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.

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This November will see the release of a brand new full-length from the amazing Lorenzo Landini. The album, titled radical with the subtitle or, all the good revolutionaries are dead (cuz we killed them), looks set to further the aforementioned style, as previewed by lead ‘firebrush’. Inspired by the Osorno volcano in Chile, the song takes the image of the titular perennial to explore ideas of life and transformation within inhospitable conditions, as though holding onto hope that within the burning world of the present moment, new growth might be possible yet.

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Latest offering ‘Rockaway’ continues in this vein, another song which packages contradiction within a bright and playful sound. What Landini describes as “a YOLO song for the overeducated and underpaid,” the track carries that signature blend of earnest emotion and deprecating humour, occupying a space between nostalgic longing and existential dread where we are left to scrabble for comfort wherever we might find it. “Best time of my life, full happiness, fullest myself-ness,” as Landini sings. “Think about how much worse it gets, how short this will all be / banish the lesser fears, remember the big ones / for a moment we’re together / to laugh and cry, share and grieve.” But within this consolation blooms a real fondness. For what is life if not a train ride towards an inevitable destination?

when the time comes, you’ll know just what to do
you’re gonna bury me in East New York, on the way to the beach

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“An embrace of contradiction,” was how we described Wins Above Replacement, last year’s sports-themed full-length by the amazing Lorenzo Landini. “Because, like sports, life can feel like a whole lot of suffering until those moments where it’s suddenly wonderful.” What he calls “a piece about hungering to belong in an increasingly disconnected and brutalizing culture,” new single ‘Leave No Trace’ sees Landini adopt a newly polished style without sacrificing the immediacy and charm which made the previous album so striking. Again the mood splits the difference between playfulness and sincerity, the vocals full of searching questions and wry humour, with a rock energy coming to drive the track forward and towards its cathartic conclusion.

Braden Lawrence – Gary

A song “told through the lens of an elderly man who’s looking for love after a tragic loss,” ‘Gary’ is the lead single and title track from a forthcoming EP by Braden Lawrence. Perhaps best known as a founding member of Philly rock band The Districts, Lawrence also previously recorded under the moniker Haggert Mctaggert, but has switched to his real name for last year’s album When You Lose the Light, released via Anxiety Blanket Records. Again on Anxiety Blanket, the Gary EP promises to continue the record’s blend of folk songwriting and contemporary indie pop. ‘Gary’ the single is a good introduction, a downbeat but sincere song full of wistful longing for things past, all hushed vocals and gently poignant instrumentation.

When you lose something you find something new
That’s what they said and then I met you

‘Gary’ is out now via streaming services.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Laraaji Rework)

The latest “rework” of a track from their acclaimed album Aura on Erased Tapes, London-based, Japanese voice artist Hatis Noit has teamed up with “multi-instrumentalist, laughter meditation practitioner and ambient godfather” Laraaji to reinterpret the album’s opener and title track. Previous reworkings have seen the likes of Preservation and Armand Hammer push Noit’s work towards hip hop, whereas Laraaji uses open tune zither, kalimba and vocals to lead it further out into ambient landscapes, leading to a multi-timbral sound which reaches the for the horizon.

Hemlock Ernst – Raised in the South

Hemlock Ernst, the rap project of Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, has announced a new album, Studying Absence in collaboration with Icky Reels. Released via Beans‘ Tygr Rawwk Rcrds this coming October, the record sees Herring swap the typical jazz and soul beats of the Hemlock Ernst sound for Icky Reels’s industrial sensibilities and forces his most ambitious record to date. One loaded with all the history and ghosts of the South, that which happened and what might have been. “Studying Absence is what I see when I look in the mirror,” as Herring explains. “The record explores the magic that can arise when people are brought together by fate, and the poignant absence that underlines the human experience.” Check out lead single ‘Raised in the South’ now:

Studying Absence is out on the 16th October via Tygr Rawwk Rcrds.

Julia-Sophie – i was only

With new full-length forgive too slow, out now via Ba Da Bing Records, Julia-Sophie “uses her danceable electro pop sound to present something messier but more authentic,” we wrote in a preview. “As though the album is not a straight line towards a final goal but an orbit around an elusive answer.” Closer ‘telephone‘ offered what we described as “a lush song of love, loneliness and longing, where the brightness on the horizon might be some emergent hope or just the neon smudge of the last place still open so late at night,” whereas final single ‘i was only’ invites Noah Yorke to paint the romantic yearning underpinning the entire release. “I was only falling in love with you,” Julia-Sophie sings, and the swirling soundscape comes to mimic such an overwhelming descent.

ladylike – Horse’s Mouth

Taking equal doses of folk, shoegaze and post-rock to form their distinctive sound, Brighton‘s ladylike sit somewhere between caroline and Big Thief, conjuring expansive soundscapes populated with intricate details. Following on from the success of debut single ‘Southbound’ and slots at Glastonbury and Green Man, new track ‘Horse’s Mouth’ is the ideal starting point for those looking to get on board before ladylike really take off. An ever-shifting song which seems at once intimate and sprawling, as though in delving so deep in its introspection it inverts to find a vast internal landscape, one as majestic and melancholic as anything you might find in the wild.

Langkamer – At the Lake

Last month we introduced Langzamer, the forthcoming album by Langkamer on Breakfast Records, with lead single ‘Richard E. Grant’. Indicating something of a change of tone for the outfit, the song displayed a slower, more considered pace to house its confessional exploration of grief. Latest single ‘At the Lake’ invites The Gold Dregs to help Langkamer further this sound, reaching for something as close to Americana as anything they have released to date. “‘At The Lake’ is a song about the fallout of binge drinking culture,” says drummer/lead vocalist Josh Jarman, “and the prestige that we attach to the idea of the poète maudit. The way we romanticise unhealthy behaviour in the name of creativity.” Hence references to Janis Joplin and James Joyce in the almost mournful sound, the track unfurling with all the slow, soul-searching regret of the worst day after.

Langzamer will be released on Breakfast Records on 16th October and is available to pre-order via the Langkamer Bandcamp.

Madam Sad – Exs

Earlier in the month shared Madam Sad‘s ‘Hope For You’, a single which introduced Maddison Schreiber and Evelyn Charlotte Joe’s “willingness,” as we put it, “to confront difficult things with a compassionate face.” With its depiction of relationships and their inevitable end, latest single ‘Exs’ is no different. A song which looks to utilise a sense of personal growth in order to face such breaks with a more neutral, or even positive, attitude. “The song title is a way of holding myself accountable to make sure I am always hoping for the happiness of those who have hurt me,” Schreiber explains. “I also do get to a more genuine place where I feel compassion for an ex-lover’s success, and that’s a nice kind of sad.”

Exs is out now via streaming services.

Niall Summerton – Train

If Niall Summerton‘s previous album What Am I Made Of? presented “easygoing pop […] packed with lo-fi charm,” as we wrote last year, then new single ‘Train’ offers an altogether more shadowy side to his work. Again released via Tiny Library Records, the single pairs prominent drums and almost grungy guitar into a more conflicted atmosphere, the skipping rhythm faltering on occasion as though to evoke the apprehension at the track’s heart before rising into the squally climax. “It’s going to get harder,” Summerton sings, and amid the tumult of the closing seconds, you get the sense the prophecy has already arrived.

‘Train’ is out now via streaming services.

Nick Zanka – Softshoe

Described as “one part intervention, one part pep talk,” ‘Softshoe is the latest single from Nick Zanca ahead of his forthcoming LP, Hindsight. Recent singles ‘Little Professor’ and ‘You Two’ took on neurodivergence and open relationships respectively, and ‘Softshoe’ feels like it meets both tracks halfway. “I wrote this song for a dear friend and longtime collaborator during a period where we were struggling to communicate,” Zanca explains. “When zoomed out, it is a love song to a friend and a promise to persist and keep the faith.”

Slark Moan – Dollhouse Heart

The first glimpse of forthcoming EP The Return of Guitar Music, ‘Dollhouse Heart’ is the new single from Slark Moan, alter ego of New York multi-instrumentalist Mark Sloan. “[The song] is about feeling small amidst the enormity of life, and the overwhelming sadness and beauty of living an ephemeral existence within an infinite universe,” Sloan explains, illustrating both the scope and inspiring nature of the record. “I recognize that I’ve gained an unabashed realism,” they continue, “creative empowerment, and gratitude that my younger self just couldn’t access.” Sloan is joined by Nashville songwriter and visual artist Meg Elsier, and together they conjure something that oozes calm confidence and newfound wisdom as life’s many emotions threaten to burst from the seams. Watch Diego Molina’s video below:

‘Dollhouse Heart’ is out now on streaming services.

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Fast forward a year and the amazing Lorenzo Landini is back with a brand new record, Wins Above Replacement. The album sees Landini focus on sports, wringing every drop of metaphorical value from the theme to explore ideas of dreams, disappointment and disillusionment. Because what is sport but an exaggerated picture of the contradictions of modern living? Where people are made heroes, made villains, treated as performing robots and flattened into statistics? Games of money and numbers where human connection nevertheless flourishes.

Take opener ‘Coach’, which serves as both a thank you letter to the titular figure (“when I got knocked out / you were the first one there, you held my hand”) and a pledge to utilise the trust and confidence such figures inspire (“gonna keep trying to find my team / gonna keep trying to build a healthy routine / I’m gonna keep trying”). Though this earnestness is quickly followed by the wry ‘Rooting for the Earthquake’, which draws on the phrase Italians use when two football sides you dislike are playing against one another (i.e. Tottenham or Arsenal? I’m rooting for an earthquake) to capture the sensation of being stuck amid a collapsing world:

wouldn’t mind the comet
wouldn’t mind the horsemen
wouldn’t mind the inferno
wouldn’t mind blasts of ice
I am rooting for the earthquake
full time surely, ref
I’m ready for it to end

From here, Lorenzo Landini explodes the sport theme in scope and direction, leading casual fans into the ideas while providing plenty of references for the true heads too. “Heard you only sing when you’re winning / that’s no way to fan,” he sings on the self-deprecating ‘a loser (again)’, while ‘Incidental Contact’ plays to the whistle in its examination of love and guilt and the title track rails against both self-held perfectionism and the dehumanising capitalist gamification faced by athletes and artists both. “Categorize me, package me for consumption / I will defy the numbers on your screen,” as Landini sings. “My spirit will scream and break your machine.” Not that such passion is easily maintained, especially not in a dog-eat-dog world of competition where the brightest stars are teenagers. ‘Serena Fucking Williams’ confronts the frankly soul-destroying act of holding your own life up against the demi-gods of whatever field you call your own.

But even through this despondent mood runs a tangible playfulness. A new way of looking at things. An understanding of the rules of the game. This is the presiding spirit of Wins Above Replacement. An embrace of contradiction. Because, like sports, life can feel like a whole lot of suffering until those moments where it’s suddenly wonderful. And how that’s more than enough to fall in love with the whole thing. The conclusion of ‘not a loser (for a day)’, a song in part inspired by a visit to a friend in a mental health unit, serves as a summation of the entire album:

look I have no moral
and I’m sorry I talk about sports so much
they bring me joy
how can I bring you joy

Wins Above Replacement is out now and available from the amazing Lorenzo Landini Bandcamp page.

Artwork, graphics, and photography by Lara Atallah

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