YUPPIE FLU - Kings Without A Crown

There's a tangled skein of stories, of comings and goings, returns and farewells behind "Kings Without A Crown". Eighteen years after their last studio album, Fragile Forest, Yuppie Flu return to the scene with an LP that, alongside 42 Records, once again bears the glorious Homesleep imprint, just like in the old days, reaffirming that indissoluble band/label bond that helped write one of the most thrilling and genuine sagas of the Italian indie scene at the turn of the millennium.
"Kings Without a Crown" is also the final work signed by Matteo Agostinelli, who devoted the last years of his life to this material, before leaving us prematurely last February at just 48 years old. "The songs are exactly as Matteo wrote, recorded and completed them. Not an unfinished collection or an archive reopened after years, but a real album built without the pressure of having to meet market timelines or production deadlines," reads the press release accompanying the album's release.

The new record – ten songs for a total running time of just over half an hour – doesn't merely pick up the threads of the past. Although it wasn't conceived as a "final" album, "Kings Without A Crown" distills and elevates the long journey Yuppie Flu began back in the late Nineties. While lo-fi pop built on guitars and synthesizers remains, once again, the beginning and end of everything, the long studio work shows through both in the songwriting - a string of melodies bordering on perfection - and in the care lavished on the arrangements.
Pocket-sized orchestrations elevate the narcoleptic "We're Real (In Neverland)" and the elegant "Be Free Now", built together with Francesco Chielli, the band's longtime bassist and co-writer, who also delivers the rapped verses. "Avalon" unfurls over bittersweet notes and melodic lines recalling "The High Road", the old Broken Bells-Danger Mouse single, while "Chasing What" even echoes the Air of the "The Virgin Suicides" soundtrack. Not to be outdone are the blazing uptempo "Sweet Ghost", enriched by yet another perfectly turned chorus, and a "Hold On" laid over trip-hop rhythms.

The fact that each of the nine songs heads in a different direction, while still retaining a recognizable stylistic core, is made even clearer by the spectral "Devil's Sweetheart" and the rarefied, psychedelic "Cosmic Ape", whose chorus brings back the spatial atmospheres of Air. "We will meet again to start/ the game of the thin and sharp/ knife of the heart/ ever and ever", sings Matteo Agostinelli on the closing - almost country-rock - "Nothing", as if bidding farewell after dispensing, once again, so much beauty.

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26/09/2026