Review: BIRTHH - "Breathless"

BIRTHH-Senza-Fiato-album-2026.

“Breathless” is an expression that in Italian works in two opposite directions: wonder and anxiety. Alice Bisi knows this, and she built an entire album around it.

Fourth album in his career, first entirely in Italian, “Senza breath” arrives after three albums in English and a decade spent building Birthh as an international project. The leap into the native language might seem like a retreat. Listening to it, you understand that it is the exact opposite.

The album is as if it were a sound diary of a life divided between Italy and New York, in search of a new identity in a world dominated by conflicts and tensions.

Co-produced with Chef P, the album triggers a tension between Italian songwriting and urban production which, on paper, would suggest a gamble, but here it immediately finds balance.

The album is a continuous flow, not only lyrical. The pieces are connected to each other, almost as if they were a single whole like the passage from Terminal at Trumana perfect sonic and poetic transition.

The already published Little Rat it is among the most focused pieces, the disorientation becomes rhythm rather than lament, the verses cut without excessive weight, the writing is fast and precise.

Good (alone) it is a statement of self-determination, while Total Black (also already published) hits hip-hop with an almost reggaeton-like ambition without asking permission. Ten tracks that alternate acoustic ballads, electronic leaps, sudden register changes. The album fights with itself and then makes peace, with an emotional logic that makes more sense than the formal one.

It all ends with the title track, the only track above three, four and twenty minutes of sober orchestral arrangement that evokes Mina without imitating her.

“Senza breath” is not a resolved album, it is discontinuous, the pieces seem to belong to different spheres that collide before finding a precarious agreement. But it is exactly that precariousness that makes it credible. He has the honesty of someone who doesn't yet know where he will land, and he doesn't pretend otherwise. It's a record about the late twenties really written at the end of the twenties, without the reassuring distance of nostalgia to smooth the edges.