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Say hello to your new favourite doom metal band. Italy’s MESSA made some serious waves with their 2022 release Close, a sumptuous blend of crushing riffs, glacial melodies and eerie ambient passages that won them the best reviews of their career. It was a beautifully executed album, hoovering up influences from a multitude of genres and even briefly wandering into grindcore territory. So, what’s the best way to follow such a well-received breakthrough?
Well, try something different, dur. MESSA’s newest album The Spin could easily have been Close Part Two, but the four-piece didn’t want to sit in a comfort zone. Like its predecessor, The Spin is bleak, spine-tingling doom, but there’s a greater emphasis on Goth and post-punk and less of the prog and sludge that defined their breakthrough. It’s also significantly shorter, barely making it past the forty-minute mark whereas Close lasted more than an hour.
“Yeah, that was deliberate. We thought about doing a more direct album, take out the stuff that doesn’t need to be there and just focus on the message, make it more short, more direct,” explains guitarist Alberto Piccolo. “I’d rather say less and be understood, than say more and have it missed.”
This approach has paid off; The Spin is a tightly edited and enthralling trip to dark places, and even with the compressed run time, is a worthy sequel. These songs veer between highly emotive, anguished doom in the mould of CANDLEMASS and hypnotic post-punk that could have shaken the foundations of Camden town in the late eighties. There are saxophone interludes, jazz melodies and at the forefront, are the spellbinding vocals of Sara Bianchin. Take one listen to album highlight The Dress and one thing becomes abundantly clear; this is not your parents’ favourite avant-garde metal band, but something else entirely. Genre purists might even argue that it’s not doom at all, despite being slow and really bloody bleak.
“It covers everything from the most infinite deep sadness to not recognising yourself in the mirror. When we were rehearsing some of these songs, I thought I could never play them live, I can’t get through them without crying!” Sara tells us, “But after a point, you kind of, detach yourself? I don’t mean in a negative way, but you exorcise the emotions associated with the song. You let the pain free.”
Alberto nods along as she explains this and emphasises that while performing such dark music is tough, it also acts as a catharsis. “It’s great to share that thing with the people, because hopefully they resonate with the song, and it acts like a kind of collective healing.”
Despite not always being the most uplifting listen though, there’s something about The Spin that demands repeat plays. It ends with Thicker Blood, one of the most melancholy things they’ve ever written, but even so, it’s easy to find yourself returning to the first track as soon as it finishes. The Ouroboros snake on the artwork and the title could not be more appropriate;
“It’s structured like a spiral, it goes down and down and keeps spinning,” says Sara. “I think it encourages you to return to the beginning and play the whole thing again. You could say it comes to a full spin.” The album climaxes with one of the most agonising screams of raw, visceral pain imaginable, but it’s not technically the end. The best way to listen to The Spin is to play the entire album on a continuous repeat, until it ceases to have a beginning or end and simply exists.
Alongside the song structures and overall layout of the album, there’s also the production quality. The Spin isn’t old-fashioned by any means, but there’s a retro vibe that adds to the unearthly atmosphere. As Alberto explains, this was very much intentional. The band specifically tried to utilise as much older recording equipment as they could, without compromising the overall quality:
“We didn’t want to do like an experiment and do everything as they did in the eighties, we still had modern computers and we didn’t record on tape, but we used a lot of older gear. I don’t think anyone is going to listen to this and believe it was recorded back then, it’s more like we’ve got an old flavour, but the recipe is a new one.”
The finished record is one of this year’s more intriguing releases and another welcome addition to Italy’s oft-overlooked metal scene. There is a depth to The Spin and multiple layers to unravel, and it owes a debt to authors like Cormac McCarthy and Charles Bukowski as much as SAINT VITUS. “I love the way he (McCarthy) uses words,” says Sara, “there’s a sharpness to it, he writes like a fucking razor blade!”
It takes guts to mess with a winning formula, especially for a comparatively smaller band who are still fighting to rise out of the underground, but pushing one another is how MESSA work. They’ve had no line-up changes in the last ten years and as Alberto puts it; “when you’re spending a lot of time with the same musicians you can fall into the same patterns. But each of us keeps trying to innovate and come up with new things, so we always push one another.”
“The interplay between us after ten years is pretty strong. We know each other’s positive sides and flaws and we know how to treat each other,” adds Sara, “although sometimes it works against you, because you might have negative feedback, and you don’t want to hurt anyone.”
If The Spin is the sound of the band working in total cohesion, then MESSA have a bright future indeed. It’s seven songs of unforgiving metal with a remarkable creative streak and should leave doom aficionados feeling very happy indeed. Jump into The Spin and let it envelop you.
The Spin is set for release on April 11th via Metal Blade Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS122 here:
For more information on MESSA like their official page on Facebook.
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