Last autumn, after mass demonstrations and strikes for Palestine across Italy, Rajab Al Reefi and the Gaza Skate Team posted a short video. They were holding an Italian flag, thanking people in Italy for the support. It went viral. Within hours, members of the Italian government tried to take public credit. Rajab and the team filmed a second video almost immediately, clarifying that their thanks were for the people, not the government, which had refused to take even the smallest steps to pressure Israel. “These people know very well who is their friend and who isn’t,” Matteo Bennici says.
That moment, the speed of the correction, the precision of who it was for and who it wasn’t, sits close to how the Milan quartet built “No Comply”, their second full-length, out 8 May on Supernatural Cat. After the first piece on the record ran in early May, we went back to the band over two further rounds of questions. The conversation got longer, the political backbone got more specific, and a number of things came out that the first article had no room for.
The album cover, an image by Eiz Almshharawi of Rajab Al Reefi performing a skate trick across the rubble of Gaza, came out of a year of Baratro following the Gaza Skate Team’s feed. Bennici remembers the moment the photo surfaced. “It contained a necessary message that we strongly wanted to amplify, something that cannot be ignored.” The band wrote to the team through Instagram, mostly spoke to Rajab, and asked permission. The exchanges were brief. “Sometimes it would take them days to reply,” Bennici says.
“I think these pauses actually carried a lot of emotional weight given the living hell these people are facing day to day. The very fact that they are still alive after almost three years of bombings and starvation is a monument to their strength and resilience.” Baratro also pressed a limited run of t-shirts with proceeds going directly to Gaza Skate Team. “We know this is a small gesture compared to the Palestinian catastrophe, but we are trying to make a contribution, hoping others will do the same.”
The album title closed the loop. “No Comply” is the call ICE agents in the US use when individuals refuse to follow their orders, usually shouted during their illegal raids into people’s homes, as bassist and vocalist Dave Curran later explained. It also happens to be the name of a skate trick. Almshharawi’s photo of Rajab on the ruins of Gaza did both things at once.
Musically, the change between “The Sweet Smell of Unrest” and “No Comply” tracks the line-up shift. Bennici had played cello as a guest on the 2024 album; this time he was in from the start. Guitarist Federico Hartridge describes what that did to the writing.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
Sometimes we wanted it to take centre stage, with the drums, bass, and guitar taking a back seat, while other times it becomes part of the soundscape and blends with the guitar, creating all sorts of interesting interplay. Sometimes it plays wild solos, and that’s when his Kerry King side comes out. For all of us, it was uncharted territory, and that’s what made writing these songs so enjoyable.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
Drummer Luca Antonozzi adds that the cello pushed the band toward “a more organic and linear path, hopefully not a boring one of course”. Curran’s bass, the same instantly recognisable tone he carried over from The JJ Paradise Players Club, Pigs, and Unsane, still anchors the room. “Dave’s bass sound is instantly recognisable from a mile away,” Hartridge says. “We often have Dave’s fans show up at our shows, usually they are bass player nerds and we spend the evening talking about amps and pedals and sounds.”
The political reality of the record, though, was the part that pushed hardest. Antonozzi, filling in an answer that had been cut short in his first round of replies, an unsaved draft as he later clarified, completed the thought.
“We all felt like taking a stance was necessary given the reality we are navigating. Personally when I think about political bands I think of acts like Dropdead, Catharsis or Tragedy, who put politics and social commentary at the very core of their band aesthetics and lyrical focus. While we do appreciate those bands I don’t think we fit that description. There’s a certain degree of cynicism and dark humour to Baratro’s DNA that clashes with a strictly militant attitude and we would like to keep that. Also, while we share a common perspective on many fundamental issues (Gaza being obviously one of them), we are different individuals with different backgrounds and making our band into a single political identity would feel unnatural and unnecessary.”
What pushed the record outward, then, was less a programme than an inability to write around what was on the screen. “Watching the horrors of Gaza and the subsequent dismantlement of any pretence of international law unfold live on our phones took a heavy toll on our mental health,” Antonozzi says, “and we realised that our music was probably the only healthy outlet left for our frustration and anguish.”
The Italian backdrop runs in parallel. A far-right government in Rome, evictions of squats and community-run spaces across the country, cuts to welfare, health, and education. Baratro themselves emerged in the orbit of Cox18, the Milan squat that has hosted shows, anarchist archives, and political organising for decades. Squats of exactly this kind have been the target of the current government’s evictions. Asked whether the domestic crackdown and the EU’s posture on Gaza are two sides of the same coin or two parallel atmospheric facts, Antonozzi pushes hard on the former.
“I do see the domestic crackdown and EU’s political posture on Gaza (and Iran, and Ukraine) as two sides of the same coin, and this has much to do with corporate power sucking any actual agency out of democratic institutions all across the west. The EU in particular is a rotten corpse carried about by the most stupid, corrupt and cowardly leadership since its inception.”
He goes further. “Capitalism hates squats because they show people that it’s possible to build relationships and meaning devoid of transactional value. It hates good education because it does not produce obedient slaves. It hates life itself because life is fragile and finite and contradicts its dogma of endless accumulation and growth. It’s nothing but a cult of death.” The “post-fascist clowns” who tried to take credit for the Gaza Skate Team’s Italian flag video, in his phrasing, fit inside the same diagnosis.
When the questions turned to Israel directly, Antonozzi prefaced his answers carefully. “I don’t like labels and sure enough I’m not going to put one on the band as a whole,” he wrote, and later, on a different question, “I am speaking strictly for myself here.”
What follows is his read, not Baratro’s collective platform, and it’s worth flagging that. The position is his, and it’s a strong one. It belongs to a long lineage of left and anti-colonial readings of the conflict, and Antonozzi delivers it without softening the edges. It’s worth reading in his words rather than paraphrased.
“At its core, I see Zionism as nothing but a colonial, supremacist ideology fostered by people who were born and raised in the west.” He rejects the idea of a recoverable “liberal Zionism” outright. “The sad truth is that the vast majority of Israeli society is fine with Netanyahu’s policies. The violence against refuseniks, dissidents and even ultra-orthodox, non zionist jews is brutal. And these groups are a tiny, tiny minority in Israel.” He closes with a verdict. “I think 80 years of non stop war, mass murders, displacement and apartheid should be enough for any reasonable individual to say that the zionist project is an absolute failure and a disgrace to humanity.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
The harder question of the round was about the “We Want to Live” movement, the Gazan civilian protests of 2019, 2021 and 2023 against Hamas’s rule, which called for open elections, better living conditions and an end to the leadership’s provocations against Israel. Hamas suppressed those protests with mass arrests, beatings, and the forced disappearance of organisers. It’s a piece of recent Palestinian history that has had very little circulation in European hardcore discussions of Gaza, on either side of the framing. Asked where that fits alongside the resistance framing on “No Comply”, Antonozzi answered without smoothing.
“I’ve searched hard enough to formulate an informed reply to this question, and I’ve had a hard time finding reliable sources and detailed reports about the episodes you mentioned, but I have no problem believing internal opposition to Hamas is real and repression against palestinian dissidents occurred.”
He then places those facts inside his wider read. “These realities are pretty much irrelevant within the context of the occupation. Hamas is a direct consequence of 80 years of brutality against the palestinian community. Before Hamas, Israel’s main political opponent was the PLO, a largely secular/socialist organization, and they didn’t like them very much either. Even after Arafat’s recognition of the Israeli state and the Oslo accords, Israel never really accepted the idea of an independent palestinian state. Rabin paid the price for signing the Oslo accords with his life.”
On Hamas’s internal politics, executions of dissenters, the 2007 takeover, the use of civilian infrastructure militarily, Antonozzi was careful to say he didn’t have ground-level knowledge of Gaza’s internal dynamics. He flagged the absence of international coverage inside the strip before October 7th, “and Israel exterminated 270 journalists since the beginning of the conflict”. (The number is in the right range; the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented over 200 journalist killings in Gaza since 2023. The verb is his.) He then offered an analogy that landed harder than most.
“In Italy the storytelling about partisan resistance during WW2 is now reduced to some sort of fairy tale where heroic partisans fought against evil occupying forces with just sheer will and a pure heart. The reality of it? They were ordinary people who hid in mountains, basements, empty buildings or just in plain sight under the facade of ‘normal life’ under occupation and bombed, ambushed and occasionally tortured fascists (who could happen to be neighbours or even family) and nazis. These people would 100% be called terrorists by today’s standards.” He follows it with two images placed side by side. “Yahya Sinwar was photographed throwing a stick at a drone with his only functioning arm inside a bombed building moments before being killed. Netanyahu fled to Berlin on his presidential plane when Iran rained missiles on Tel Aviv. These are just facts. Anyone can make what they want with it.”
The guest list around the core quartet stays the same as on the first article. Vinnie Signorelli on second drums on “Not All There”. Gipsy Rufina on cigar box on “Keep ‘Em Needing”. Eugene S. Robinson on vocals on “120 on 280”. Nàresh Ran on noise machines on “Dusk”. Christian Biscaro on backing vocals and moog on the title track. Fabio Intraina recorded, mixed and mastered the record at Trai Studio.
Since the album came out, Baratro say they’ve had almost no pushback on the politics, only support from friends, family, fellow musicians. “We did not feel any explicit pushback on the record except for random zionist bots on social media (we keep screenshots, just in case).” If anyone felt differently, they say, they’re keeping it to themselves. Antonozzi leaves the door open on that. “Anyone is welcome to confront us on this matter though. I feel these are times that demand uncomfortable conversations to happen.” This piece is one of them.
Editor’s note: This piece was shaped by two follow-up rounds of questions after the original article ran in May. Some of the sharper threads in this conversation were prompted by a long-time IDIOTEQ reader who pushed back on the first piece in good faith, and the exchange that followed shaped how this follow-up was put together. IDIOTEQ publishes what bands have to say about their own work, including positions the editorial team doesn’t fully share, and treats civil disagreement as a feature of the scene rather than a problem to be managed. Letters welcome.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
