh, archaic nature of Carlo Levi's landscapes merges with rites of love and music over a funky-wave arrangement that's part Battisti from his "Una giornata uggiosa" period, part Alice as produced by Angelo Carrara. "Nuda di bossa", born from a trip to Brazil, turns a shared separation into a tribute to the memory of relationships, moving towards cinematic, jazzy singer-songwriter sounds.

With "La casa dei miei nonni" the story turns personal-political once again: a childhood beach becomes the starting point for questioning family bonds and challenging their supposed sanctity, while "Telephone Tango" moves between Berlin and Milan, fusing identity and movement, cars and fragments of existence queued outside a club.

"Zagara", written in Palermo and another high point of the record, is a profane devotion that combines 80s electronics with accordion phrasing, where eros and folk merge in Sicily's blinding light. "Non mi importa più" brings us back to Turin, its porticoes, trams and bars, but slows the pace into a bluesy midtempo where electronics act as an introspective counterpoint and a saturated guitar veers towards psychedelia — the same direction taken by the outro, closing the circle opened by the intro.

The reason for being behind this expressive diary in nine movements and two framing pieces isn't a warning, but an inescapable need, all the more urgent the harder it is to perceive its voice. Bitte Leben.

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23/04/2026