There’s a line buried in “Albatros” — “My nest is a boat / With which I sail Oceans and Seas” – that lands less like metaphor and more like a working method. For over a decade, Pastel have kept moving while trying to stay anchored, a project in constant adjustment that still circles the same core idea: write alone, finish together, and push outward without losing shape.
“A Lovers Manifesto,” out April 3, 2026 via Slow Down Records alongside Dischi Decenti and Vina Records, carries that tension in every direction.
The Bari band, active since 2013, still builds from Vito Pesce’s initial sketches before locking arrangements in rehearsal with Andrea Annese, but the scope has widened.
What began as a duo has stretched through different lineups — Daniele Annese, then Emanuele Mura, and now Sabino Schingaro and Francesco Lapomarda — until it lands, for now, as a four-piece. The method stayed intact even as the structure kept shifting.
The songs themselves reach back further than their release date suggests. Most of this record was written around 2018, then stalled out during the pandemic years. Momentum dropped, picked back up, and dropped again. “We genuinely doubted, more than once, that we would ever be able to complete this work,” Pesce admits. Motivation eroded slowly, worn down by external pressure and the internal instability that has followed the band since the start.
They resumed in April 2025 at M.A.T. Studio in Terlizzi, with Michele Valente handling recording and mixing. By January 2026, Jesse Germanò had mastered it at Jedi Studio in Rome. The finished version reflects that long gap between writing and completion — a document of a darker period finally processed years later. “Perhaps this struggle was matched only by the immense joy we felt when we finally held the finished product in our hands.”
The record opens with “Lucky Kentucky,” which the band describe as “a wild yet charmingly quirky melodic-rhythmic paraphrase in pure math-rock style,” imagining someone idly strumming in a straw hat with a stalk of wheat between their lips. It’s playful, but still tightly wound.
“Albatros” leans into motion — wind currents, shifting surfaces, distance covered without effort. “These are exactly the elements we used to sonically paint our idea of traveling freely anywhere, while always feeling at home.”
“Pettirosso,” one of the record’s defining points, pulls in the opposite direction. “Despite its appearance—small yet vividly aggressive and territorial with its own kind, as well as boldly at ease when approaching humans—this track channels its energy by embedding its own contemporary interpretation within a Rock and Punk foundation.”
The band describe it as their most direct piece: a clearer structure, sharper melodic lines, something closer to a traditional song without losing their internal friction. “A single branch for support / I lift myself into the Universe.”
At the other end sits “Today? Mayday!,” the last track they wrote and the most physically demanding to play. “Technical takeoff trials in black and white and landing in stereo Technicolor.” It pulls together prog structures, hip-hop-adjacent rhythm, and the tapping patterns that have long defined their approach, without settling into any one lane. “It is perhaps the most demanding track to play, but at the same time the most fun, as it remains unpredictable despite being structured like a proper song.”
Between those poles, “J.Missouri” runs on unstable footing — “the most rhythmic and irreverent Post-Hardcore meets odd urban dancers engaged in an improbable breakdance amid Punk Rock echoes and rhythmic explosions, all while a threatening storm looms on the horizon.”
“Thelonious” closes with a direct nod to Thelonious “Sphere” Monk, and the kind of logic that often gets mistaken for chaos. “Would you play some of your weird chords for the class?” / “What do you mean weird? They’re perfectly logical chords.” The track leans into that idea of internal coherence misunderstood from the outside. “I have an idea for a hat / But it’s the World that doesn’t want it / I turned the Revolution into normality / I painted the Revolution in normality.”
Across the record, Pesce handles guitar, Bass VI, and vocals, with Annese on drums and vocals. Emanuele Mura appears on bass for “Albatros” and “Thelonious.” All music and lyrics come from Pesce, with arrangements finalized by both him and Annese. The artwork, by Gianluca Lonigro, matches the record’s sense of something held together through shifting parts.
Their listening habits remain scattered and wide — free jazz, ambient, hip hop, noise, classical, grind, trap — without hierarchy. That openness shows up in the way the songs refuse to settle into a single identity. Outside of music, Pesce points to long walks by the sea, cinema, and improvisation as equally present influences, citing Federico Fellini’s “8½,” David Byrne’s “How Music Works,” and Alfa Mist’s “Structuralism” as recent touchpoints.
The title “A Lovers Manifesto” came later, but it holds the thread that kept the record moving at all. “A title that embodies the feeling that guided us and allowed us to keep going, even when doubts began to surface.”
Recorded between April and November 2025, mastered in January 2026, and released April 3, 2026.
