Post Mortem is the even more surprising comeback album by I Cani

It took nine years for Roman singer-songwriter Niccolò Contessa to decide to return to the scene with a new album from his musical project. i cani, written all in lowercase, is a band that’s actually a true one-man band where Contessa writes, plays, sings, and records. A name that marked an entire generation of Italian indiekids, made up of regular Rockit readers and loyal attendees of the Miami festival, the ultimate Italian indie event. Just three albums from 2011 to 2016 — Il sorprendente album di esordio de I Cani (2011), Glamour (2013), and Aurora (2016) — were enough for Contessa to become a cult figure and then vanish into thin air, as befits a true legend, like Mina, Battisti, and others. It might sound like an exaggeration, but we’re talking about a project that many still credit — for better or worse — with inventing Italian indie as we know it today. The verse by Willy Peyote is emblematic: «I Cani invented indie, so now everyone does it like dogs».

It’s possible that Contessa felt the weight of that responsibility and stepped back — or maybe even felt guilty, like Thom Yorke when he realized he’d contributed to the creation of Coldplay and a whole wave of copycat bands. One thing’s for sure: during all this time, Contessa didn’t just go to bed early — he kept working in music from a more behind-the-scenes position, as a producer and soundtrack composer. He also released a few occasional tracks, solo or in collaboration with Baustelle, but no one expected him to return so suddenly with a full album. Even the members of the Facebook group Daily updates on Contessa’s fourth album had stopped believing — their last post, a sarcastic «It’s not out», dated back to December 15, 2024. But as of yesterday, the album — symbolically titled Post Mortem — became reality with a short, simple announcement from the label 42 Records: «No one expected it. We were all waiting for it. ‘post mortem’ now available for streaming and download. Enjoy.»

First of all, the album cover seems to reference Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen, though unfortunately there’s no official confirmation. The press release by the artist wasn’t very "chatty”: «At the center of everything is the music, so no talking, no image. Everything there is to discover is in the album.»The comparison between the two covers is quite striking: the photo appears to be cropped from a small detail of Springsteen’s, and the contrast between the black-and-white image and the red lettering is very similar, though a bit more faded. It’s almost as if i cani’s album is declaring itself a “minor Nebraska,” which would suit Contessa’s persona. The association might make sense because Nebraska is an album Springsteen wrote during a particularly difficult period of his life, when he tried to disappear, shutting himself in self-imposed isolation. It’s an alien record in his discography, written, recorded, and released in complete solitude, without the famous E-Street Band. The songs are raw skeletons of guitar and harmonica, exploring the darkest parts of the human soul: stories of killers, criminals, various forms of physical and moral violence, mixed with childhood memories, humiliation, and poverty. They come from a dark place, one Springsteen didn’t know how to escape. It’s no coincidence that the key lyric, repeated in two songs, is «Deliver Me From Nowhere.»

Well, the songs on the new i cani album seem to come from that same place — a no man’s land between nothingness and farewell, to quote Clint Eastwood. Though the sound is very different from Nebraska’s raw folk-rock — a mix of electronic, industrial, new wave, and lo-fi — they sound just as dark, painful, and gritty, as if they’d gushed from a sewer, spit to the surface from underground, or ripped from the heart of a stormy, sleepless night. The color palette that paints the album’s mood isn’t just set by the gray cover, but also by some of the track titles — like black hole, darkness, charcoal — that leave no room for brightness. We’re far from the world of Wes Anderson and the other “hipsterisms” sung about in the debut album, and even from the melancholic romanticism of Aurora.

Black Hole talks about the inner void where we swallow our desire to rebel against social conventions or simply our need to break them (You don’t cry at weddings / You don’t laugh at funerals / and above all You don’t complicate people’s lives with your imaginary problems). The theme of nonconformity is echoed mid-album in a track called f.c.f.t., an acronym for doing as everyone else does. Another track that literally moves in the dark is darkness: a lament built on electronic and industrial sounds, blending Subsonica and Nine Inch Nails in equal measure. The fear of darkness is the fear of our darkest side, which we must find the courage to face because «For those afraid of the dark / There’s little light in the world / There’s little love in the world.» The lack of love is clear in charcoal, which is practically a snapshot of Scenes from a Marriage by Bergman, done pop-style — the only nod to the theme of romantic relationships, which here slowly dies out, burning not with passion but with pain and incommunicability. Not exactly a Rio Carnival, in short.

Perhaps the only track that lets us relax with a hint of a smile is cough, a kind of meta-narrative anomaly within the album. In such a monochromatic work, it really feels like a flash of light brighter than the sun, as the opening line says — or a literal cough, something that makes the needle jump during listening, a glitch, a Matrix-style déjà-vu that momentarily breaks the album’s generally dark tone. Still, it’s a bitter smile, because the song is nothing more than a disillusioned analysis of «everything it takes» to make a hit — as if there were truly a recipe to follow (which many producers today probably believe there is). Sometimes, Contessa sings, all it takes is ten years of boredom. The album is then split cleanly in half by the instrumental requiem post mortem, which also metaphorically divides the work into a life before and after death. This idea resurfaces in the final track, with references to the poetic We Will Return Again by Franco Battiato. A major name — the Sicilian songwriter also comes to mind in the vocals of one of the album’s two literary highlights: felice. Each half of the album contains a refined literary reference.

If in Nebraska Springsteen's literary references were the great 20th-century American authors – like Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor – Contessa instead turns to two European giants. In davos he explicitly references The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann: not only does the title refer to the setting of the novel – that is, the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland – but its main characters are almost all mentioned in the song. Those familiar with the source text will easily recognize the protagonist – Hans Castorp – in the «engineer» who doesn’t know which side to take in the philosophical dispute between the nihilist «Jesuit» Leo Naphta and the humanist – «progressive pain in the ass» – Lodovico Settembrini. To avoid any doubts, there’s even the protagonist’s romantic infatuation – Madame Chauchat – mentioned by name. The final verse of the song «He fell asleep Under the snow / He thought he was in the afterlife / He saw everything / That had been / And a touch of eternity» is nothing more than a musical transposition of one of the most important scenes in the book, in which Castorp gets lost in a snowstorm and has a kind of epiphany. «It was no longer just snowfall, it was a white chaotic darkness, a mess, a phenomenal excess exceeding moderate zones (...) Yet Castorp liked living in the snow.» In short, in this album, even the white purity of a snowfall is not in contrast with the darkness, but almost a natural continuation of it.

In the second part of the album, however, Contessa refers to Kafka in a deceptively titled track. felice is in fact a play on words that refers to Felice Bauer, Kafka’s first fiancée to whom the writer dedicated hundreds of letters before their breakup. There is very little truly happy about this track, which explicitly references the protagonisf of The Metamorphosis – «Gregor Samsa» – transformed into an insect – «Like a dog locked inside that whimpers», Like one of those machines that suddenly stops working / And shatters without reason». There would be much more to say, from the self-accusation in the mirror contained in the opening track io to the Western guilt complex present both in colpevole and in in the part of the world where I was born, but for now, we’ll stop here. Just as Nebraska closed with a small note of hope in Reason To Believe, the new album by i cani ends with the faint glimmer of light in un’altra onda, or rather, with an alternation of light and darkness because the song seems to allude to the cycle of life repeating endlessly. Whether it speaks of reincarnation or more prosaically of the ups and downs of life that sometimes overwhelm you, keep your head underwater, and then let you breathe again is left to the listener’s interpretation. Life goes on, with this simple concept, ended the brief section of Springsteen’s autobiography dedicated to Nebraska. His did, as did Contessa’s, and so did ours. We just hope it won’t take another nine years for them to meet again.