Half-Blood and Last: the feat that no one expected

There were those who really widened their eyes when they read the tracklist of Ultimo's new album, “Altrove”, out on May 17th. Just one unexpected feat. The first real feat included in one of his official albums, and which, also for this reason, is arousing curiosity. Track number eight, “Diluvio universale”, in fact, will see an embrace of apparently very distant worlds and styles, even at the public level: the Roman singer-songwriter, with 66 Platinum Records and 21 Gold Records under his belt, more than 2 million records sold and more than 1 billion streams collected on Spotify, wanted with him Half-blood, rapper symbol of the underground universe. Ultimo recently collaborated on “L'ultima politica” with Geolier, but that's a completely different field, it's a piece, certainly not memorable in reality, to wink at live shows in stadiums and the charts.

Anger, discomfort, friction with reality, the desire to make it: the story of Mezzosangue (here is our last interview) is a story of redemption, which passes through rap. From the first appearance in a YouTube video in 2012 to the first successes, the question was always the same: who is behind that mask?? Then the mysterious rapper let his identity be revealed. Ten years after the debut with the mixtape “Musica cicatrene” it is known that behind the name Mezzosangue and the Roman rapper born in 1991 hides under the balaclava Luca Ferrazzi, born in Cinecittà, in those “outskirts where the trams no longer move” sung by Eros Ramazzotti, he also grew up in the suburbs of the capital, in “Now you”. Yet Mezzosangue has still never shown himself in public without his iconic balaclava and has never stopped giving his fans thick and valuable albums such as his latest work “Sete” (here is our review).

What links Ultimo, who will leave for a new stadium tour on June 2nd, to the rapper with the balaclava? The Roman rapper, famous for his poetic, intense and musically powerful bars, went from the black to the white balaclava, from darkness to light, from the folds of the independent world to the major label. He did it while maintaining his style and his imagery: “Sete”, in general, was the album of transformation and certainly of an opening. On the other hand, Ultimo, to want him with him in a track, must believe very strongly not only in the song itself, but also in Mezzosangue's talents. In short, it is not a “feat of convenience” for Ultimo, even a child would understand this. Numbers and strategies have nothing to do with it.

“In 2017 I met Nicco at one of my live shows. From there we began to see each other and talk about anything, two aquarians who share the fact of always traveling elsewhere with their headswith the common thread of music – wrote the Roman rapper on social media, publishing a photo of the two of them together (Ultimo also wears a Mezzosangue fan shirt) – in my journey I have seen all the colors and backgrounds, which sometimes they make you lose the taste and spontaneity of making music, and maybe that's precisely why I have few collaborations. Nicco has always been different, as far as anyone can tell he has always done whatever the fuck he wants, and the fact that the first featuring on one of his albums is with an artist like me is proof of this. It's a track born the way beautiful things are born, without thinking about anything, in the studio with two beers and a guitar”.