On his third studio album, Kid Yugi chooses the riskiest path: dismantling his imagination instead of consolidating it. “Even heroes die” is not a programmatic title, but a declaration of surrender towards the very idea of myth, of a saving figure, of heroic narration applied to contemporary man.
It is a record that does not seek redemption or moral peaks, but moves in an intermediate, opaque zone, where conflict is no longer a spectacle but a permanent condition.
Here the hero does not fall due to excess hubris, but due to wear and tear: crushed by time, by hyper-information, by a system that reduces the individual to a function, to a node within a network of continuous noise.
Kid Yugi he writes as someone who observes history from inside its cracks, questioning both the present and its past mythologies, between ancient fanaticisms and modern radicalisms, between internalized violence and moral simplifications.
Even Heroes Die is an album that asks for listening rather than consensus, distance rather than identification. A work that does not want to explain the world, but to show its fractures, letting time – once again – do its job.
What does it mean to be a hero?
Do good with all your strength” most would reply.
Failing miserably in the name of a utopia!” the wicked would thunder.
Demonstrate courage and self-sacrifice in the face of danger and adversity” the academics would intone. Well, all these definitions are wrong, old, obsolete, outdated, suitable for past eras, for a world in which the distinction between good and evil appeared clear and irreducible. Contemporary society, that of consumption which promotes individualism and glorifies selfishness, the society which has sacrificed the values of justice by replacing them with those of merit, has managed to amalgamate the two absolutes. But therefore, if good and evil are similar, if the human being opts for one or the other according to a single criterion, utility, how can we recognize a hero? Even worse, is it possible that this world is no longer capable of creating them?
They taught us that each of us is the hero of our own story, that each of us is predestined, talented, a genius sent to this earth to fulfill a divine task. This is what you believe and this is what I believe too. And now more than ever my mission appears clear to me, as clear as the March sky. I am your Memorandum.
And I bring a single message: EVEN HEROES DIE.
We met him during the presentation of the album.
THE INTERVIEW
In the title of the album, “Heroes also die”, there is an almost iconoclastic gesture. Is it a more aesthetic or political choice?
It is a choice that arises from both things, but first of all from a need for subtraction. The idea of having the hero “die” is a way to defuse expectations, both mine and others.
We live in a society that needs heroic figures, hypertrophic symbols, models to project onto others. But the central theme of the album is precisely this: today the true hero is the common man.
Making the hero die means bringing him back to a human, fragile, fallible dimension. It is an almost therapeutic act, a way to exorcise the weight of the heroic narrative and restore dignity to normality. There is no glorification of the fall: there is a willingness to accept that we are all, inevitably, ordinary people.
Good and evil run through your record. What do they represent for you?
Good and evil in past eras, at least in the arts, were two very distinct things. Good was “Beowolf” and “Grendel” was Evil. Instead, today almost everything is blurred, there is no longer a straight line that says what is good and what is bad and therefore even the concepts of good and evil which in the history of humanity have always been absolutes are starting to falter.
Today the idols of the new generations are no longer those who fight injustices or those who do something concrete. Unfortunately, today the value of a person is often calculated based on how much money they attract, produce or generate. Today everything is very empty. The title of the album is to remember that if the heroes of the past died, the heroes and idols of today will surely also die.”
The theme of struggle often returns on the album. But it seems like a struggle emptied of triumphalism.
Because the fight, as I understand it, is not about winning something. It helps us understand who we are. Fighting is not a heroic act, it is a human condition.
Writing comes after this thought, not before. It's a reflection I already had when I was much younger. I have always had the feeling that, in contemporary society, human beings have been progressively dehumanized, reduced to a node within a network of information.
You defined this approach as a sort of “post-futurism”. What do you mean?
The futurists tried to enhance the noise of machines, to transform it into poetry. Today the problem is the opposite: man produces noise through machines.
Hyperconnection and hyperinformation have brought us so close that we have to scream in each other's ears all the time.
We live immersed in an incessant flow of references, comparisons, metaphors.
We are targets of information that is “shot at us”, and which we then reprocess in a more or less conscious way, returning it to the world.
Writing today means dealing with this saturation, trying to create something personal in an era in which it seems that everything has already been said — and it's probably true, often better than we would be able to do.
The conflict, internal and external, is one of the strongest cores of the album. Is there a song that represents you more than the others?
Definitely “David and Goliath”. It is the song in which I try to explain this tension better. Every human being is simultaneously David and Goliath: no one is excluded from this internal battle.
There is a dimension of inevitability that unites us all. The blade of grass will always be cut by the scythe, the stone will roll downwards because it must submit to gravity. This constant pressure of the inevitable is a form of internal micro-violence. It is the conflict that each of us carries within us.
What about external violence?
It exists, and it is undeniable. It is the violence of society, of the streets, of contexts in which marginality becomes destiny. There are places and dynamics in which this violence takes on even more extreme and catastrophic forms.
But I don't feel like I'm in a position to teach anyone anything. David and Goliath was born rather as a message to young people who get lost behind street dynamics, often for ideologies that don't even really belong to them.
In the text you list words such as violence, fear, abuse, hatred, lack of forgiveness. Is it a diagnosis or an indictment?
It's a bitter observation. Can we really not do better than this?
If you talk to a street kid, it often seems like only that one vocabulary exists. And this is the most hypocritical thing of all, because the street is the most hypocritical place I have ever seen.
I wanted to dedicate a song to those who lose their lives, physically or simply in terms of time, of possibilities, behind these empty mythologies. Giving your life, or ruining it, for concepts that only produce violence, fear and hatred makes no sense. And that's where, ultimately, the whole album comes from.
What were the cultural and artistic references that accompanied you in writing the album?
Not only CCCP, even if they were fundamental, but I listened a lot to Guccini, who has this ability to talk about everyday life and human suffering without rhetorical excess. On the visual and cinematic side, Tsukamoto with Bullet Ballet influenced me with its extreme and claustrophobic aesthetic. And then Dostoevsky: I consider him the novelist who had the greatest impact on me. When I read “Crime and Punishment” at thirteen, even though I understood almost nothing about it, something of his suffering still reached me. If a Russian who lived two hundred years ago can speak to a boy from Massafra today, it means that words have a much greater power than we imagine. In his novels there are no heroes in the classic sense, or they are human, fragile, contradictory heroes. I tried to do the same, in my own small way. In recent years I have become very passionate about literature again. He rekindled this passion in me with Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires.
How much do books, cinema and social media influence your creativity? How do you manage these different stimuli in your daily life?
Books are fundamental to me, but out of laziness I read relatively few of them. There are periods when I immerse myself more in cinema, I spend hours in the cinema watching films, and in those moments I feel I nourish my creativity. Other times, however, I find myself immersed in social media, especially TikTok, and there I feel my brain rotting: these are the saddest moments of my life, because I know that I am wasting time and potential.
INSTORE
Kid Yugi will also be present at a series of fan signing meetings on the following dates:
Friday 30/1 – MILAN – Mondadori (Piazza Duomo) – 5.00 pm
Saturday 31/1 – ROME – Laziale Disco – 5pm
Sunday 1/2 – BARI – Feltrinelli (via Melo) – 4pm
Monday 2/2 – LECCE – Mondadori (via Felice Cavallotti 7/a) – 2.00 pm
Monday 2/2 – TARANTO – Feltrinelli (via Federico di Palma) – 6.00 pm
Tuesday 3/2 – NAPLES – Feltrinelli (Station) – 4.00 pm
Wednesday 4/2 – FLORENCE – Feltrinelli RED (P.zza Repubblica) – 5.00 pm
Thursday 5/2 – BOLOGNA – Feltrinelli (Porta Ravegnana) – 4.00 pm
Friday 6/2 – VERONA – Feltrinelli (4 Swords) – 4pm
Saturday 7/2 – PADUA – Mondadori Bookstore (via Cavour) – 4.00 pm
Sunday 8/2 – VARESE – Varese Dischi – 4pm
Monday 9/2 – TURIN – Feltrinelli CLN – 4pm
Tuesday 10/2 – LUCCA – Sky Stone & Songs – 4pm
Wednesday 11/2 – PALERMO – Feltrinelli (via Cavour) – 5pm
Thursday 12/2 – CATANIA – Feltrinelli (via Etnea) – 5.00 pm
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