Terni’s Die Abete have never made easy, comfortable hardcore. Their third album, “Giovani Volpi“, moves through fast, tightly wound US-rooted hardcore, post-hardcore, math and punk, with lyrics exploring the body, instinct, loss of control and the fears and patterns we’ve internalised. The title track is one of its most direct songs, and now, several months after the record came out, the band have made a music video that takes us around the places they grew up in. We’re premiering it here at IDIOTEQ.
There are abandoned factories, the basketball court beside their rehearsal space in Cospea, backstage moments and footage from their set at Italian Party in Umbertide this July. The picture has a great texture to it, and the whole thing has the loose feel of older hardcore videos where you got to see the band hanging out, playing and going about their business.
That’s pretty much what vocalist Eugenio Della Mora had in mind. The band have been playing for years and wanted to make something that looked back to the music videos they knew in the 90s.
“The idea behind the video was simply that we wanted to make one. Italian underground bands don’t usually make many music videos, especially in our scene. There’s never much money around, and what really matters is playing live. We’re pretty old school in that sense.”
By Eugenio’s count, they’ve played around 90 gigs, including plenty from the days when hardly anyone thought to document what happened.
“We’ve played around 90 shows, and before the whole Instagram and social media boom, we often played gigs where nobody even took a picture. Maybe just a few badly taken shots posted on Facebook by someone who was there, but nobody really cared.”
The new clip brings together quite a few parts of their life as a band. That basketball court in Cospea is right next to their practice space. The live footage comes from Italian Party, the long-running DIY festival organised by To Lose La Track, who also released “Giovani Volpi”. Die Abete played there on 25 July alongside bands including Fine Before You Came, Crash of Rhinos, Totorro, Radura and Stegosauro.
“Basically, we wanted to make a classic, slightly 90s-style music video, showing the band for what it is: a group of friends getting together to play the music they love, lucky enough to be part of the Italian hardcore, screamo, post-hardcore and emo scene.”
Their friends Raniero Giacchetti and Daniel Lutchner directed the video. Daniel also worked as director of photography, with Andrei Sandru as first assistant camera. Daniel and Eugenio edited the footage together.
The factory footage brings Terni itself into the picture. It’s a city with a long industrial and working-class history, and Eugenio remembers spending a lot of time exploring disused buildings when he was younger. Those same places ended up becoming locations for the video.
“We shot the rest of the video in abandoned industrial areas. Terni, the city we come from, is a former industrial working-class town, and the surrounding area is full of abandoned factories. We chose those places because we used to love urban exploring when we were younger. It was something we did a lot growing up.”
There’s something quite nice about how ordinary that explanation is. These buildings were already familiar to them. So were the basketball court and the rooms where they practise. They’ve simply gone back there with cameras.
And the song they’ve chosen to film has a much stranger history.
“Giovani Volpi” translates as “Young Foxes”, and somebody originally threw that name at the band as an insult during an argument online. It happened years before they began making the album, but Eugenio remembered it.
“As for the title, it’s something we’d had in mind for a long time. It was actually a name someone called us during an exchange of insults online many years ago. I already had it in my head before we even started writing the album.”
He’d been thinking about generational divisions, the way older people talk about younger ones, and the strange position of millennials who aren’t really young anymore themselves.
“It makes me think of generational gaps, awful words like ‘youthful’, sly old bastards, us millennials who aren’t exactly young anymore, and the arrogant, don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, more for show than anything else, of what some trashy mainstream TV report would call the ‘trap generation’.”
The title was already waiting when the band wrote the song more than two years ago. It eventually became the last track they added to the album.
The lyrics are short, physical and often difficult to pin down. Eugenio opens with a repeated declaration, “I’ll be there when we touch the fire”, before running straight into “trampled / nameless / absent / relentless”. The opening seems to promise somebody’s presence at a shared moment, yet the following words describe somebody being crushed, stripped of a name and disappearing.
Then comes “deafening like a silent film”, followed by the instruction to “bare your teeth”. The words keep moving between aggression and the body taking damage. “I strike at meaning / I earn the gaze / I scourge my body” is one of the song’s more direct passages.
Towards the end, the repeated image changes again: “it’s not fresh blood / it’s not even a mark / everything retreats and that’s how I understand”. The song returns to touching the fire, with no straightforward explanation of what has happened.
Eugenio is happy to leave these images connected by what they evoke.
“The lyrics are built around images, often very physical ones: teeth, blood, the body, fire. They’re a collection of sensations, somewhere between violence and the instinct to fight back.”
The rest of “Giovani Volpi” has plenty of similar concerns. The record deals with what people absorb from their surroundings, the fears and ways of thinking they carry around, and what happens when control starts slipping away.
“Mai” opens the album with some of its angriest language, including “generazione di vecchi del cazzo” and “il nemico era in casa”. In “Gola”, hunger becomes the main obsession, with repeated demands to be devoured and images of hyenas lining up for new prey. “Stalker” moves through cruelty and destruction, ending with an instruction to choose your battles carefully.
There’s a pretty wide range of writing on the record. The title track hits with a more direct hardcore attack, while “Nessuno” moves into drums, samples and almost industrial repetition. “Punto, Linea, Superficie” brings in stoner-leaning guitar passages, and “Stomaco” closes the album with a more communal vocal passage and words taken from Céline. The songs come from different periods of the band’s life, with some ideas going back as far as 2018.
Die Abete themselves have changed quite a bit over that time. Their early records, “Tutto o Niente” from 2014 and “Senza Denti” from 2017, were even more extreme, according to Eugenio, and the band used to play with two drummers. Eugenio was one of them, singing and playing drums at the same time. They eventually left that setup behind and returned to playing shows in 2023, completing 25 dates around Italy that year.
The current lineup features Lukas Bergmann on drums, Michele Perla on guitar, Alberto Venanzoni on bass and Eugenio on vocals. Eugenio also recorded drums on “Gola” and “Stomaco”, two songs that retain something of the band’s earlier setup. Former member Marco Tortorelli played rhythm guitars and bass on the album.
Recording took them through several cities. Carlo Zollo worked on the sessions at Groove Studios in Terni and later mixed and mastered the record at Terribile Studio in Milan. Federico Mazzoli recorded guitars in Perugia, Alex Gavazzi handled vocals in Rome, and Maurizio Bergmann contributed sound design from Berlin. The album artwork uses photography by Marco Sconocchia, with design and layout by Due Studio.
Following the album’s release, Die Abete have kept playing live through the summer and autumn. Their recent dates included Turin, Bologna, Perugia, Umbertide, Belluno, Milan and Rome, with three more shows scheduled before the end of the year: Hardcore for Palestine in Piacenza on 28 November, Cox18 in Milan on 5 December and Back to the Garage Fest in Rome on 20 December.
For a band whose older gigs sometimes left little photographic evidence, “Giovani Volpi” gives them a proper record of the people and places involved. They got the friends, the rehearsal spot, a festival gig and those factories they used to wander around when they were kids. It’s a good-looking piece of footage too, especially the texture of the image and the way the older industrial locations sit alongside the everyday scenes of the band together.
“Giovani Volpi” was released on 15 May 2026 through To Lose La Track. You can hear the full record on Die Abete’s Bandcamp, get the LP from the label’s store, and follow the band on Instagram.
