SUBSONICA - Terre rare

Already with “Augmented Reality” (2024) it was possible to sense that something had genuinely started moving again within Subsonica. Beneath the surface, the risk of a definitive split had, over the years, been far less theoretical than is often told. That album, instead, gave back the image of a band that was compact again, present, still capable of working as a true organism.

“Terre rare” picks up exactly from there, but doesn't simply confirm that regained cohesion: it puts it to the test, pushes it further, turns it almost into a gamble. It's as if Subsonica, once realigned, decided to raise the bar on their exploration and do so without the nagging need to chase the hit, the immediate signal of survival.

In this sense the new album has something liberating about it. It feels like the product of a band that has shed a weight and rediscovered, in complexity, contamination and movement, the most natural form of being together.

This is also why the thirtieth anniversary, hugely important as it is, stays in the background as a frame rather than the centre of the discussion. Turin celebrates them as it should, with concerts, events, and trails scattered across the city, and this carries real weight because Subsonica's relationship with the Piedmontese city has never been merely decorative: they have been one of its most recognisable voices, one of its most identifiable sounds.

But the best thing about “Terre rare” is that it doesn't pose within the anniversary. It doesn't use the birthday to tidy up the past, preferring instead to open a new trajectory. The key lies largely in the trip to Essaouira, Morocco, taken by the Piedmontese band during the project's gestation: an aspect that turns out to be far more than a mere detail to mention in interviews, shaping up instead as the real starting engine of the record.

Contact with the Gnawa tradition, with a music that's more circular, more hypnotic, more tied to repetition and trance than to the Western song form, has left a deep mark. The guembri, with its dark, vibrant, almost earthy sound, and the krakeb, with their insistent metallic clatter, have entered the band's vocabulary without ever feeling like a decorative borrowing. This is the decisive point: on “Terre rare” the ethnic component reveals itself as the true soul of the record. It makes the album breathe differently. It makes it more porous, more physical, more open to an elsewhere that is never treated as mere postcard suggestion.

“Al confine” is a perfect opener because it immediately brings the nature of the album into focus: Eastern and African-tinged sonorities, already fused into a fully Subsonica-esque, rhythmic and nervy framework. From there onward, the band's work as an organism also comes through clearly: Vicio, more prominent than in the past, often drives the movement from below; Ninja builds an elastic, pulsing weave around him; Max Casacci steps in with cutting, abrasive guitars; Boosta holds everything together with a synthetic fabric airier than usual, while Samuel continues to be the emotional centre with a vocal naturalness that remains intact.

“'Straniero' is one of the most successful tracks, because it widens the meaning of the title: not just someone arriving from elsewhere, but anyone living a condition of marginality, exclusion, disorientation. Fitting very well into this picture is the vocal contribution of Palestinian-born singer-songwriter TÄRA, who, alternating Arabic and Italian, adds a further vibration to the track, both concrete and symbolic. The music accompanies this tension beautifully, making this passage one of the most open and painful moments in the sequence.

If "Teorie" wins you over with its more suspended character, with drums and guitar pushing toward a zone poised between two identities, in a limbo that ends up heightening its sense of personality, "Radio Mogadiscio" serves an opposite but necessary function: it's the most straightforward return to typically Subsonica coordinates, with an immediate grip that widens the breathing room of the tracklist without lowering its level.

Among the most intense moments is "Rifugio", which stands out by starting from an almost darkwave synthetic imagery before opening up into something broader and more intense, achieving a remarkable emotional depth.

If there's one manifesto track, though, it's probably "Ghibli": here the fusion between the new sounds absorbed by the band and its historic trademark comes together in the most natural and physical way, turning into pure kinetic energy. "Grida" effectively confirms the same synthesis, while "Il tempo in me" shows that Subsonica, even while immersed in this new phase of contamination, haven't lost the ability to write a great song in their most typical vein: built with clarity, drive and a recognisability that doesn't feel remotely like a calculated comeback.

The picture is rounded out well by the other tracks on the record too. "Transumanesimo" pushes the album into rougher, more confrontational territory, with a hard, pounding synthetic backbone that underpins a reflection - far from abstract - on an idea of progress emptied of human scale. "Jinn", in its brief minute and a half of instrumental, instead acts as a short dive into a dark, suspended trance, almost a shadowy passage that recharges the record before the final stretch, with Vicio's bass seeming to surface from some remote depth.

"Alisei" then brings everything back toward a lighter, more airy, even moved dimension: it's a song about detachment and letting go, handled with a delicacy that Samuel carries off very well, letting a distant 90s echo surface too. Finally, the title track gathers up the meaning of the journey and closes it with restraint, drawing together many of the tensions that emerged along the way into a conclusion that has something serene and self-aware about it, almost like the calm reached after crossing, without shortcuts, rougher and more uneven terrain.

"Terre rare" wins you over above all because it manages to organically blend exploration and recognisability, letting new instruments, new cadences and new shadows pass through it while still sounding fully like Subsonica. This is where the album finds its centre: the idea of a band that has no intention of merely managing its past, but is looking for - and finding - a way to carry it forward.

Subsonica don't just confirm their recovery: they relaunch it. That matters, because this album arrives after years in which, between less convincing efforts and centrifugal pulls toward individual projects, it would have been easy to picture a gradual settling, if not a slow ebb.

"Terre rare" isn't a perfect album, and it probably doesn't even need to be, but it has a quality that counts for far more: it feels necessary. Necessary for them, even before it is for whoever's listening. And that's precisely why it ends up standing as one of the sturdiest works of their recent phase, perhaps the one in which that fresh start truly finds its fullest form.

Subsonica aren't simply doing fine here - they sound alive again, curious, hungry and, above all, they seem to have rediscovered a deep reason to keep sharing the journey.

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31/03/2026