Between Future and Fractures: the britpop heart of Piergiorgio Corallo’s “In via di sviluppo”

When a debut record sounds like both a confession and an architectural sketch, something rare happens: form and feeling collapse into one another. 'In via di sviluppo', the first full-length by italian multidisciplinary artist Piergiorgio Corallo, lives inside that collision. It’s a rock album that distrusts certainty, borrowing britpop’s melodic clarity only to distort it through an existential lens.

At a time when pop culture’s noise feels endless, Corallo’s noise feels deliberate. His music doesn’t fight against silence — it builds with it, like a sculptor working inside the void.

'Erase her name' — the paradox of clarity

The album’s most immediate track, 'Erase her name', opens with a deceptive sense of familiarity. The guitars shimmer with a britpop precision that recalls a distant London sky, but soon the melody starts to bend, drifting toward something more fragile. Corallo’s voice — half whisper, half verdict — turns repetition into erosion.

Lyrically, he isn’t chasing catharsis; he’s cataloguing disappearance. The refrain doesn’t explode; it fades, as if the act of remembering were already too loud. What might have been a straight-ahead anthem becomes an x-ray of sentimentality itself.

That tension — between control and collapse — is where 'In via di sviluppo' finds its identity. Each track behaves like a structure built to fall apart beautifully.

'Don’t let it go' — resilience as European rebellion

If 'Erase her name' sounds like detachment, 'Don’t let it go' is its mirror: resistance. Here, Corallo’s sound widens — drums march forward, bass lines coil around a pulse that feels both human and mechanical. Yet the hook refuses triumph.

Britpop often disguised melancholy with grandeur; Corallo strips that disguise away. He turns optimism into endurance — a state of motion more than a mood. His delivery is firm but frayed, suggesting that persistence itself can be a kind of rebellion, particularly within the European context he inhabits: one marked by cultural fatigue and post-industrial solitude.

Listening to 'Don’t let it go' is like standing in the middle of a square at dusk, where old slogans echo against empty façades. The rhythm continues, not because of faith, but because stopping would be worse.

Between painting and sound — the dual identity

Outside music, Piergiorgio Corallo is known for his visual work: expressionist paintings, sculptures, and installations that often depict human isolation in post-urban landscapes. That background seeps into every frequency of 'In via di sviluppo'.

His arrangements behave like brushstrokes — thick, layered, imperfectly balanced. Synth textures enter not as decoration but as negative space. The production resists polish; instead, it exposes the bones of the composition, the same way an unfinished canvas shows the artist’s hesitation.

In this sense, the album isn’t merely recorded — it’s built. Each song feels like a corridor within a larger architectural memory. The listening experience becomes spatial: you don’t just hear Corallo’s music, you move through it.

Expressionism reimagined in sound

Where many rock records chase clarity, In via di sviluppo prefers distortion as honesty. There’s a lineage here that stretches from European expressionist art to post-Britpop melancholy — from Egon Schiele’s twisted portraits to Radiohead’s Kid A. Corallo isn’t copying; he’s continuing.

His choice to sing in multiple languages across the project (and in future releases) isn’t a marketing strategy; it’s a conceptual stance. Language becomes another texture to be warped, not a vessel for fixed meaning. What unites everything is timbre — that gray-blue atmosphere that refuses optimism yet never abandons empathy.

A fragile rock for a fragmented age

The press has begun to call Corallo’s sound fragile rock, a term that feels both ironic and accurate. The fragility isn’t weakness — it’s precision. In a digital culture obsessed with volume, fragility becomes subversive.

Corallo’s strength lies in proportion: he knows when to let the structure breathe, when to let distortion speak for him. The result is music that feels alive in its hesitation. 'In via di sviluppo' doesn’t demand belief, but presence.

A European dialogue with britpop’s ghosts

For listeners raised on Blur, The Verve, or early Coldplay, Corallo’s album offers echoes without nostalgia. The britpop lineage is there — melodic directness, harmonic lift — but filtered through European introspection.

Where the UK once celebrated escape, Corallo lingers in return. His melodies fall inward, finding beauty in unresolved cadence. It’s britpop rewritten in chiaroscuro: the sound of light learning to live with its shadow.

Conclusion — building outward again

Ultimately, 'In via di sviluppo' is less a debut than a foundation. It sets the coordinates for a body of work that connects painting, literature, and sound into a single aesthetic act.

Piergiorgio Corallo may write songs, but his medium is space — emotional, urban, psychological. In a landscape where authenticity is often performative, his art insists on something slower: an honesty that has to be built, one fracture at a time.