Seventeen songs to analyze yourself without making discounts and in a direct and crude way, not afraid to admit their weaknesses and weaknesses. “Solo” And the darkest album of Ultimo and you can understand it immediately from the cover photo where a hand squeezes his neck, just to communicate the sense of suffocation. If in the previous records the singer-songwriter has always communicated the desire to dream and build possible imaginary worlds, this time we are talking about mental health, loneliness, despair. Ultimo explains it very well on his Instagram: “Mental health has been totally forgotten, putting only the physical one first. Today, especially among my peers, there is a tendency to reject pain on the edge of oneself, accepting a condition of mediocre well-being, just to say ‘I’m fine’. – he says – And then what a bummer this continuous competition between people, this over-performance that everyone aspires to, this wanting to always overcome at all costs. These mental coaches that are so fashionable and that inspire you, always yelling at you that you have to be number one and you have to run, run, run. But to go where? Why this need to show only the beautiful parts? Why offer only the ‘least injured’ side? It can also be said that you are not feeling well and the pain and loneliness must not be unmentionable ”. Last did not give interviews to the media – with the exception of the promotion on the radio – to let “speak” only his songs, his desperation and his loneliness. A precise artistic and personal choice.
But how do the songs on “Solo” sound? The recording project – the first self-produced by Ultimo Records – was entirely written and composed by Niccolò Moriconi (Ultimo’s real name, ed) with the production of Federico Nardelli, Andrea Manusso e Matteo Nesi. Those who have already listened to the songs released in recent months, apart from the single “Niente”, “Tutto questo sei tu” (double platinum disc), “September 22” (double platinum disc), “7 + 3” (disc d’oro) and “Buongiorno vita” (platinum record) it was possible to come up with an idea. In many respects the songs of Ultimo can “sound” similar to each other, an ‘accusation’ of which the singer-songwriter himself is aware. Opening up to new collaborations? Share the pen with other authors to describe feelings with different nuances? Impossible. Now more than ever. You can understand this by listening carefully to “Solo”, an album that was born during “interminable afternoons” of crisis, loneliness, but also the impossibility of being able to sing in fifteen practically sold out stadiums. The pandemic entered Ultimo’s veins and forced him to take stock and to find answers that perhaps, to date, have never arrived. Under these premises it would have been impossible to share one’s intimate thoughts with other people.
What has changed then, what’s new? The contents. “The child who counted the stars” is one of the three songs “saved” from the album that should actually have been released in the summer of 2020 and that will never see the light of day. It is the song that bridges the “old” Last and today’s one. There is “Solo” in which he sings “today I feel myself disappearing because I no longer know what I have inside, it is as if I lived in the past months because now I have nothing that I will tell”, among the songs that are instead detached from the old style of Last there are “Those guys”, a generational portrait “irreverent and carefree” (“I feel like the laughter extinguished by the police”), “Isolation” (“I am isolating myself from others and I also try to do it from myself “) And” Superheroes “, song that will be the soundtrack of the new homonymous film by Paolo Genovese with Alessandro Borghi e Jasmine Trinca whose theatrical release is scheduled for Christmas. Outspoken and a punch in the stomach is “I don’t love”. A list that leaves no room for misunderstanding: “I do not like this policy steeped in respectability, phrases that have an effect like ‘collapse, but I resist’ (…) I don’t like religion that advances, while backing away, I don’t like those who preach and blasphemy in the head (…) I don’t love when I return alone and lock the door, I look in the mirror and I no longer know who I am looking at, I don’t like those who describe me with three words in two pages, I don’t love this money, it just makes me fragile “. The disc ends with the piano of “2:43 am”, written during the lockdown in his country house: “I wonder why this life has chosen me then, I wonder why I see light if there is no light”.
In the end the question is one: why change style, musical world if there are those who run in stadiums and has awarded the artist with 44 platinum discs, 17 gold discs and the record of the youngest Italian singer ever to perform in a stadium (“La favola”, Stadio Olympic, 4 July 2019). Ultimo has a recognizable stylistic figure that makes it transversal. It speaks of existence and the evil of living, in recent times very topical issues especially for the repercussions that the pandemic has had – and is having – in the lives of many children but also adults. “It is no coincidence that I called this album Solo – explained Ultimo to RTL 102.5 – because I think when two lonely people meet the bad experiences both have had are canceled out in some way. We feel less alone when we are together ”.