KLIMT 1918 - Àmor

Ten years are just a habit, for Klimt 1918. Since 2016, when “Sentimentale Jugend” closed a chapter eight years on from the previous “Just In Case We’ll Never Meet Again”, silence has become a second skin for them. Not the silence of abandonment, but that of sedimentation: like photographs left to settle in an attic, like summer skies watched for too long through a misted window. “Àmor” arrives, then, not as a triumphant comeback, but as a slow, almost inevitable resurfacing.

The title is a mirror game: read backwards, it spells out Roma, the city where the band has always lived and which here becomes a mental landscape. Not the postcard Rome, but the one of scorching August outskirts, of ruins you live alongside without really seeing anymore. A Pasolini-esque Rome of decay, where humanity keeps moving as if the collapse had already happened. It's against this backdrop that "Àmor" sets its eleven songs.
The old coordinates (shoegaze, post-rock, dream-pop, even the old metal flashes of their early days) are now recomposed into a new shape. The word the label coined, skygaze, perhaps captures the sense of it: a gaze turned to the sky, a vertical melancholy, a nostalgia that seeks no redemption but wallows in its own suspension. But that's too reductive. Klimt 1918 now sound as if they'd stopped chasing genres altogether to embrace a single, stubborn, obsessive emotional direction.

The opener is "Dream Core", and the title alone is already a manifesto. Klimt 1918 say they dedicate this album "to whoever chooses to love despite everything." "Eros" is the carnal heart of the album. Domenico Vellucci's sax creeps in like a nighttime thought, growing until it becomes a blade of quartz, and the song turns into a baroque architecture of fuzz and reverb. Here the fire from the cover art (a man burning in the night) becomes tangible. Love isn't a caress, it's combustion. The instrumental title track "Àmor", by contrast, is a surprise: just guitars curling in on themselves, a migratory wind, no words at all. It lasts under three minutes but manages to condense all of the record's yearning into a sonic arabesque plucked from a daydream.

"Àmor" is a work of strong atmospheric coherence, one that doesn't try to fill the void of time but rather inhabits it. It's a record born out of lockdown silence, yet it reacts to that solitude by searching for love. And it does so in its own way, with the delicacy of someone who knows passion isn't just flame, and who seeks out the warmth of embers still smouldering under the ash.

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28/06/2026