Some album titles are more informative than others. Some are cryptic, suggestive, mysterious, while others, like that of the amazing Lorenzo Landini‘s latest full-length, radical, or, all the good revolutionaries are dead (cuz we killed them), set out the stall of the record from the very beginning. Written and recorded within an increasingly turbulent present, the album is several things at once. A howl of despair, a statement of intent, a timely reminder of the power of collaboration and community. Like much of Landini’s work, this is delivered with a layered, nuanced style which moves effortlessly between playful irony and open-hearted sincerity, though it is notable how the former never impinges on the fundamental intent of the songs. Which is to say, the irony ranges from cynical satire to good old fashioned gallows humour, though exists not to undermine the album’s earnestness but reinforce it. To amend the old Gramscian favourite a little, the amazing Lorenzo Landini could be said to work with a certain cynicism of the intellect, sincerity of the will. Perhaps the only way to be a radical when the world is intent on killing revolutionaries.
We took the opportunity to ask Landini a few questions about the record, so read on below for a more detailed exploration of radical, from the path to a new album that started in reluctance, to the influence of Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba and, yes, Herman Melville.
The title seems a pertinent place to start, especially in light of… *gestures at the state of the world*. radical, or, all the good revolutionaries are dead (cuz we killed them), to give the full title, feels like a real statement of intent? Did you have the title in mind while working on the songs? What were the origins of the record?
I cannot emphasize enough that I didn’t want to write a record last year, and didn’t set out with that intention. 2025 was always going to be a year of transition. I left New York City after fifteen years, moving with my wife and cat an hour and a half south to Philadelphia (she is Philadelphian and her family is all around here). It was my first relocation as an adult to a totally new city in the USA, and it happened without the excuse of work or school, so it’s been hard to feel like I’m not starting over as I get to know a new scene and community in my mid 30s.
But after a month in our new home we finally took our honeymoon in December 2024. We went to Chile, a journey to celebrate love which I found (maybe unsurprisingly) inspiring as a writer. I felt I was setting out on the next big chapter of my life and was immersed in the street art of the liberatory political tradition of Chile, an odd combination of forces maybe but ones that ignited my imagination. Sprinkle in the associated shame and reflection of being an American visiting the society and territory ravaged by Pinochet’s decades of atrocities, and you have a fertile ground for writing political songs, I’d say.
So yeah, I didn’t want to write and record and release an album, but I did, because I am a firm believer in working with inspiration when it arrives, even if other conditions are unideal. It’s a risk to let inspiration sit, especially when it feels as urgent as this one did; you never know when it’ll move on from you.
The title did come to me quite early on, in fact, I think I was doodling the full title around some early album artwork ideas in a notebook on the flight back home from Santiago. It certainly shaped and organized the songs and the aim of the release.
Songs like ‘firebrush’ draw on your own experiences pretty directly. Would you say this is your most personal record to date?
I think in some ways it is more personal than previous collections of songs in that the listener’s recognition of the personal side is more immediate, I’m sharing details of my biography and heart in ways that require less “spelling out,” so to speak. But I also think of “radical” as my most imaginative record, where forces of nature and world history clash and metaphors and characters interplay with great freedom. I’m not too big on formal overarching literary gestures but I like that the thematics of the songs do not feel confined to one song or one set of ideas, even, but move with freedom throughout the release. An embodiment of a borderless terrain, perhaps.
We’ve previously noted a “blend of earnest emotion and deprecating humour” running through your work, and I think the description still holds here, though more than ever it’s the former which wins out. Humour and wit are features for sure, but there’s no hiding behind irony. You say what you mean pretty clearly. Was there a conscious decision to embrace sincerity in this way? I mean, could a good revolutionary be anything else?
Irony will always be a part of my songwriting, or at least an element of playfulness that invites the listener in, that tells them they are allowed to mess around and try stuff within the space of interpreting this music. But yes, I think that the subject matter demands a clarity and truth telling that isn’t funny or clever or holding a shield. That’s what humor can be, right, honesty with some armor to it, medicine with some sugar.
So yes, you are very much correct that it was a conscious decision to embrace sincerity so often here. With so much of the writing in this album inspired by mutual aid organizing around prison abolition and Palestinian liberty, well, it doesn’t allow for half measures against the people (us, all of us) complicit in perpetrating the great horrors of our age. If anything, I sometimes still chide myself for not being more direct, more explicit; on the other hand, I did want “radical” to feel like a work of artistry with political underpinnings rather than a work of straight agitprop (a medium which I have much admiration and think is also super useful).
On a related note, there’s long been a conversational tone to your work (parts of Wins Above Replacement felt like sitting in the bar watching the game with the central figure of the song), but parts of radical push this further than ever. The near-spoken word introduction of opening track, for example. Could you talk a little about this side of your vocal style, and how it fits into the (earnest?) thematic intentions of the album?
Thank you for asking about this, I do try to shift the listener into different relationships (spatial and otherwise) with the narrator and I’m glad this is coming across. ‘about the author’ is a funny example where the song is explicitly from my perspective, about me and my actual life and beliefs, but musically it functions as an introduction to the band and some of the sonic styles of the album. I was lucky that we were able to record much of the instrumentation for the record as a four-piece band about an hour north of Philadelphia. We were in a beautiful studio that was a converted stand-alone garage of a friend of a friend over a weekend last May, where the bay was converted into a rehearsal space that could record live drums. The band includes a couple really dear friends of mine who have been playing shows with me around the Mid-Atlantic region of the US for a couple years now.
I’ll speak a little more on collaboration below, but in the studio or in the rehearsal room I never give folks a ‘part’ to play, I’m not a ‘composer’ … I love getting talented folks I trust—as people AND artists—in a room with lyrics and some chord progressions and then ask them, over and over again, “what do you want to do with this?” I believe I rarely have the best idea in the room, and ‘about the author’ reflects this part of the process with the different voices (different me’s, in a way) chiming in to challenge or antagonize the main narrator. I find dialogue infinitely more satisfying and ultimately more productive than monologue and it also feels more true to our current pixelated existence. Capturing this multiplicity can involve a bit of push and pull, if not thematic conflict, and can be somewhat thorny, messy, non-linear, inefficient, non-hierarchical … but it’s, well, more free?
Likewise, we’ve written about the duality of hope and despair through the amazing Lorenzo Landini albums in the past, and the themes push this balance to the forefront of concerns here. The whole optimism vs. doomer argument is too often abstracted into theoretical ideas of identity, but I’m most interested how you position the dynamic as a source of potential action. As though total hopelessness might be its own form of motivation? “no one is coming to save us / oh boy do we know that,” you sing in ‘kindness’, which to me seems to capture the nub of the situation. The good revolutionaries are dead, there’s no help coming, therefore the onus is on us?
This is definitely part of what I am on about, yes! I think we can push the severity of the problem even further, especially in the art world, in that I am not really discussing the political outlook or the left’s chances of victory; it’s not an intellectual exercise anymore, where it might have been for the white-passing cis het educated folks like myself, who have benefited most of our lives from the spoils of empire. Rather, when we are rightly horrified by our history of complicity—i.e. our willingness to let others suffer for our comfort, our desire to outsource justice to craven institutions, our tacit endorsement of for-profit pipelines of violence – when we look at all this and say “I can no longer morally excuse this in myself” … when we see the truth of these things, then we uncover in ourselves a responsibility and a love for what is being harmed that makes positive corrective action inevitable.
All honor to Renée Good and Alex Pretti, unjustly slain brave residents who refused to continue prioritizing their own safety while Black and brown neighbors suffered brutalization upon the altar of white supremacy and global empire. We can no longer say “this is not who we are” and draw increasingly intangible lines between ourselves and the bombs our taxes paid for. Put simply, it is our mess and we must at least attempt to clean it up, because that’s the right thing to do.
I suppose it all sounds a bit Catholic when I put it like that, doesn’t it?
Can we speak a little about influences? Who/what do you consider the major touchstones for the album? Be those musical or otherwise?
Ack this is almost too big a question as I am indebted to so many great artists and activists for radical! Trying to be concise here, believe it or not…
Sonically, I thought this was going to sound mainly like a quite spare punk rock album at first, but as an indie / alt band like Pavement or my favs The Weakerthans might record it. Songs like “complex” still retain some of that character. I thought that, within that general aesthetic, ‘signs from the static’ and ‘peace’ would then stick out as country and folk counterpoints, respectively.
Then I got in the studio and started playing with the band and I didn’t let myself be dogmatic about any of it. I’ll never be a puritan about style or sound or anything like that, and I relish the things that emerged. I was pleasantly surprised by the flashes of Interpol and Sylvan Esso scattered amongst the Bright Eyes and Neko Case.
Lyrically, when I began writing these songs I was reading Moby-Dick; or, The Whale for the first time, and I think that among other things Melville’s prose added a certain (forgive me) size to the scope of the language and the perspective, which I treasure. Also, after I had the title and solid sketches of 3-5 songs, an informal organizing book club I am part of began reading Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, two of my favorite liberatory writers, and no surprise I loved that work too. Many of the chapters articulated and dovetailed with ideas I was trying to capture in song and fiction, affirming what I was writing while still challenging me to do better, as a person and an artist
While writing the songs themselves I listened to Jose Larralde and South American New Wave, Patagonia is still quite obsessed with New Wave, which I didn’t realize before visiting, did you?
I also noted how you thanked a variety of friends and collaborators for bringing the record to life. What role did they play exactly? Is it important for a ‘solo’ artist to have this kind of support?
For me, that support is essential. It’s such a vulnerable, potentially foolish thing to earnestly make art that no one specifically asked or paid for, and I try to surround myself with collaborators that are friends first and colleagues second. I’m also not at all precious with my draft material, I’m constantly asking friends if they would read something, or listen to a phone demo, if they could then tell me what it made them feel, what they thought it was about. I hope it’s a loving lean on their expertise and critical eyes, one that invites them to ask the same of me. I love my friend’s artwork with all my spirit, experiencing it in whatever form it takes informs my knowledge of their interiority in a way that is so rich and wonderful that it almost doesn’t matter what the ‘product’ becomes.
This record in particular I sent many of these song drafts to folks whose character and politics I admire, and I am so grateful to their insight and encouragement. Then for the final recorded version of ‘peace’ I asked many of these same folks and other varied friends and comrades to record themselves singing the group vocals remotely and send them to (my producer) Vadim and I to mix, I am so pleased with how it came out, Vadim had all his little cousins sing it as well. And when I asked for the group vocals I also invited anyone who wanted to share a story about organizing to include it, and that’s how my friend’s narration that ends with “it’s possible to build the world that we deserve” came to exist. No coaching or direction there on my part, seriously! When I heard it I thought it was just so perfect that I wanted to end the record with it.
To conclude, I won’t be as ham-fisted as to ask whether or not you are hopeful re: the current political climate of the US and wider world, but I am interested in your own personal experience of the present. How does it feel to live in America today? To release an album into such a world?
As I write to you I am in daily contact with a handful of friends in Minneapolis, the area which could be described as our current front against the traditions of white supremacy and fascism that have always infested the political concept of the United States of America. I do not know if I am hopeful, but thanks to the aforementioned Kaba, I know hope is a discipline to be practiced for it to exist at all. And I am always inspired by communities coming together, as they are, to an unprecedented degree in the Twin Cities, which already had its share of activation after the murder of George Floyd, only for the locals to now be occupied by a paramilitary force with goals entirely contrary to the vast majority of the residents.
I don’t really think art is ‘enough’ in any moment, let alone one like this, or that any one piece can ‘change the world’, and the culmination of this line of thinking is, unfortunately, where I am now as I write to you Jon: a place where it is hard to want to make things at all, especially joyful, fulfilling things. I want to think of myself as someone who understands when it is time to be on stage, and when it is time to be on the street. But, as one of my literary heroes Tony Kushner writes, despite the ‘fraudulence’ of attempting to be an explicitly political artist, “those who are involved in the struggle to change the world need art that assists in examining the issues at hand,” and I think that includes all of us, not least of all myself. Writing the record itself was a process of becoming, of examining my values and my actions and actually actively transforming.
So right now yes, it feels bad to be an American, a people who “suffer from collective amnesia” (more Kushner) … To borrow clumsily from an Italian countryman now, while the new world struggles to be born, the monsters are very much here. And I want us to survive.
radical, or, all the good revolutionaries are dead (cuz we killed them) is out now and available from the amazing Lorenzo Landini Bandcamp page.