Anna Castiglia’s second album lines up eleven autobiographical songs with the tempos of stand-up comedy, on an elegant pop tinged with jazz and bossa.
ANNA-CASTIGLIA-Fear-in-the-pocket-album-2026.
Almost all of us keep something in our pockets to clutch when the day gets bad. Keys, a handkerchief, a receipt, the phone we don’t want to look at.
Anna he keeps the pen in his bag, the words to write in his head and above all the fear in his pocket. He wrote an entire album with that fear to tell how you learn to live with it, one day at a time.
Listening to “La fear in pocket”, his new album, you get the impression that someone is talking to you about their life in a low voice. You can feel the embarrassment of someone who knows they are exposing themselves, and at the same time the readiness of someone who has learned to play down before others do. It is a fragility that does not ask for compassion, and for this reason it is immediately recognized as one’s own.
The eleven songs are pieces of life and follow the times of stand-up comedy. Anna sets the scene, shifts the point of view and closes with a joke that often arrives when melancholy seems to have already won. The writing is dense, verbose, torrential and intense by choice, and therein lies its character.
In a market that shortens verses and tempos to fit in a TikTok video, she lengthens them, loads them with details and trusts a listener willing to follow her. That trust pays off. The title declares the strategy: fear stays in your pocket, it doesn’t disappear, and the irony serves to keep it there.
Musically the album chooses a refined, contemporary and elegant pop, crossed by jazz harmonies, bossa, rock guitars, oriental and Balkan airs, cosmopolitan Latin rhythms and every choice seems designed to leave space for the voice and words.
Selton’s Ramiro signs part of the production and the band appears in I ran out of Latin piecesbringing that confidence with Brazil that no other Italian group has.
Valerio Lundini arrives surprisingly at the tail end of Sound Breath. His comedy built on discards and non sequiturs is a close relative of Anna’s, and his presence seems more a sign of affinity than an operation of visibility. The voices of Canta up to ten, the collective of singer-songwriters of which she is part, fill the choirs of Dumb and they transform a private confession into something that is sung in a group.
The frame is elegant but never tames the writing. Even in the softer passages, when the groove slows down and the harmonies become warm, there always remains a line that stings or a twist that unsettles. It is the most difficult balance for those who write ironic songs: to make people smile without the song becoming a joke, to move without asking for tears. Anna succeeds throughout the album, and with a consistency that wasn’t obvious on the second album.
“Fear in Your Pocket” is the work of an author who already has her own voice and knows exactly what to do with it. There are no poses and there is no chasing the algorithm. In today’s Italian songwriting, full of whispered and always the same confessions, he is one of those rare voices that is worth keeping.
And that pen, in the pocket next to fear, continues to write and give us precious music.
SCORE: 8.00
TO LISTEN NOW
If I look at you like others – It’s been a long time since I said I love you – Fear in my pocket
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Nothing, the album works even after repeated listening!
TRACKLIST
I insist because I exist
Nothing about me
Sound Breath
If I look at you like the others
It’s been a long time since I said I love you
I ran out of Latin pieces
The new season
Dumb
Miro
Barking couple
Fear in your pocket
