There’s something about Italian screamo that hits the same nerve as the French variety — that particular European register of density and precision that feels less like a genre exercise and more like a specific way of being in the world.
dagerman., a five-piece out of Milan, have been making that case since their debut two years ago. With “Di fronte a noi il nulla,” out now, they’re making it harder to argue with.
“Tragedie | VIVERE” mapped the daily mechanisms of erasure — the city as logistics operation, labor as slow attrition, selfhood worn down by routine and obligation. The follow-up arrives with a wider lens and a colder diagnosis.
“The world is in a very bad period — wars, conflicts, right-wing governments taking power, crazy statements from the US,” drummer and lyricist Pelle writes. “And we as the rich part of the world simply stay motionless in our privilege. Maybe with criticisms, but still quite motionless.”
That motionlessness is the record. “Di fronte a noi il nulla” — in front of us, the void — didn’t start there.
dagerman. initially planned a concept around war when they began writing in June 2025. “During the songwriting we encountered some difficulties,” Pelle explains. “It felt like a partial topic.”
Indifference turned out to be the bigger thing underneath — more honest, and more directly aimed at the position they and their audience actually occupy.
“It’s a terrible attitude that leads to accepting and consequently endorsing a lot of terrible, intolerable injustices — like war. Nothing moves. Nothing changes.”
The album traces the conditions feeding this paralysis: fear, status, habit, duty, resignation, selfishness, greed — and the chain of consequences that follows.
The record is a different animal sonically, too. “Tragedie | VIVERE” was wet, full of rooms and atmosphere. “Di fronte a noi il nulla” is dry and stripped back.
The songwriting process shifted just as sharply: where the debut was built collectively in the rehearsal room, this time Pelle and guitarist Ricky wrote the skeleton of all eight songs together over summer 2025, then guitarist Piotr and bassist Bruna came in during autumn to work on harmonies and arrangements, with Gri handling the vocal parts last.
“The songwriting was definitely more ordered and structured, less instinctive,” Pelle says.
“We’re a little sorry about that, but we felt the need to build something more constructed and elaborated.” Influences fall along the screamo end of things — Eyelet, Yearning, Frail Body, Envy‘s footsteps period — with some Converge and Botch pulling at the harder edges. They’re not precious about any of it: “We don’t like maintaining the same approach. The next record will definitely be done in a completely different way.”
The band walks through each track below.
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INCARNAZIONE
“Speaks about how people in the Western world — with rare exceptions — have bent themselves to endure, accept, resign themselves. How rebellion, protest, and revolutionary projects are increasingly thin, weak voices and practices.”
CALVARIO
“A sort of prayer that asks an unnamed god why we must endure the horrors of war — where it’s always civilians who pay.”
LONTANI DA QUI
“Narrates the condition of those who experience war as a distant fact. Who feel the horror of the world’s injustices, but in the passing of their days get used to the distance and easily surrender to it — without ever stopping thinking about that horror, tormented by their own incoherence.”
CAINO
“About selfishness and greed. About how we always need to find an enemy — internal or external — to fight or destroy in order to defend our own peace.”
OLTRE
“Tries to explain the difficulty many face in building and embracing a truly critical and radical political consciousness — because it requires dismantling an apparatus of thought, formation, and education that leads you to reject those very concepts. About the difficulty of deconstructing what has been taught and internalized throughout your whole life.”
NEVE / IMMOBILI
“Both speak of surrender, resignation. How, despite having ideas, the comforts of the bourgeois world lead us to give up on everything we dislike. In ‘Neve,’ there’s an awareness of the surrender. In ‘Immobili,’ the knowledge that this will leave us empty and sad regardless.”
METAMORFOSI
“Change. Internal revolution before external. How strong can be — in fewer and fewer people — the awakening of consciousness that precedes taking a position, that precedes action. About learning to feel important things, things no one feels or wants to hear anymore.”
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