Nicola Giacobbe’s debut album, Tutti in Attesa (“Everyone Waiting”), lands like a time capsule cracked open after years underground. Recorded between 2003 and 2017 in the intimacy of his home, these tracks gather dust and fire in equal measure, fragments of sound that have matured into a singular vision rather than withered with age.
Giacobbe makes clear that genre for him is less a boundary and more a palette. Doom’s heavy drag drifts into shoegaze shimmer; ambient layers evaporate into metallic crunch. Trash metal collides with post-rock atmospherics, but the clash feels strangely seamless, as if these languages were always meant to speak to each other. The result is less about eclecticism for its own sake and more about stitching together a sonic diary, one that translates both private revelations and encounters with literature, art, and dream logic into sound.
The lo-fi character of the recordings, what Giacobbe calls “raw and beginner level” is deceptive. Far from being a liability, the rough textures lend intimacy and urgency. Each hiss, each uneven edge becomes part of the atmosphere, amplifying the record’s theme of escapism. Rather than fleeing reality, the listener tumbles into Giacobbe’s inner mythology, where classical allusions coexist with distorted riffs and ambient drifts.
At its strongest, Tutti in Attesa hypnotizes. When psychedelic currents weave through doom’s glacial rhythms, the music achieves an otherworldly suspension, as if time itself were bending. Not every juxtaposition hits with the same force, some transitions jolt rather than dissolve, but the conviction behind them makes even the less polished moments feel honest rather than careless.
More than an album, Tutti in Attesa is an archive of becoming. It captures fourteen years of searching, of sounds waiting to be given shape, of influences refusing to stay in their lanes. The companion release, Oltre il Confine, promises more of this excavation, but for now Giacobbe has offered something rare: a debut that is both deeply personal and defiantly unclassifiable.
For those willing to dive in, Tutti in Attesa is not background music, it’s a diary sung in many tongues, a portrait of restlessness that somehow feels whole. The wait has been long, but the unveiling was worth every year!
