Coez, British turning point: the single “Mal di te”

There are those who want it more pop and those who want it more rap. And then there’s him, who for fifteen years he has been doing whatever he wants without paying attention to expectations and labels, so much so that he has even earned a definition that had not been attributed to anyone before him, that of singer-songwriter. It was 2013 when Coez, until then considered one of the leading exponents of the Capitoline underground rap scene, surprised everyone with “Non Era Fiori”, abandoning the street attitude of his early days to rediscover himself as one of the most skilled melodists of the “new” pop. , thanks to pieces like “Ali sporche” and “Lontana da me”.

At the time that album was underestimated: it would only be rediscovered four years later, when “La musica non c’è” and “Le luci della città” made “Faccio un casino” the best seller of 2017, clearing the charts that Coez whose karma seemed like that of a cult artist. The diptych “Faccio un casino” and “È semper bello”, which arrived two years later, in the name of collaboration with Niccolò Contessa, earned him something like 36 platinum records: a success to which in 2021 Coez reacted by dusting off, with “Volare ”, the street attitude of the beginning, dividing. Yes, of course, there were pieces like “Occhi Rossi”, “Come nelle canzone” and “Margherita”, but in general the more rap side prevailed over the more pop one, including references to the Wu-Tang Clan, duets with Guè, Gemitaiz and Noyz Narcos and even a reunion of the Brokenspeakers, the crew with which he cut his teeth on the stages of Roman clubs and social centers at the beginning of the 2000s. .A return to melody, with the next step, was to be expected. And it arrived, right on time. “Bad for you“, the single that marks the return of the Roman singer-songwriter as a soloist after almost three years, having archived the partnership with Frah Quintale for the joint album “Lovebars” in 2023, was defined by Coez as «a song of those with tears inside».

It is no coincidence that he anticipated it on social media with a video that portrays him at an airport, just off a plane: if in the 2021 album he left for a journey of his own, in “Mal di te” returns to speak a more earthly, real, everyday language: «You would never have left without making a noise / today you dress in a new color / it’s a dead Saturday if I see him pass in just one place / we are the same ones who live once and it hurts», he sings in the first verses of the song, with an almost Vaschia flavor. But then the piece immediately goes in a completely different direction, in terms of references.

After the collaboration with Niccolò Contessa (“At a certain point we both understood that it was better to recognize that together we had already given so much”, he said in 2021), he found new stimuli together with the producer and multi-instrumentalist Essehoreal name Matteo Montalesi, Roman, born in 1997, who had already contributed to “Lovebars” and who here joined his trusted collaborator Valerio Smordoni, keyboardist of the band that accompanies the singer-songwriter live. Blues progressions, crooked guitars à la King Krule and, at the end, a coda in pure Brit pop style. Musically speaking, Coez has never been banal (his unpredictability always reminds him of Kanye West, on a more strictly artistic level), but here he seems to have had even more fun than in the past.

THE’album will arrive later this year: «These last few years have been a great flight, through ups and downs I have never lost my way. We return to land.”