Three founding members leaving your band in 2023 is, by most measures, the kind of thing that kills a project. For Giante — a post hardcore / emo outfit from Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Basque Country — it nearly did. But instead of folding, vocalist/guitarist Egoitz Olalde sat with the wreckage and ended up writing the most uncomfortably honest stuff the band has ever put out. “Beste Norbait Izan,” their third album, dropped March 13 on all streaming platforms (minus Spotify), with a vinyl release following on March 20.
The title translates from Basque as “Be someone else.” It comes from a pretty specific place. “Am I enough?”, “Is all of this worth it?”, “Why should I even try?” — Olalde describes these as questions that have crossed his mind several times a day for as long as he can remember. Self-doubt and fear of rejection had been constant companions for years, but he’d never actually addressed any of it through the band’s music. “Easier to pinpoint what is wrong with everything else — politics, war, society — than with oneself, I guess.”
When those three founding members stepped away (still close friends, notably), the internal noise got impossible to tune out. “Those recurring questions felt amplified to a deafening degree, almost paralyzing, leaving no option but to dig deeper and deeper. It seems I wasn’t enough, after all.” Every day felt like starting from zero with no clear direction and no energy to find one — only comfort in shutting everything down. That thread runs through the album directly. On “Urte Berria,” the fifth track: “Don’t try, there’s no need, I’ve studied all the precedents” / “The peace that comes with shutting all the lights out.”
At some point the thought of giving up entirely — on himself, not just the band — became easier to entertain than pushing forward. Just surrender. Just become somebody else. That’s where the album title landed.
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But then, as tends to happen, other people pulled him back. His partner, close friends, including the three new members who stepped into Giante. “When you don’t even know why everything is wrong, only words from someone else can scatter the clouds,” Olalde writes, referencing the album’s opening track “Ostegun Bat Amildegian”: “Can’t survive all by yourself when the fire casts no smoke.”
Those new perspectives reconnected him with the music and, eventually, with himself. “So it was almost inevitable to speak about this in these new songs. To let it all out. To wear those fears proudly instead of hiding them in the closet, as they are as much a part of me as everything else. As a way of truly showing what I am, instead of being someone else.”
The whole thing was written in Basque — entirely, for the first time — dealing with depression, impostor syndrome, and the anxiety of confronting what’s actually going on inside your own head. Eight tracks, recorded and mixed in September 2025 by Borja Pérez at La Nave Hermosa studios, mastered by Victor García at Ultramarinos. The current lineup is Olalde alongside Beñat Pérez, Ioritz Herreros, and Asier Bermejo.
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Sonically, “Beste Norbait Izan” leans further into the melodic side than anything Giante have done before. The vocals are more layered and deliberate, moving between screamy choruses and near-shoegaze verses, while the guitars interlock tighter — less about individual riffs, more about building a shared emotional weight across the full record. The Dischord and late-90s/2000s emo DNA is still there, but the delivery has evolved past straightforward post hardcore into something more patient and textured.
There’s a particular quality to post hardcore and emo coming out of southern Europe — Basque Country, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France — that carries its own atmospheric identity, something warmer and more sprawling than the US or UK counterparts, often with a cinematic sense of space. Giante fit right into that lineage while sounding distinctly like themselves, and it’s encouraging to hear another vital band from this corner of the scene pushing the sound forward rather than just echoing what came before.
The band formed in 2016, released “This Is Fine” in 2018 and “Hamaika” in 2021, toured the local DIY circuit heavily, and then went through the lineup upheaval that led to where they are now. The vinyl edition — 200 copies, red splatter over marble white — is a co-release across a whole spread of labels: Erraldoi Records, Maybeyes Hardcore, Holdyourground Records, Hombre Montaña, Carcosa Records, Remorse Records, and Pasidaryk Pats Records. Artwork and design was created by Rodrigo Almanegra and Jorge González.
