ALBUM REVIEWS
It seems weird that Måneskin frontman Damiano David’s debut solo album would land on Eurovision weekend, given that the past Italian victors have done so well to escape and thrive outside of the shadow of the cheese-romp song contest. Since their victory in 2021, the band have won love from the likes of Iggy Pop and Tom Morello and arenas full of fans that have probably never heard the words “douze points!”
Proving himself all over again, here stands David free from any of the rock’n’roll tropes that found him fame – and nearly ruined him. “In the last few years, we worked a lot and I was starting to lose the focus… I was basically making myself unhappy, and I was doing pretty good at it,” he told NME about the journey of “cutting out all the excess” that led to this solo venture.
The same rehab for excess can be said for the music too. Sure, ‘Funny Little Fears’ is huge in scale and melodrama (what else did you expect?), but it’s still a record free of distractions and laser-focused on straight-up pop bangers.
Opener ‘Voices’ meets the pomp with the personal as he tries to outrun his demons on a real stadium-rattler akin to that ‘Beggin’ cover he did so well, while ‘Next Summer’ has enough echoes of ABBA to make it a heartache epic. From the Lennon-y piano of ‘Sick Of Myself’ to the shameless summer indie-pop of ‘Tango’ to the star-reaching orchestral grace of ‘Mars’ and the Killers-y Americana road anthem of ‘The First Time’, it’s a collection that’s confident in squaring up to fears and all quite tastefully measured.
That includes some guest turns with Suki Waterhouse lending silky vocals to the “lighters up” earworm ‘The Bruise’ and viral sensation D4vd jumps on the sweet old-school waltz of ‘Tangerine’. Subtlety is the order of the day on the elegiac electro lullaby closer ‘Solitude (No One Understands Me)’ as David poetically cuts to the existential core of the record: “I’ve got a funny fear of flying, it’s not the height or the chance of maybe dying / It’s finding out the Earth was flat and finding out everybody here was lying.”
For his soul-baring, personal flair and finding his own musical accent away from the juggernaut that made him, you’d be forgiven for comparing this to a Harry Styles move. Despite bassist Victoria De Angelis enjoying a sideline as a techno artist, David and the band maintain that former NME cover stars Måneskin are currently “in training to get back different, better and harder”. We might miss a little bit of glam-rock insanity here, but ‘Funny Little Fears’ is a classy pop statement from an artist just comfortable in their own skin. As David offers on ‘Solitude’: “No one understands me, but I do”.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
