cocaine, stalkers and rock’n’roll to be rougher than ever – Corriere.it

Cool kids don’t like rock because they listen to trap and pop. Mneskin joke about it in Cool Kids, a post-punk track from Rush!, the third album of their career which will be released on Friday all over the world. The four managed to make a genre that seemed to be on the way out cool again. Their ride to global success, which started with victory at Eurovision 2022 and passed through around 7 billion streams worldwide, now faces the most difficult test, that of confirmation.

A dozen unreleased songs (in addition to singles already released in the last year) which confirm their rock soul. There was not that filing of the edges that many feared given the presence in the studio, together with Fabrizio Ferraguzzo (who is also the manager of the band) of Max Martin, the producer who from Britney to the Backstreet Boys to Katy Perry, shaped the sound of the pop of the last 25 years. Songs from Rush! they are rough, tense rock, with that space for solos and instrumental moments that the logic of streaming seems to have killed. The references are many, from the funk rock of the red Hot Chili Peppers to post punk, from the garage of the Zeroes to the Brit pop of the Nineties. In terms of language, English wins (in Cool Kids also with a marked British accent), but three songs in Italian will also go worldwide.

We left them with Teatro d’ira vol. 1, the record that contained that Shut up and good that crowned them in Sanremo and Eurovision: Damiano David, Vic De Angelis, Thomas Raggi and Ethan Torchio were boys angry with the world, with that anger that comes from the urgency of twenty years, that desire to shout that the wrong ones are you who still think with old-fashioned schemes. Here the four accompany us into that world of sex, drugs and rock and roll into which they were catapulted after the global explosion and from whose observation reflections and self-analysis are born.

There are sex nights like Baby Said or Feel in which spreads cocaine on the table. Even if the above cool kids don’t use drugs, only weed. Bla bla bla has a Blur-like attitude and a heart-pounding rhythm as much as the night spent with the girl, also attracted to white powder, of a guy who said they were a crap band. And it’s not clear whether this rematch is more fun or the ego trip of kissing my butt because I have a billion streams. Not all perdition and temptation. There is also the awareness of how fake this shiny world is. the story of Gossip, the single recently released with the feat of Tom Morello, former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, more than an inspiration for the band. A photograph of that Los Angeles where they moved, a city of lies where everyone pretends to be better than they are: just a mask, hide the dirt under the carpet and the American dream served as a cocktail.

One plane after another, contracts to sign, a run-up which doesn’t make all this sense if she stays in some time zone and 7,000 miles away (more or less the one between Rome and Los Angeles) and you have to dream of escaping and making love with her that same night accompanied from the romantic vintage echoes of a power ballad like Timezone. In the account there are also the stalkers well told, this time in Italian, by Mark Chapman, the madman who killed John Lennon, who keeps you on the edge of tension with a nervous riff. The story of that piece of reality leaves room for the world on the dark atmospheres of Gasoline: the completion of a piece published for a pro-Ukraine campaign, a portrait of a bloodthirsty madman who holds the destinies of the world in his hand, an in-depth analysis of the fuck Putin shouted on the stage. While waiting for the concerts, the first Italian date is on the 23rd in Pesaro, there is a collective wedding. The invitation is there, with the four on top of the wedding cake. The celebrant Alessandro Michele, former genius of Gucci. the disc launch party, tomorrow in Rome, in style, needless to say, kinky rock in love, a little perversion, a little love.