LUPO - Cerotti

It always takes some courage to release an Italian record right on the eve of the Sanremo Festival, an event that swallows everything whole, hoovering up all the attention. Despite this all-consuming force, there are records that manage to stand out, records for which the choice to come out just the week before the Ligurian showcase is anything but random: it's a challenge, a way of saying "hey, look around, there's more to Italy than this", an expressive urgency that refuses to be boxed into rigidly defined dogmas.

From the very title chosen for his debut album, Roman singer-songwriter Lupo De Matteo, born in 2001, declares his attempt to apply a kind of collective bandage to heal the wounds left by the uncertainties of a transitional age. Lupo speaks to his peers, university students no longer entirely carefree but not yet fully disillusioned either, caught up in a pervasive sense of anxiety and inadequacy. Lupo talks about boredom, about what it means to be 20 or 25 today, offering not so much definitive cures as small remedies, achieved through restoring genuine connections between people and accepting who you are.

Arriving two years after the EP "Scarabocchi", "Cerotti" moves along the tracks of an emotional singer-songwriter tradition that seeks to make the most of what remains of the it-pop wave, while looking elsewhere, often pushing guitars to the front in support of the electronics. From the Gorillaz-esque "Noia" to the wave-funk groove of "SaleSale", from the nocturnal romanticism of "Interludio", close to the most intimate Calcutta, to the driving pop of "Dilivi", from the urban approach of "Ilfiore" to the assertive riffs of "X100", right through to the surprising nu-gaze closer "Supersonico", Lupo proves he has plenty of arrows in his quiver.

Spontaneous, even as it occasionally shows itself pleasantly naive, "Cerotti" is, in its own way, a courageous album, one not necessarily bound to the fashions of our time, crafted by a musician who doesn't feel compelled to deliver summer-playlist hits — that's what Sanremo is for…

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02/03/2026