Motta: a tour for the tenth anniversary of “La fine dei twenty years”

In 2026 Motta will look back again, but without sinking into nostalgia. Ten years after the release of “La fine dei vent’anni”, the album that established him as one of the most recognizable voices of new Italian songwriting, the artist has announced the first dates of a tour that promises to be more than a simple “anniversary operation”also because the singer-songwriter is in an extremely free phase of his career. The first confirmed stages are two symbolic contexts: the Spring Attitude Festival 2026at the Nuvola dell’Eur of Rome on May 29th and 30th, and the Mi Ami 2026scheduled from 21 to 23 May at the Idroscalo di Milan. Other dates will certainly be announced, but the direction of the journey is already clear.

When it came out in 2016, “La fine dei twenty years” was not only a particularly successful solo debut: it was a record capable of intercepting a widespread, almost generational feelingand to offer a clear emotional form. Motta came from different experiences, from the noisiest and most experimental background of the Criminal Jokersbut with this album he found a personal, tense, often rough language that it held together rock urgency, pop melody and intimate writing. The title was already a declaration, made explicit in the song of the same name “La fine dei twenty years”, which seems to function as a miniature existential manifesto: “It’s a bit like being late. You don’t have to take a wrong turn, don’t hurt yourself and find parkingIn a few verses, condensed the subdued anxiety of the passing age: the feeling of having to get somewhere without knowing exactly where, with the constant fear of making a wrong choice and the struggle to find a physical and emotional space in which to stop. He wasn’t simply talking about the passing of time, but about the disorientation that accompanies the moment in which the horizon narrows and the decisions really start to weigh.

The album was not and is not just this: it is also populated by nocturnal characters, told with an empathetic gaze. “You’re truly beautiful” is one of the most emblematic songs in this sense: a song that puts you at the center a transgender girlcelebrating its beauty and a difficult but authentic life path. Motta made an intimate and respectful portrait of it, transforming the song into a hymn to gender identity and overcoming prejudices, without rhetoric and without the need for explanationi, letting the humanity of the story become political. Alongside these stories, “The End of the Twenty Years” also embraces moments of psychedelic and collective tribalism: “Roma tonight”, one of the most beautiful and representative songs on the album, reaches its peak live. A dirty and visceral song that talks about belonging without ever idealizing it. But there is also another fundamental nucleus, more silent and profound: the family, which has always been the central theme of his story.

With “My father was a communist”, the artist puts his hand to the most delicate matter. In a pop panorama that is too often anesthetized, Motta thus put conflict back at the center: the conflict with oneself, with the body, with expectations, with identity, with the community and with one’s origins. Songs like “Happiness passes by as time” or “If we keep running” offer no solutionshis is a writing that does not seek consolation, but truth. Musically, “The end of the twenty years”, thanks to the work of Riccardo Sinigallia, struck and also strikes for its unstable balance. An authorial and popular song stripped, finally, of the fear of noise, ambitious and profound songs. The recognition also arrived in official form, with the Targa Tenco as best first filmbut the true strength of the album has been measured over time. Ten years later, those songs continue to speak to those who experienced them then and to those who discover them today, perhaps from different perspectives. “The end of the twenty years” is not a monument to be celebrated, but a pure energy to be put back into circulation.