Rome’s Total Reverends have an origin story that tells you most of what you need to know about them. Guitarist and vocalist Francesco Forni once got a December 8th booking at a venue and decided to throw a “Madonna concert” – assembling a congregation of musicians dressed as priests and nuns to twist familiar songs into something almost unrecognizable. That concept eventually crystallized into Total Reverends, a duo project with drummer Piero Monterisi, both of them veterans with serious Italian music credentials between them. “Where is God” dropped on May 29th as the second single off their second album, following April’s “The Revolution Is Inevitable.” The premise behind the song is simple and uncomfortable: if God exists, where exactly are you supposed to look? The answer Forni offers is a series of snapshots – a woman being arrested, a homeless man in love, a sex worker going through the motions, a child standing in rubble.
The music earns the weight of that question. Total Reverends have the kind of band chemistry where the playing feels genuinely alive rather than assembled in post, and “Where is God” uses that to its advantage. The rhythm section is the anchor – Monterisi’s drumming is hypnotic without being mechanical, and the bass line is the kind that digs in and stays there. Forni’s guitar work draws a clear Queens of the Stone Age comparison in the press materials, and it’s not wrong: the dynamics shift from high intensity to something groovier and more deliberate in a way that mirrors the song’s own emotional movement. The vocals narrate rather than perform – Forni sounds like someone recounting what they saw, not trying to make you feel a certain way about it. That restraint is the right call for lyrics that are already doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The lyric “no answer” sits at the center of the song’s whole project, and the music doesn’t pretend otherwise. The track builds and releases, builds and releases, and never arrives anywhere conclusive – which is exactly the point. “Where is God” doesn’t ask its question to resolve it. It asks the question to show you the faces people make when they lose everything, and leaves you to sit with that.
