With Irama I never stop oscillating between fascination and suspicion. Anthology of life and death is a tome of 14 songs that amplifies this perennial ambivalence of mine: sometimes it captures you, other times it leaves you suspended, balanced between boredom and amazement.
The album moves on a double track: life and death, ascending and descending parable of a love, round trip between euphoria and loss.
It is a work born from silence, from the creative isolation chosen by the artist as an ascetic training ground for the voice. In this suspended space, Irama explores domestic intimacy, the house as a refuge and theater of ghosts, affections and memories. Each song is an open room, a fragment of life in which fragility and strength, desire and pain, shadow and light coexist. Here vulnerability becomes living matter, concrete poetry that is not afraid to show itself in its cracks.
The collaborations confirm the desire for an authentic dialogue with contemporary Italian music: Achille Lauro in Arizona, fusion of desire, passion and instinct; Giorgia in Darkwhere love and pain blend together until they become song; Elodie in Formera heated duel between pride and attraction, already among the most listened to songs. Davide Rossi, international producer, signs I will miss you very muchone of the emotional peaks of the album, with arrangements that can be cinematic without being pompous.
In the end, I decide I like the record. It's not revolutionary, it's not flawless, but it shows clear growth: uncompromising artistic evolution from a phone call hit, expanding lyricism, a willingness to follow its own paths.
TRACK BY TRACK
Arizona (with Achille Lauro)
I finished recording the piece, I'm listening to it… this song is sex: it's pulsating flesh, it's raw passion. I need the verse of someone who can ride it. I have the right person in mind.
Soulless
I threw up the first take, dirty, unrepeatable. Every time I try to do it again, that urgency, that intensity is missing. And then that first sentence: “but female pain…” — disarms me every time.
Dark (with Giorgia)
I just finished listening to Giorgia's recording: it gave me goosebumps. “And I hated you so much that I broke the doors like a flower in a shrine that grows and breaks it.”
Dust
I was in the mountains, alone with a guitar. “Break my bones until I turn to dust.” I finished writing Polvere and the song was already born. Spontaneous, like a scratch you can't hold back. It's the first time I've written with a guitar, I've always had the piano as my home. What emerged was something poisonous, but at the same time liberating: almost a blade that cuts and immediately opens air. I can feel it: this song will find its true form in concerts. She was born for that. I see the people in front of me, I hear them singing it and putting all their voices into it. As if it were theirs, as if it had always existed.
Everything except this
Yet, even if I tried to replay everything a thousand times in my head, I wouldn't be able to imagine a different ending.
Galaxies
Every time I walked through that door and saw you, I felt tiny. Paradoxical: you were the little girl, yet it was me, every time, who had to learn from you.
I will miss you very much
I listen to it again and I think it's my favorite song on the album, maybe one of my favorites ever. I stood on that roof thinking about what I would want to say if I took my own life.
48 hours
I have 48 hours to clean up all this mess… “And the house without your scattered clothes looks like an office.”
Ex (with Elodie)
And despite everything, do you believe that he loves you as much as before? “Are you out of your mind…” Yet you still make me ask.
Julia
I recorded a new song live. I've smoked too many cigarettes, I should quit. Anyway, this song is just the icing on the cake, isn't it?
Slowly
Sounds like one of those fucking classics to me. Yes, this is it.
Circus
A dancer, punished by the gods and cast out due to the envy aroused by her beauty, is relegated to a circus: an oppressive place, where applause mixes with slimy looks and a constant sense of imprisonment. There, where everything seems to represent hell, he unexpectedly discovers love, the only flame capable of redeeming his condemnation. But the goddess of beauty, blinded by jealousy, does not tolerate that happiness: she brutally extinguishes that love, killing the man who had dared to love the damned woman.
Not you
A fucking angel. I was just a child: that day I entered the room to tell you that I loved you. You were looking down at me, you were happy… I knew I should have told you. It's yet another song I wrote for you. Then I tried to disguise it, but others will understand.
The Day
Pain – wrote Pavese – “is not at all a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Pain is a bestial and ferocious thing, banal and gratuitous, as natural as air.”
SCORE: 6.75
TO LISTEN NOW
Arizona (feat. Achille Lauro) – Buio (feat. Giorgia) – Giulia
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Perhaps the songs you already know make listening easier
TRACKLIST
Arizona (feat. Achille Lauro)
Soulless
Buio (feat. Giorgia)
Dust
Anything But This
Galaxies
I will miss you very much
48 Hours
EX (feat. Elodie)
Julia
Slowly
Circus
You No
The Day
THE DISCOGRAPHY
2016 – Irama
2018 – Young people
2022 – The day I stopped thinking
2023 – No stress (With Rkomi)
2025 – Anthology of life and death
