Video interview - TROPEA: “Serole” is our dimension (Track by track)

“Serole” is Tropea’s debut album. An album that arrives after 6 years of activity, 3 EPs and participation in X-Factor in 2022.

“Serole” is the sense of concreteness that Tropea wanted to give to a long journey of recordings and creation, which began years ago in a remote farmhouse in the Langhe, right in Serole, another place of the soul of Tropea and a destination for “retreats spiritual” periodicals, in which Tropea found shelter from the outside world, which allowed them to conceive the 10 tracks contained in the album.

The Tropeas say about it:

In July 2022 we returned to Serole, to the house where we recorded most of our songs.

The setting has always been the same since the first time we set foot in it in 2017: the living room of a rustic country house, stormed, emptied, turned upside down and filled with amplifiers, mixers, cables, stands, microphones and instruments. In those 7 days of July we recorded the songs we wrote from 2017 to 2022.

It is a vast material that covers the entire period in which we existed as Tropea. Almost a year later, after difficult and demanding months, we have started to build a path around these recordings. Mimmo (Domenico Fizio) then took a house near the sea, to completely immerse himself in the arrangement of the album”.

“Serole” is a work full of expressive urgency and expectations, combined with the uncertainty and sense of inadequacy of a generation that is looking for its place in the world.
Inside there are love, sadness, bitterness and all the sweetness of Tropea.

It is the only possible first Tropea album. The songs guided everything, the arrangement choices were made with an ear strained to the belly of the songs, to understand where they wanted to go.

THE COVER

Giovanni Pagani’s cover, taken on New Year’s Eve 2017 in Serole, contains everything. We and some of our friends, a generation of twenty-year-olds who are setting out on an uphill road that leads to the unknown, each at their own speed.”

THE VIDEO INTERVIEW

TRACK BY TRACK TOLD

Tropea-Serole-ARTWORK-2024

Serole (Together With You)

Peter: Serole (Together With You) was born during the New Year of 2019 right in Serole. In addition to the more purely musical retreats, in fact, several New Year’s Eve parties were also held in Serole which saw Tropea present together with their group of friends (“Gli Altri”, i.e. the people also photographed on the album cover).
Starting from one of the numerous “goliardic” jams, this slogan was born which we could define as didactic of the situation.

Initially the melody had a broader development and the piece lasted longer, but subsequently it was decided to give the piece the exclusive function of the album’s intro, shortening its duration.

I would love you

Dominic: I would love you it is a reaction cry towards the sense of inadequacy that we often feel and have felt. It is practically all born from instinct, lyrics, melody, riffs and arrangement.
A kind of lament that Domenico recorded in the form of a demo, and which remained fairly unchanged until the final version.
It is a song that talks about the struggle in perceiving oneself accepted by others or by oneself at times, despite numerous efforts or changes in direction.
It happens that we fall in love with those who make us feel inadequate, not understood, with those who don’t see us for who we are.
It is a vital love, even if it is blind, deaf. Domenico says that he was inspired by his relationship with the city of Milan, the city in which he grew up and with which he also had a troubled relationship in the past.

Gallipoli

Tropea: our sense of itching is that of those who are growing up and are comparing their dreams, ambitions and the love we put into playing live, with a world that knows how to be ruthlessly devoid of content – as the song itself says: “ I have become allergic” – “I am thirsty for a thirst that I don’t have”.

Tu Credi Che (feat. Marco Castello)

Peter: You Believe That was born in the summer of 2021 during my traditional Sicilian holidays. More specifically, on an August evening in the Cavagrande nature reserve, where I was camping with a friend (Riccardo Manzoni guitarist Milano sport, Visconti etc). It was just us and the guitars.

We spent the night playing (and smoking :)) and the beauty of the context was certainly a source of inspiration. Initially the piece did not foresee a collaboration (the textual material of the second verse was already present) but Claudio and Domenico had the great intuition to propose it to Marco Castello.

As expected, at least for those who know Marco, his songwriting contribution has elevated the song by giving it greater depth. It’s a song about self-harm and a friendship that hides the desire for something more (boom: friendzoned).

Nightclub

Tropea: We invite you with Nightclub to forget about all your commitments for a moment and simply dance this nocturnal Mediterranean dance with us.

With this song we want to paint the rhythmic frenzy that marks our life. The lyrics and music are by Domenico, who wrote it in one go, in a moment of lucid melancholy. We immediately made it ours, intrigued by the evocative but at the same time material character of the song.

We saw in the melody a repetitive, almost choreographic movement to play, play, play. In the piece there is also the link with Mediterranean music, with which each of us has a profound relationship.

Sick

Lorenzo: The first track of Sick it dates back to April 2020. It’s the first recording on the phone since the start of Covid.

I remember that I had just finished changing the strings on my acoustic guitar, and immediately my hands went to generate those forms of melancholy chords, a bit of a product of the music I was listening to in that period (mainly Alex G and King Krule), and a bit of the somber mood that characterized the start of 2020.

The text came shortly after: it talks about the fear of getting sick (on the news they constantly gave news of people getting sick and dying from Covid) of an illness which, however, is not only physical, but of the soul. The text of the refrain was not originally there and was added by Domenico later, and completes the moods of the verses in a bittersweet way.

All My Life

Peter: All My Life It has a rather particular genesis. It is a piece exhumed from Tropea’s very first repertoire, when a band with this name didn’t yet exist. At the time the band’s lineup was also different, in fact it featured Marco Castello on drums.

The composition started on the piano: I wrote down the two chords of the verse on which I wrote a melody with lyrics in English (at the time it was the reference language) which remained intact until the final version. These elements together with the bass and drum groove created by Piso and Marco Castello are the nucleus around which the piece developed, in a rather linear way. The second verse, sung and written mainly by Domenico, is much more recent; in fact, it was born during the last stages of the album’s recordings (summer 2023).

The objective was to remain as continuous as possible with the first verse in terms of the meaning of the text. It is a song that talks about uncertainty, expectations and the search for one’s place in the world, which however, as time passes, seems to become more and more unattainable.

Rebellion

Dominic: Rebellion it’s a love song, slow and sweet, about the meeting of two people. Like two former lovers who recognize each other in the crowd after many years. Like two people who have never left each other but in different moments of life, when everything is called into question, they continue to choose each other, always. I remember that one day at the end of October 2017 I improvised the song, melody, lyrics and chords. Rebellion it remained with me in the drawer for a long time before being taken into consideration to propose it to the Tropea. Rather than leave the original and improvised text, which was also a bit cryptic, I wanted to give it a real text. One day in the summer of 2021, for the first time there really was a sense that everything the Covid pandemic had posed was no longer a danger. Driven by this moment, a few years after the original idea, I took up the song again and wrote the final lyrics, thinking of a love that resumes after years of difficulty.

Words

Tropea: Words was born during the recording sessions of Might Delete Later in 2019. We had finished dinner, on the ground floor where the kitchen is in Serole’s house. Domenico went up before the others into the large room set up as a home recording studio and improvised the arpeggiated guitar riff that opens the song. After a while he decided to start a recording to immortalize that idea. As they finished eating, the other Tropeas went up and reached their instruments, Piso found his bass line and Pietro sang the melody of the chorus. Only at the end did Claudio enter and a sort of improvisation began. Since that recording there have been developments and changes, but the song only took true shape when the lyrics were written. It was created jointly by Domenico and Martina Garbin, the photographer who contributed her photos to the cover of both Might Delete Later what about Gallipoli. It is a sweet and melancholy song that talks about a nocturnal and fleeting farewell, and then finding ourselves more grown up and aware.

Simple

Dominic: Simple it’s the song we decided to close this album with. It is a song born in January in a silent and calm post-Christmas cold, upon returning from a stay in Naples surrounded by family affection. The song is slow, inspired by Red House Painters’ slow-core. I tried to describe the mechanism that leads from an intuition to the birth of something, sometimes a song. This mechanism is, in two words, simple and alien. “Simple” because it is an almost automatic correspondence of gesture-emotion-action, which is recorded and saved. Subsequently revised and possibly reworked. “Alien” because, like many people born in one place and raised in another, it comes from the feeling of belonging to nowhere and to all places at the same time. The verse focuses on this aspect, describing a communication difficulty that sometimes crushes me. In fact, I have often felt misunderstood, not understood, while other times I have not been able to explain well what I want to say, or even not understand what I am trying to say myself. The explanation is that we do not belong to anything or anyone and for this reason it sometimes seems that we express ourselves in an incomprehensible, foreign language. I deliberately chose to use two languages, English for the verse and Italian for the chorus. The guitar, bass and drum recording takes of this song are among the last we acquired in Serole during the last recording session we did, late at night in July 2022. Also for this reason, symbolically Simple closes the first Tropea album, an ironic contrast with a long and tortuous path that saw 6 years of activity as Tropea before trying our hand at making a record. It’s nice to remind ourselves that sometimes writing songs is the easiest part of the whole job.

THE TOUR

This winter, then, Tropea will be the protagonists of a tour around the main clubs of the peninsula, where for the first time they will bring the energy and atmosphere of “Serole”, in the dimension that most belongs to them, live on stage :