Definitely a Mixtape. “Ryan Ted” has this structure, this attitude, this value.
It doesn't aspire to be something different. It is a gesture, a stance.
After The Divine Comedya monumental construction in which Tedua had brought Italian rap to compete with rarely used conceptual structures, returning to the original format has the flavor of a voluntary undressing. Mario knows very well what he is doing.
Ten years separate this album from Waiting for Orange County. It's not nostalgia, or at least not only. It's reconnaissance. The reference to The OC it was never just aesthetic in Tedua: it was a way to make the Californian imagination a screen on which to project Genoa, its buildings, the crooked sea and that province of the soul that no success can completely erase. Here the formula returns, but filtered through a decade of scars.
Marco Giacobbe's artwork, a man suspended in the night sky of a metropolis, is the exact visual synthesis: neither inside nor outside, in the balance.
The writing is drier, straighter, less constructed. Blue seems like the natural continuation of Purple on the beat level, as if certain thoughts needed a second turn to be said. Fly it is the most intimate piece of the lot: love, redemption, change, with Battisti hovering as a quote, but there are also Vasco and Battiato, Paper sailing ship in particular, to remember that the pens that count know where they come from.
Ultimately, Genoa is never forgotten, it is a constant.
Guests work because they are friends before they feature: Latrelle on Faxxx and Gravity, Very black Serpe in One+GangstaAnna up Black Sweatshirt where the beat seems Drop It Like It's Hot accelerated and dragged by the hair in 2026, Hernia in Hoola HopSayf in Handsome Young Man. No collaboration seems to have been undertaken, they all seem to have been born in the room.
The disk closes where it should open. Letter to Tedua it is the key that explains everything else retroactively: “Tedua is a meme, Tedua can't sing / Tedua thinks he's being intellectual / Tedua must go back to the days of Orange County / When he still sang with his heart among the buildings”. The way in which he demolishes his own public mythology before others do is both the most honest and the most shrewd gesture. He doesn't know how to keep time, he has no talent, he just likes it because it's beautiful: if you put it in your mouth alone, no one can use it as a weapon.
Ryan Ted it doesn't solve anything and doesn't pretend to do so. It's a record that breathes, that has room to make mistakes. After a work like The Divine Comedy and while waiting for the crowds at San Siro, perhaps this was exactly the necessary step.
TO LISTEN NOW
Mai – Hoola Hop – Flying – Handsome Young Man
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Freestyle, an overly worn beat.
SCORE 7.25
TRACKLIST
Rap Legend
Faxxx feat. Latrelle
Uno+Gangsta feat. Very black Serpent
Never
Black Sweatshirt feat. Anna
Too Late
Hoola Hop feat. Hernia
Fly
Freestyle
Young and Beautiful feat. Sayf
The Years
Gravity feat. Latrelle
Blue
Paper sailing ship
Chuniri
Letter to Tedua
THE DISCOGRAPHY
2017 – Orange County California
2018 – Mowgli
2023 – The Divine Comedy
2024 – Paradise – The Divine Comedy Deluxe
Mixtapes
2015 – Waiting for Orange County
2016 – Orange County Mixtape
2020 – Vita Vera Mixtape
2020 – Vita Vera Mixtape, waiting for the Divine Comedy
2026 – Ryan Ted
