Review: NEGRAMARO – "Free Love" (Track by Track)

With “Free Love”, Negramaro embark on a new emotional journey that mixes the intimacy of personal experience with the universal challenges of our time.

An album-reflection on the courage to love, on how freedom and authenticity can be forces of continuous transformation.

Recorded in the historic Hansa Studios in Berlin, the band's album number nine is rooted in a sound that resonates strongly with history and hope, bringing the band to a point of synthesis between its past experiences and new artistic needs.

The title itself, “Free Love”, is an invitation to embrace love in its purest form, without constraints or prejudices, a love that asks for no permission and knows no boundaries. It is a love that, as in the reflection of Narciso di Jago (the album cover; ed.), looks into the other without possessing him, recognizing his beauty in diversity.

The collaborations that run through the album are not simple artistic exchanges, but deep bonds, built over time, that transform into shared sounds and words. With Elisa, Jovanotti, Tiziano Ferro, Niccolò Fabi and the other guests, Negramaro not only weave a network of artistic friendships, but immerse themselves in an emotional dialogue that is heard as a single voice, different in each song but always intense and present. Each voice adds nuances to the story of a journey which, despite being personal, becomes universal.

In this album there is the essence of the band but at the same time their desire to transform and evolve. Twenty years of successes, of ups and downs, of changes in the musical and social world, without ever losing their authenticity.

If we analyze the album with a microscope, the critical issues are linked in the first instance to the number of songs already published: half of the album, a mix between an EP, a container of hits and a deluxe edition. The new songs alternate tight, dynamic pieces with ballads in perfect Negramaro style. Perhaps this very attitude of theirs is what I prefer…

A return for Negramaro which also marks their search for a new positioning in the current sound scenario, very different from the one in which the band became the protagonist of Italian pop!

TRACK BY TRACK ACCORDING TO GIULIANO

Free love (ft. JJ Julius Son)

Free to love and love each other in the purest and most ancestral sense of the term.
A continuous and open struggle between the man I would like to be and the animal I carry inside me.
“The monster remains in the abyss until I wake him up…”
Julius entered like “a punch in the stomach”.
This freedom, of music and words, is their place in the world, in mine, in our world!
Ode to the blues and its eternal freedom!!!

Martians

“Without pretending anymore we will be happy with nothing…
It will be enough to shake hands that are always hands!”
Humanity above all else, aliens are we, as we move away from our nature, that of holding each other, like hands that only know how to do this in the best of their functions, help each other and “co-m-take each other”.

Astral Conjunction (ft. Niccolò Fabi)

There are encounters that only in the most authentic freedom transform into real astral conjunctions.
As happened in a completely natural and casual way with Niccolò Fabi.
Friends for a lifetime and a lifetime ago, on a summer night, we sang this song and only today, when we are truly free, in a world that tends to lock itself into patterns and homologations it would seem like forever, we come out into the open, naked and raw how Musica made us!

Full moon

I continue to remain a wolf in complete adoration of the moon and its sky, its sea, its night, its dark side, its best side. Life, summer, always remain in the balance for me, between melancholy and stupid joy. I much prefer “The dark side of the moon” and react by howling and singing to the moon, all my simple amazement.
Let's not be surprised at being surprised!

Lens (ft. Aiello)

“Like a dog who dreams, who if he runs stays still, here I still wait for the wind” because I think we are a daydream as long as we remain with our hands folded without praying for anything, without expecting who knows what from life… who knows what miracle or what new wind. We are that wind that blows strong every time we find its point of origin.
Slow are our lives if only we are able to hold on to everything that we believe is truly important and time passes like the wind and doesn't give a damn, and shuffles the cards we will remain immobile and resist its bad weather, like Rome and its ancient ruins.

East Berlin

I knew it would go like this! Like the first man on the moon, a moon that even from that very privileged point of view, still remains mysterious and “alien”, like that man, I touched unexplored ground for the first time and a song is all that what could I say to describe that moment, which from the carpet of a stupid hotel, as always wrong in its choice, pushed me into the streets of a city which tells in the remains of a “very banal” wall the continuous conflict between humanity and the its opposite.
I thought I wasn't able to understand and I don't think I succeeded, but I at least went through it and I only understood that I still want to dream, like Berlin did, until every wall collapses, especially the ones I built inside myself even without knowing or wanting it.

Only if you're wrong (ft.Tiziano Ferro)

A song against every form of prison that pride, at all costs, can build.
And then by recognizing the mistakes and shouting them or singing them out loud, you get out of that gray area in which you don't choose and it seems convenient to do so, so as not to be anywhere, so you are sure that you don't make mistakes.
With Tiziano, we invite ourselves to choose: we want to live and make mistakes and fall in love with a pure and sincere love, this one, sincere at all costs!

Go out alone

A song addressed to the same soul, mine, ours, always in continuous and tumultuous upheaval, an eternal storm in which the sun never seems to come out and then, right then, in that moment full of thunder, lightning and grey, scream and scream again freely “come out alone!”, an imperative aimed at something infinite that we believe we cannot manage, but there is no limit to willpower, it can move clouds and worlds if only we fully believe we are free.

I would say yes (ft. Malika Ayane)

Malika and I know our naked and raw love well, without frills, how far it pushed us, until we found ourselves in a Berlin that we didn't even know would bind us to the core, when we felt in free fall “like leaves” .

TO LISTEN NOW

Astral conjunction – East Berlin – Only if you're wrong

TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY

Perhaps the songs you have already heard can be skipped immediately.

SCORE: Score 7.00

1.Free love (ft. JJ Julius Son) – Rating 6.75
2. Martians – Rating 6.75
3. Let's start everything again – Rating 6.75
4.Until the new day (ft.Fabri Fibra) – Rating 6.75
5.Diamanti (with Elisa & Jovanotti) – Rating 7.25
6. Astral Conjunction (ft. Niccolò Fabi) – Rating 7.50
7.Full Moon – Rating 6.50
8. East Berlin – Rating 7.50
9.Lente (ft. Aiello) – Rating 6.75
10. Only if you're wrong (ft.Tiziano Ferro) – Rating 7.50
11.Go out alone! – Rating 6.50
12.I would say yes (ft. Malika Ayane) – Rating 7.25

TRACKLIST

2003 – Negramaro
2004 – 000577
2005 – While everything flows
2007 – The window
2010 – House 69
2015 – The revolution is coming
2017 – Love that comes back
2020 – Contact
2024 – Free Love