Man Looking Man recorded their self-titled debut on a rooftop in West Berlin. The studio belongs to their bassist Maurizio Bergmann, who also engineered, mixed and mastered the record, so every stage of production stayed in the band’s hands.
The album lands on June 12, 2026 via Octopus Rising (Argonauta Records) on CD and digital, after a five-year process that nearly ended the project more than once. Today, we’re stoked to give you an exclusive early listen below!
The foundations go back to 2018, when Bergmann and vocalist Carlo Poy started developing the first pieces of what would eventually become the album.
The current lineup took longer to settle. Drummer Jacopo Marzola joined in 2020, lead guitarist Tommy “ergo sum” Romito came in around the same period, and the four of them built much of the eventual sound together, including the first vocal parts. Then Romito left.
“We had just parted ways with our guitarist Tommy, and after the void that created, we thought: these songs are too good to just die in a closet,” the band says.
“So for us this record became less promotional material and more of a testament to that period of our lives.”
When Nico Marin stepped in on lead guitar, the lineup finally locked. They played their first shows in 2024 under the name Angstrom, then changed the name to Man Looking Man before the album cycle began.
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The full record took roughly three months to track. They started by recording guide tracks for Marzola, who then tracked the drums in a few intense days. Bass, guitars, vocals and additional layers of experimentation followed. With no studio clock running and no outside producer’s deadline, the band let themselves obsess.
“We had the freedom to obsess over details, rearrange entire sections, argue endlessly over transitions, tones, pacing, dynamics, and then rebuild everything until it finally felt right,” they say. Nothing was treated as fixed until everyone in the room genuinely believed in it.
Songwriting moved in fragments rather than start-to-finish runs. Riffs and ideas arrived almost reflexively. “Amp on, first Riff, bang. That’s it,” the band describes.
Then came the slower work of figuring out which pieces belonged together. Contrast is the principle that guided most of those decisions. Heavy passages collapse into slower, more spacious sections without warning.
Vocals shift with the music, pushing into screams in the denser stretches and pulling back where the songs open up. The push and pull between density and openness is the record’s central move, and it shapes nearly every track.
Lyrically, the band writes across six languages. English, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Latin all appear across the six songs, with Poy’s multilingual writing setting the tone.
“Different languages carry different emotions and textures, and that became part of the identity of the album itself,” they explain. Conceptually, the record sits with alienation, emotional exhaustion, political awareness, and “the feeling of trying to stay human in a completely deranged system.” Capitalism and the damage it does to people and relationships runs through several of the songs, alongside an insistence on emotional survival and resistance. The writing pushes past individual isolation toward ideas of community and shared vision. Revolution sits at the center of it, both personal and collective.
The reference points are unusually wide. The band names Converge, Orchid, Botch and Refused as core post-hardcore and screamo influences, then Tool, Amenra and Electric Wizard for the post-metal, sludge and doom side. Outside heavy music entirely, they cite Modest Mussorgsky and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for the darkness and weight in the classical writing.
The six-track album opens with “Symbols of Loss” (6:10) and closes with “Poslushayte” (4:06), with “Zegepraal” (3:21), “369” (7:03), “Samsara” (5:02) and “Glide and Turn” (6:53) in between. “Samsara” was the first single. “Zegepraal” followed as the video single, both arriving ahead of the June 12 release.
“In the end this album feels like the most honest representation of the band we could have made at that moment in time,” the band says.
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