MARTA DEL GRANDI - Dream Life

One of the finest qualities of Marta Del Grandi is that she never takes anything for granted. Her new record, "Dream Life", confirms this once again, striking a perfect balance between art-pop and experimentation, singer-songwriter craft and consistently engaging arrangements dotted with unexpected twists and turns. In short, after her already excellent, largely folk-rooted work, the musician now turns artistic eclecticism not merely into a creative wellspring to draw from, but into her true strength.

Given these premises, keeping such a cohesive underlying vision was by no means a given, but the excellent production work and the attention paid to every single detail in the songwriting and arrangements stave off the risk of a scattered collection. Yet more than any amount of studio polish, what allows such a multifaceted tracklist to flow so smoothly is the chameleonic spontaneity with which Del Grandi carries out her sonic metamorphoses, embracing different genres even within the same song. Pop, funk, jazz and a dash of progressive music find an exceptional, buoyant synthesis in "Antarctica" and in the rhythmic sturdiness of "Neon Lights". This playful dimension emerges even more clearly on the title track, where reflections with transformative political potential are wrapped in a cloak of folk-pop lightness and accompanied by a wry video. Her experiments with electronic instrumentation, meanwhile, lead the Milanese singer-songwriter to the restless pulse of "20 Days Of Summer" and to the expansive spaces inhabited by the duet with Fenne Kuppens ("Some Days") and the enveloping instrumental cloud of "Gold Mine".

Two tracks, however, stand out as the two little compositional masterpieces of this collection, confirming Marta Del Grandi as one of the most original and daring songwriters active in Europe in recent years. The extraordinary chamber folk mini-symphony "Alpha Centauri" condenses folk imagery and an epic sweep into four and a half minutes, in the wake of the recent narrative works of Black Country, New Road. Here the ecstatic surge is sparked by the orchestral arrangement that illuminates the song's tones as if it were the earthly mirror of the star system that gives the track its title. The ballad that closes the record, on the other hand, has an immediate emotional impact. Initially stripped bare and gradually enriched by horns and drums, "Oh My Father" movingly explores the complexity of the parent-child relationship and how it evolves over time. Del Grandi could not have found more delicate — and simply beautiful — notes to close "Dream Life", bringing the listener back to the deep, physical reality of what is, for many people, one of the foundational relationships of their existence.

This is, then, a record that speaks of dreams but also of reality and small everyday things, and it does so with a refined, creative musical spirit that grows more enchanting with every listen. It confirms that, sometimes, the boundary between the dream world and reality is flimsier than we might think. Telling the two realms apart thus becomes a matter of perspective, or rather of one's own positioning towards the world, which, as Adrienne Rich and Donna Haraway teach us, remains, in any case, always also a political act.

If nothing is real

Can I take control?

Do any of my actions matter at all?

If I could go back in time

do it all over again.

Dream life, how can you tell if it's real?

Oh let me see it through your eyes

don't make it disappear!

Ride the wave of great music

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01/02/2026