SANTAMAREA-Crooked-souls-album
The debut album is not a business card, it is a beacon which, if positioned incorrectly, risks dazzling rather than illuminating.
Santamarea, with “Anime Storte”, have the rare foresight to shine the light on the shadow areas, on those oblique existences that the norm tends to smooth to the point of anonymity.
There is an ancestral urgency in this album, an aesthetic of the “non-conforming” that has its roots in affective semantics: the term tortu, a Sicilian word that means “not straight”.
Not a condemnation, but a linguistic caress that transforms deviation into an evolutionary privilege.
The project moves on a conceptual axis that connects Mediterranean viscerality to the visionary rigor of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The denial of the straight line, defined by the Viennese architect as “wicked and uncreative”, becomes here the programmatic manifesto of Santamarea.
The eleven tracks unfold like a collective coming-of-age novel, where the topos of metamorphosis is not treated with the usual rhetoric of “improvement”, but as a necessary loss. It is a fertile crumbling. The lyrics address the pain of mutation by avoiding the clichés of chart sentimentalism to embrace a restlessness that is, first of all, existential. Transformation is a dispossession: you have to shed your old skin so as not to suffocate in immobility.
Musically, “Anime Storte” is a complex object to catalogue, and thank goodness. Produced between the golden dust of Palermo and the metropolitan cynicism of Milan, the album oscillates in a European alternative pop rich in indie and post arrangements and sounds. The centrality of the text does not sacrifice the sound texture; on the contrary, the instrumentation demands a physical, almost architectural space. There is a constant dialectical tension between the “straight life” (suffered) and the “oblique” one (chosen), resolved in a sound that does not offer reassurance, but opens passages.
To close the creative impact of the album there is also the cover created by Manuela Di Pisa, with her Daphne in full arboreal transition, the visual seal of the work.
The myth is not a frill, but proof that immobility is the only true defeat.
“Crooked souls” is one of the first surprises (even if we were waiting for the album) of this new 2026.
Crooked souls and straight music!
SCORE: 7.75
TO LISTEN NOW
Mosquitoes – Catastrophic pleasure – New Year's Eve
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
An enjoyable album that we enjoy listening to and listening to again!
