Venerus: “I want to continue traveling”

At the time of “Senza di me”, in the now distant 2018, Venerus was twenty-five years old, with a shy mustache, a look made of glitter on his face and leopard-print clothes and had just carved out his place in the music scene alongside Franco126 and Gemitaiz. We kept an eye on him by following him on his artistic journey, first with the EPs “A che punto è la notte” (2018) and “Love Anthem” (2019), then with the first album, “Magica musica” (2021), and the second “Il Segreto” (2023). Today we meet him to tell us about “Speriamo” (2025), the third studio album released on November 7, and expanded in recent days by a new song, “Sentire”, with Angelina Mango. An album in which a dimension emerges made up of experimentation, collaborations and a mix of musical genres that tell its multiple souls. He is presenting it with a theater tour that started on Friday 27 November from Pisa: yesterday it stopped in Milan, then it will head to Naples, Rome, Trento and Genoa. “The people who really made this record possible will be together on a stage, in a new guise, and some of the songs performed in an unconventional way. Theater has always given me the opportunity to open my mind and explore the human experience,” he says.
The album’s producer and co-composer is Filippo Cimatti, while the artwork is created by Andrea Cleopatria, who also collaborated in writing the lyrics: an apparently messy journey that touches on soft electronics and jazzy arrangements, funk, folk, r&b, hip hop and rap (“I wanted to rap, this monkey climbed up on me”) up to more intimate moments, in which the fixed point remains the artist’s voice.

Let’s start with the title of the album. What does Venerus really hope for?
“I have said many times what I hope for others, I have not yet said what I hope for myself. I hope that it can be an opportunity to encounter something that I have not yet encountered, in terms of people and life experiences. That it can be a point in my life that I can learn from and that these songs take me to physical and personal places that I have not yet contemplated.”

Who is Venerus today and what kind of direction has he taken musically?

“I don’t know and I’ve never known. My desire is to listen more than ever and try to put all my thoughts at rest. I don’t even know the direction I’ve taken, I definitely want to continue to stay on the road and always do new things.”

Do new things without knowing the impact they might have? Do you care more about a loyal audience or about extending it?
“These are not two alternatives that are mutually exclusive. I am grateful for the people who have shared the journey with me up to now, my invitation is to travel together with love and without judgment and to have the same open-mindedness that I have in order to discover new destinations.”

Unlike “Il Segreto” there are several collaborations in this album. Some are long-standing like the one with Gemitaiz and Mace, others new like Mahmood, Jake La Furia, Cosmo. Are they featuring or duets? Are they born out of an artistic connection or are they recording needs to broaden the audience?
“The songs with Cosmo and Marco Castello are the ones in which we really wrote the song together from scratch, the others are more of an opportunity to meet, to share a musical moment and they are all born, if not from a friendship, from the possibility of creating one. Nobody is put there for the accreditations that they can bring to the public, if we also consider that the song that could do this the most, ‘Cool’, is a song without a chorus that is unlikely to have a run on the radio.”

Some passages of “Speriamo” are recorded live. How important is this aspect to you?

“If ‘Il Segreto’ was all done live with overdubs added later, in ‘Speriamo’ we used this technique for some sections of the album and some songs. It is an important element because it is not replicable and includes chance and chaos, life.

You said that this time the lyrics were born before the music.
“We worked a lot on the lyrics, they were the real focus. Starting from them allowed us to have a critical vision of the chosen songs. When the public sees a concert they sing, not play, it’s the point at which we manage to get to the bottom of people’s hearts and lives. In the past everything was much more instinctive, it was a flow in which what came was imprinted in the song. This time we put a lot of filters, we were judges of the songs”.

It seems that turning 30 has messed you up a bit, as can also be understood in “Okay”, the song with Altea. Can we say that they have started a new era?

“Definitely. And in this new era I will try not to get lost as I got lost in my twenties on many things, but to keep in my hand the compass that keeps me present, to be truly on track and take this project where it can go.”

Is this also the era to arrive on the Ariston stage? How did it go two years ago when you accompanied Loredana Berté?“The experience I had two years ago in Sanremo was not one of the most phantasmagorical of my career, I think I have done more with my journey than with that particular performance. Part of this job is realizing that you clash a bit with reality and that you have to find a way to fit in and find a point of contact. As for the future, I don’t know what will happen, I have no answer, but if I have the chance to get on that stage I will certainly give everything I can give with the love for the my music.”