Love and ghosts: the summer of the Nuclear Tactical Penguins
Every love story is a ghost storysaid David Foster Wallace. “Sorry excuse lo siento”, new song by Pinguini Tattici Nucleari that comes out today, is a song about love and ghosts over an electropop base: And ready to become a hit, but without the stereotypes of the genre. Indeed: in the text, together with ghosts, they appear Edgar Allan Poe and Cesare Pavese, Dua Lipa, tarot cards and urbex, the practice of visiting abandoned buildings. “The paradox is that this is a summer song and I’m talking about extremely macabre things. We wanted to try to face a different summer”, Riccardo Zanotti tells Rockol.
And in fact, a few days ago, PTN presented “Sorry excuse lo siento” in an abandoned station of the Milanese metro: an old corridor that led to the condominiums in Piazza De Angeli, abandoned and then purchased by private individuals to be transformed into an evocative and dark place for events. It feels like entering the imagination of a Burial song rather than that of an Italian pop bandwho appeared in front of a hundred fans, playing the song for the first time and then leading them to a karaoke among the neon lights underground.
Hating summer songs
Zanotti couldn’t stand summer songs, he says: “I never liked them too much, even though some artists have done good things over the years. They just often didn’t speak my language. Perhaps this desire to try to make a summer song that goes off the rails comes from there: from the fact that we are not completely at ease in the summer season, perhaps also because we are animals that symbolize the cold…”
The “reference”, as they say today, is “Thriller” by Michael Jackson: “It’s a song about something strange and different but which was hugely successful. Now the biopic is out and everyone is talking about it, but I’ve always thought: ‘How nice to be able to make such an identifying single, so atypical, and still manage to do well’. So I said to myself: ‘Let’s try talking about ghosts too’”.
The tema of the occult is a common passion of the band: “One of our two guitarists, for example, has become passionate about tarot cards and their reading in the last two years,” he says. And in fact at the presentation there were people present who read the cards. “Elio, our keyboard player, took a traveling show around Italy in which he talked about medieval bestiaries, fantastic and mythological creatures. Then everyone can read in ‘Sorry sorry lo siento’ about love, friendship, relationships, relationships: in the end a song is a container that you fill depending on your experience. But that is the starting suggestion”.
The other underlying theme, he says, is the urbex: “I have always been passionate about it, even if I don’t practice it regularly: forgotten, abandoned places have their own poetry, in a world that continues to build, destroy, rebuild and remake. I also think of Milan, which is our micro-world: there are places that are not even renovated, but abandoned to themselves. And therefore they develop a decadence that goes very well with the suggestions of ghosts, but also with broader discourses on society, on consumerism, on our way of understanding life. They have something magical. Sometimes, between one date and another, if we have a few free hours, we happen to go and see half-abandoned places that friends have told us about.”
From Edgar Allan Poe to Dua Lipa
The song, as always for the Penguins, is a mix of rhymes, puns and “tall” and popular quotes, ranging from writers such as Pavese and Edgar Allan Poe to Dua Lipa. “In a slightly paranoid way I could say that the connection is me and my life experiences. But quotes have their own ontological dignity, without there necessarily having to be an explicit connection. It’s a stream of consciousness. For example, Dua Lipa also wrote about ghosts, a song called “Dancing with a Ghost”, which was never released and which fans know well.”
The future: “We believe in the language of the album”
“Sorry excuse me” is the first piece of a return that will bring the band on their third stadium tour, in 2027: there will be an album, the title is already there and the concept – there are little squares on the posters that hide it – but for now it has not yet been revealed, also because it is still being worked on. “‘Sorry sorry lo siento'”, explains Zanotti, “is a song written to stay in your head, to accompany the summer, but it’s just a taste. Then, like all summer songs, perhaps over time it will take on the flavor of melancholy. We always hope that our songs will acquire different meanings over the years, even more nostalgic ones. More reflective, more intimate songs will also be released. We believe a lot in a heterogeneous language within albums and above all we think that an album only makes sense to exist today if it contains different facets. Otherwise, if you only have to make 10 or 12 hits, you might as well release singles.”
