When the cello starts cutting against bass this thick and drums this heavy, I go into full meerkat-alert position. Ears up, watching. On “No Comply“, the new Baratro album out May 8 via Supernatural Cat, that tension hits right after the quick opener “Dawn” and lands inside the first full track, “Hold Fast“.
Somewhere between noise rock, sludge and post-hardcore. Dark, serious, but I’m in. From there it only gets better. And whatever the cover art might suggest at a glance, this is not a skate punk record. Believe me.
The Milan-based band, born in the orbit of the squat Cox18, started as a trio: Dave Curran on bass and vocals (ex-Unsane), Federico Hartridge on guitars and vocals (ex-Council of Rats), and Luca Antonozzi on drums (ex-Marnero, ex-Laghetto). After the “Terms and Conditions” EP (Sangue Dischi, 2021) and their debut full-length “The Sweet Smell of Unrest” (Improved Sequence, 2024), they brought in cellist Matteo Bennici as a full member. He had played as a guest on the first album. This time, he stayed.
The shift changed how the songs got written. Instead of Bennici layering parts onto an existing skeleton, the four of them worked together from scratch.
“The connection with Matteo was immediate and brought us straight to the rehearsal space, where we worked with no clear goal except to play music free from any constraints. Ideas flowed naturally and, within a few months, the songs that make up ‘No Comply’ were born,” the band says.
The record came together while the genocide in Gaza escalated and fascist movements gained ground globally.
According to the band, those feelings ran through the writing without needing to be spelled out, and “No Comply” became their direct testimony in the face of the darkest tendencies of the moment, and a refusal to give in to despair.
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The title came from Curran. As the band tells it, when he proposed “No Comply” with its echoes of present-day America’s fascist downfall, the rest of them recognized it as the right channel for the emotional distress the songs had been working through.
“It was almost a subliminal choice, in a way,” they say. The two words paired together carried defiance in the face of repression and state violence, and “a glimpse of hope in a time when it’s way easier to give in to nihilism and despair”.
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The cover art ties directly to that opening. The band had been following the Gaza Skate Team for a while when an image of Rajab Al Reefi performing a skate trick across rubble surfaced on the team’s feed. To Baratro, it read as proof of unbreakable courage and resilience: men still finding the strength to go out and play despite immense grief and the hardship of the last couple of years.
The team’s charitable activities, especially their work with children, hit hard. Baratro reached out to Rajab and the team, asked permission to use the image, and got it. “We had found the image that tied everything we felt in the making of this record together. The spark of hope we were looking for,” the band says. The album is dedicated to them.
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Around the core quartet (Curran on bass and vocals, Hartridge on guitars and vocals, Antonozzi on drums, Bennici on cello), a short list of guests appears across specific tracks. Vinnie Signorelli plays second drums on “Not All There”. Gipsy Rufina contributes cigar box on “Keep ‘Em Needing”. Eugene S. Robinson takes vocals on “120 on 280”. Nàresh Ran handles noise machines on “Dusk”. Christian Biscaro adds backing vocals and moog on the title track.
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The record was recorded, mixed and mastered by Fabio Intraina at Trai Studio. Out May 8 on Supernatural Cat (CD / LP / DD).
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