Filippo “Felipe” Taddei wanted AKA Brainkiller’s “Underworld” to go by so quickly that you’d barely have time to think about what was happening. The Bologna punk duo he runs with his twin brother Lorenzo, better known as Lollo, play short, aggressive hardcore with d-beat rhythms, programmed drums and a healthy dose of old Memphis rap. Their four-song EP is over in just seven minutes, and quite a lot of it comes from the years when the two were spending more time at illegal raves than punk gigs.
Felipe had something pretty specific in mind when they started putting the record together.
“We wanted to make a very fast hardcore album, one that didn’t give you time to think. Think of it as the equivalent of the rave party shown in the artwork. A miniature rave party, lol.”
Lollo’s version of the brief is shorter: “we wanted it to be fast, cheap and easy.”
Both brothers grew up heavily into punk and metal, particularly black metal, and played in various bands in Italy and England before starting AKA Brainkiller in 2024. Most of those earlier projects didn’t last particularly long or achieve much, and there were periods when music took a back seat to other interests. With this band they decided to put their energy into making something that would stick around.
The two have a pretty uncomplicated arrangement. Felipe plays bass, programmes the drums and shares vocals with Lollo, who handles guitar. They’ve been making music together for so long that the usual distinction between who writes what has become fairly meaningless.
Lollo puts it: “it’s really a 50/50 affair.”
Songs go back and forth between them, through rehearsals and different versions, with parts constantly being added or taken out. Occasionally one of them might write a complete song, but the finished work is always credited to both.
“being twins, working together comes very naturally to the point where there really is no distinction between the two of us in the creative process.”
He also admits something that probably happens in plenty of bands, although perhaps few would put it quite so casually.
“i gotta say felipe tend to take my parts and simplify them a bit which ultimately makes them better.”
After enough rehearsals, even remembering where a particular guitar part came from can become a problem. Lollo has found himself asking his brother who originally wrote a riff, having completely forgotten the answer.
The way “Trunk” came together gives a decent idea of how this works. Lollo started with a beat he’d made on his laptop and sent it to Felipe, who added the punk guitar riffs. Lollo then changed parts of the bridge, introducing trap drums, and they eventually recorded the vocals using his lyrics.
“Living In A Casket” took another route. Lollo came up with the guitar riff, Felipe immediately wrote a bass part, and the two divided up the vocals. Lollo wrote the verse lyrics and Felipe finished the chorus.
There’s no fixed order. Sometimes they’ll begin with a drum pattern, but more often a guitar riff comes first and Felipe programmes the drums around it. He likes his drum parts simple and tightly controlled, without much extra decoration.
“I’m a maniac when it comes to drums, I like a simple and deliberate drumming, I don’t like ghost notes or too many fills, and programming allows me to write those simple parts and have more control over the beats.”
He also reckons more rock musicians will eventually end up using programmed drums, arguing that drummers and drum kits are becoming harder to come by. That’s his prediction, though for AKA Brainkiller the benefits are already pretty clear. They can write the parts exactly how they want them and keep playing even when there’s no drummer available.
And the electronic side of their music goes back a lot further than this particular band.
During the first half of the 2010s, the brothers were heavily involved in illegal rave culture, attending parties in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Lollo remembers collectives taking over abandoned industrial buildings and other empty spaces, setting up soundsystems and keeping the parties going for days.
“yes rave culture was everything to us back then. and i mean illegal rave culture where collectives of djs would occupy abandoned buildings and throw parties in them that would last for days.”
He considers them to have been serious participants in both the Italian and wider European scene. They were still punk kids, just spending an awful lot of their time around DJs, electronic music and people who had little connection to conventional punk or metal gigs.
“we were always punks acting like ravers, and thats what the ep wanna embody i think: the distorted guitars sound of punk with a drum machine-led beat and rap samples to bring the rave attitude.”
Bologna gave them plenty of opportunities to hear different stuff, although Felipe remembers punk, metal and rap mostly operating in their own circles, with occasional crossover. In those years, he was regularly going to raves but rarely attending punk or metal shows.
He considers Bologna one of Italy’s most active underground cities, with an enormous number of cultural events happening every week. He even brings up Dave Grohl having lived in a squat there during the early 1990s. That particular bit of local history checks out: Grohl spent time at L’Isola nel Kantiere while he was still playing with Scream, and the occupied cultural centre was shut down in September 1991.
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The rave connection also explains the photograph Felipe chose for “Underworld“.
Back on Halloween 2013, he attended Wichtech, an illegal rave held inside the abandoned former TNT logistics complex in Zingonia, near Bergamo. The party attracted around 2,000 people over three days, including visitors from France and the Netherlands. Organisers had set up several dance areas inside the warehouses, with another outside, along with enormous speakers, lighting rigs and DJ equipment.
Italian newspaper L’Eco di Bergamo covered the event at the time, reporting police patrols, complaints from nearby businesses and considerable damage to parts of the empty industrial buildings. Hundreds of participants were later identified and reported to authorities over the occupation.
Felipe remembers a particularly chaotic incident involving a car. In his account, somebody drove into the soundsystem, was subsequently beaten, and other people at the rave smashed the vehicle and turned it over.
His recollection differs in one significant respect from subsequent newspaper reporting. A November 5 article described a 20-year-old driver whose car knocked down a mezzanine where a DJ was performing, causing the DJ a head injury. It doesn’t establish the later beating or destruction of the car that Felipe recalls.
The photograph stayed in his memory for years.
“I always had that image in my mind, and when I had to pick a cover for Underworld, I had no doubts. It channels the chaos and the naivety of the album.”
The photograph was published by L’Eco di Bergamo with a credit to Cesni Foto. Felipe later used it to make the “Underworld” sleeve, assembling the artwork himself, although he acknowledges that he hadn’t obtained permission to reproduce the original image. We’re therefore leaving the cover out of this article and using the band’s photographs by Fiish Boy.
Back in the music, Memphis rap is the other big ingredient. This was mostly Lollo’s idea. Alongside punk, it’s one of his favourite kinds of music, with Blackout’s “Dreamworld” and Buckshotz’s “Strap” among the records he keeps coming back to.
He loves the sinister melodies and imagery around those recordings, and thought their darker feel would work nicely with the abrasive riffs AKA Brainkiller were writing. Felipe was immediately interested in trying it. His own listening habits are fairly broad, and he’s happy to bring something into a song whenever it sounds right.
The brothers also use Memphis rap tracks as intros between their songs at gigs, keeping some of that same mood running through the set.
“Trunk” takes the connection further. Lollo says the introduction samples DJ Zirk’s “Lock Em in the Trunk”, a Memphis rap classic whose repeated vocal phrase fits neatly into the band’s short punk arrangement. The song has a bit of trap drumming in the bridge, but otherwise sticks to the straightforward, riff-driven approach they’ve been developing.
Lollo considers it their most urban song, largely about going through life without giving much of a damn. Felipe hears the rap side of it as braggadocio, with the familiar “playa” attitude carried over into a punk song.
The two don’t always have quite the same interpretation of what they’re singing, either.
Felipe isn’t especially concerned with the words when making music. He sees “Underworld” as a record about rhythm, speed and violence, and has little interest in giving it one particular message.
“I would say the lyrics are irrelevant to me, tough. The music on Underworld doesn’t really have a “message”, so to speak, it’s more about the rhythm, the fastness, and the violence.”
Lollo, meanwhile, has some fairly specific things to say about the three songs they’ve discussed.
“Lies” is a straight d-beat number about betrayal, although he concentrates on the betrayal of one’s own ideals. The lyrics repeatedly return to “this system’s gotta go”, a blunt refrain over the fast hardcore arrangement. Felipe’s reading of the song is simply betrayal in a broader sense.
“Living In A Casket” goes somewhere else. Felipe connects it with mental health and violent tendencies, while Lollo talks about feeling comfortable on the margins, both physically and socially. There’s also the idea of finding something worthwhile in places or things that other people tend to reject.
The lyrics are suitably scrappy, moving through street-level language, threats and strange images, with “Go full speed I don’t look back” returning throughout.
On “Trunk”, the brothers’ ideas come back together around the Memphis rap connection. The DJ Zirk sample, repetitive vocal hook and punk rhythm all fit the slightly obnoxious, carefree attitude Lollo had in mind.
The current version of “Underworld” also includes “Velvet Spirit”, which runs considerably longer than the other songs. Its recurring refrain, “Desire sits rotting / In the dark of your body”, gives it a different lyrical character, with more of the dark imagery that runs through the band’s earlier experimental interests. The brothers’ detailed comments on the record concentrated on the other three tracks.
“Underworld” was recorded in Bologna in early 2024 and originally came out independently that April. D$B Records re-released it in October 2025, and the current digital edition is dated September 12, 2026. AKA Brainkiller handled the production themselves and share the music and lyrics credits, with Andrea Simoncini at Standalone Productions responsible for mixing and mastering.
The brothers have also put out a separate single, “All Of A Sudden, Silence”. Running just under three minutes, it goes back to some of their darker interests, with lyrics about graveyards, hatred, being strung out and finding a strange sense of sanity in the middle of it all.
Playing the stuff live has required a bit of trial and error.
At different points they’ve used a full drummer, backing tracks and even a turntablist, which Felipe jokingly compares to Limp Bizkit. The simplest setup has the programmed drum parts running through Ableton, with the computer connected directly to the venue’s mixer and the samples coming out through the PA.
Getting the drum levels right during soundcheck is especially important. As Lollo explains, they need to make sure the programmed kit remains clearly audible alongside the guitars and bass. It’s an arrangement that lets the duo keep booking shows when a drummer isn’t available.
They also prefer to keep everything else fairly basic. No in-ear monitors, no complicated equipment, and Felipe doesn’t even use bass pedals.
Whenever they can find a drummer to play with them, though, that’s still the option they go for.
“We have played with every possible configuration: drummer, backing tracks, even a turntablist, Limp Bizkit-style, lol. But we always try to have a drummer when we play live.”
For Lollo, the computer is a way to keep the band going. Felipe is perfectly happy with drum machines when writing, but once they’re playing in front of people, he likes the extra punishment of a human drummer.
“I usually don’t care for quality of sound, but when you play with a drummer it definitely gets more brutal which is the point.”
“Underworld” is available to stream and download on Bandcamp.
Band photography by Fiish Boy. Instagram: @fiish.boy.
