There’s a fixed image at the center of Give Vent’s new EP: a house that stays the same while everything around it shifts. On “Secret letters to you“, the Modena band uses that house as storage for things that were once left unsaid — three songs built from letters written at different points in life and never sent, then returned to later from a different place.
The record is the first of three chapters that together make up a single album. Each part gathers letters from a different phase, separated by time, with all three covers showing the same house split into separate sections. The tracklist runs through “The Hidden Box”, “From the Courtyard”, and “Leaving Room”, and the EP will be available through Bandcamp, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Give Vent started in 2013 as Marcello Donadelli’s solo project, first centered on acoustic songs, before growing into a full band shaped by folk-punk and early-2000s emocore. That mix is still there, but “Secret letters to you” is less about style than function: songwriting as release, self-check, and a way of making private thoughts sit still long enough to look at them properly.
“I felt that this was the right time for me to step back for a moment and look at where I am, and in some ways turning these letters into songs felt like the best way to do that,” Donadelli says. “Sharing these things with the rest of the band—shaping them into songs and turning them into an EP—made them feel more like recollections of memories rather than just old letters hidden in a box.”
That shift matters. What had been sealed away becomes communal without losing its original weight. Donadelli says going back into those old subjects let him see them “from the inside, from a different emotional perspective,” and that the process “felt like meeting an old friend.”
The house in the artwork and in the EP’s central idea isn’t there as decoration. It’s the container. Donadelli describes it in physical terms first: the old room at your parents’ house, the sound of floors and doors, the colors, the furniture, the paths between rooms. In his reading, the house becomes “the box,” except instead of holding letters it holds memory — the parts that stay put while people leave, return, or turn into someone else.
“What really changes are the people who live in or move away from that space,” he says. “The house feels like a perpetual token, something everyone keeps coming back to from time to time.”
That same logic runs through the lyrics. Give Vent have long treated songs less as storytelling than as inner conversation, sometimes turning into fights with yourself where nobody wins and nobody really loses either. Donadelli puts it more bluntly: “I mostly write to make things real, so I can stay with the question or the emotion.”
He talks about “kaiju-level emotions and situations” — the kind that arrive before you have the language or the right person around to deal with them — and writing them down as they happen, partly to stop them from multiplying in his head. “This helps me see which parts of the whole I created or projected myself, and then gently remove them from the battleground,” he says. “In that sense, writing—in any form—is my first line of defense: a way to face hard things and stay in the field.”
As a standalone release, “Secret letters to you” sits in an interesting place. Donadelli says that, “letter-wise,” it belongs to the recent past, while musically it feels closer to a more distant one.
He sees the EP as an introduction, the point where an older version of yourself runs into the person you are now and the result is a particular kind of emotional nostalgia. He doesn’t really sort those experiences into neat categories of healed or unhealed. Some things keep returning years later and pull a certain state back with them; others burn hot, get understood, and then mostly disappear.
The EP was recorded entirely at Ekidna’s old studio in Carpi during 2025, mixed by Marco degli Esposti at Happenstance Studio, and mastered by Mike Kalajian at Rogue Planet Mastering. On Bandcamp, the release appears as “Secret (Letters to You)” and is available as a digital download.
Give Vent’s current lineup is Marcello Donadelli on guitar and voice, Dave Moscova on bass, Simone Giari on drums, and Luca Righi on guitar and voice.
Over the years the band has put out several records and EPs. They’ve also shared bills with The Front Bottoms, Jeff Rosenstock, Awakebutstillinbed, Your Arms Are My Cocoon, and Delta Sleep, and completed a short acoustic tour in Japan that led to a live EP recorded in Tokyo.
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