Nuclear Tactical Penguins: “Our life is a neverending tour”

Oops, they did it again: a 33-date arena tour, all sold out, for the Nuclear Tactical Penguins, a few months after last summer's stadium tour (also a sold out one) and in anticipation of another round of outdoor concerts, again in stadiums, for 2025. But don't talk too much about numbers, because the band continues to claim its normality and that success matters, yes, but up to a certain point. “Remaining normal for us was a fairly simple thing”, they say in the dressing rooms of the Forum, where they played for a week and where they will return in May, “perhaps due to the fact that we have seen our path as musicians grow step by step and we we enjoyed every single step we took, so it's not so much a question of whether we feel like stars or not, but of knowing how lucky we are to be living a dream.”

The other word that comes back in the band's story is “underdog”: a career for those underestimated. Like when they arrived in Sanremo in 2020 with the Forum already sold out, many wondered who they were, and they arrived on the podium. They never stopped, but, explains Riccardo Zanotti, “We want to feel like underdogs, because it's nice when you arrive and no one expects anything from you and you somehow defeat everything. On the other hand I think we say 'hello ' and then there is “world” outside, there is the world. And how the world conceives you, as Pirandello also teaches us, is something that doesn't depend on you. So we want to be underdogs, but it also depends how they treat us.”

Pressure can play nasty tricks, however, they recall – indirectly citing the recent case of Sangiovanni, who took a career break: “Clearly, having brought important results, having even just done a stadium tour, the expectations on we are high. At the same time I think that in recent months we have seen how sometimes artists who feel too much expectations risk collapsing. We have no intention of collapsing: we want to shake off these expectations and move forward like healthy underdogs “.

“We hope that our life is a neverending tour a bit like Bob Dylan's”, they conclude, “we hope to always be on track, ready to play, locked inside a van, a dressing room, or even better on a stage, even if at the end of the day this takes the smallest proportion. However, we really like to think of ourselves as a live band and we act accordingly, it is the most important moment, the most important collective ritual in which this band finds itself for the relationship with the public, and therefore yes, we hope that the music never dies. Maybe we will die, but not the music”.