No Turning Back was written before the worst of it. Hold Me Tight‘s vocalist Franz put down the lyrics and vocal lines over an already-existing track, from a moment before the illness, before the surgery, while she was still pulling out of another toxic relationship.
The Sardinia hardcore band self-release the single on April 24, and it opens “The Fall” — a broader concept unfolding across the coming months through more singles and a visual campaign built around the same aesthetic.
Hold Me Tight haven’t really been around since their self-produced 2023 EP. There was no clean break, no announced pause — just a stretch where everything piled up at once.
Franz was recovering from a major surgery for a malignant womb tumor while her father was seriously ill, and she was still untangling herself from toxic situations on more than one side.
The band came back onstage in late 2024 with an updated lineup — Nico and Luca on guitars, Nat on bass, Bebbo on drums — but Franz is clear that it wasn’t the tidy comeback people like to imagine.
“We didn’t really come back. Not in a clean way,” she tells us. “There wasn’t a moment where things ended and something new started. It was more like being dragged back into it while everything else was still happening.”
Their first show after the silence landed in late 2024 and it didn’t feel like a comeback.
“My head wasn’t fully there. Part of me was somewhere else completely. But the moment I stepped on stage, it shifted. It felt like a reset, like everything I had been holding just flipped outward. Like something open and welcoming. Like I needed that moment to hold everything instead of breaking under it. To turn something heavy into something that could exist outside of me. I think I needed hope, and I wanted to give hope.”
The writing shifted with it. “Before it was more immediate, almost instinctive. Now it feels slower, more restrained. Less about getting things out, more about staying inside them. I stopped trying to turn everything into immediate release. Instead, I needed to silence the noise around me and tune into what was actually there, giving space for things to stay where they are without forcing them somewhere else.”
That change lands all over “No Turning Back.” The track moves between metal and hardcore, cold and stripped-back, alternating direct impact with stretches that hold back, without pushing toward a clean resolution. What’s left is an unstable balance — which is the point.
“It’s not just anger, even if there’s a lot of it,” she says of the lyrics.
“It’s more about realizing where you are while you’re still inside it. Not out of it. Not fixed. Just aware. In the chorus there’s even a moment where I almost invite the damage to continue, just to fully see it for what it is, and then close with the awareness that there’s no turning back. That awareness is heavy, but at the same time it gives you something to work with. It can also lift you, in a different way.”
The single was produced by Hold Me Tight themselves, with Alberto Bandino recording, mixing, and mastering at CutFireStudio — where the current sound direction got worked out together across the process.
Artwork by Davide Ragazzo, colored by Francesco Liori.
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Photos by Tessa Wiegerinck, who the band met at a fest and started working with from there, with additional live shots by Roberto Graziano Moro. Extra support from Nicola Olla and the whole project backed by AOP (Art of Puppetry).
“No Turning Back” is out April 24, self-released. First of a series tied to “The Fall.”
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