The chimera in question isn’t just the album title. Murosuono are five Roman musicians who came up in completely different bands. Psych rock in one corner, math emo in another, shoegaze and post-punk somewhere else. Welding all of that into one project gave the record its name.
“Chimera,” their second LP, lands May 1st, 2026 via Kosmica Dischi, Slow Down Records, Pasidaryk Pats Records, Spleencore Records and Prejudice Me Records.
Seven tracks of post-hardcore that pulls from math rock, screamo, shoegaze and post-punk in roughly equal measure, sung entirely in Italian, and built on a duality the band keep circling back to: dreams as both liberation and prison.
The band came together in stages. Davide Grava (vocals) and Federico Bruzzaniti (guitar) met in late 2021 / early 2022, when Davide was looking for a drummer for an English-language post-punk project loosely modelled after IDLES. That project never even got a name. Federico was already busy in Desert Kosmo, his main band on the shoegaze/emo side, alongside other things. After a few months, the two of them ditched what they were doing and started something from scratch, with Federico moving from drums to guitar.
The biggest shift wasn’t sonic. It was linguistic. They switched to Italian.
“That was a big step, especially for me,” Davide says. “I had always kinda avoided it before, maybe as a way to not fully expose myself, hiding a bit behind the ‘shield’ of another language. But yeah, meeting Federico is what really pushed that leap both lyrically and musically.”
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Michele Cipollini joined on bass, alongside Michelangelo, both coming in from psych rock and a longstanding partnership in the band Napstamind. That lineup recorded the first Murosuono album, “Che Forma Prenderò Domani,” released May 10, 2024 via Kosmica Dischi and tracked at ACM Recording Studio in Ciampino with Samuele Cima.
After the debut came another reshuffle. Michelangelo left. Thomas Perrone (drums) and Alessandro Nicotra (second guitar) joined, both already playing together for years in Algot, leaning more towards math rock and emo.
“We both really wanted to experiment, and we kinda got pulled into the band the same way Federico and Michele did, thanks to Davide’s energy and enthusiasm,” Alessandro says. “He’s been the glue of this whole thing since day one, and still is.”
That’s where the math rock dialect started showing up in earnest. Odd time signatures, intricate two-guitar interplay, more space for screamo and shoegaze textures. The post-punk and emogaze leanings of the first record morphed into something denser and more contradictory, and Murosuono found their current shape there.
Two years separate “Che Forma Prenderò Domani” and “Chimera,” and the band want you to know they used the time differently this time around.
“If the first record was kind of a gamble, recorded really fast, very raw, very punk, driven by this almost naive urgency, mixed with a lot of anxiety and expectations, then this second record comes from a totally different place. There’s way more awareness, but also way more ease. The mantra this time was: no FOMO!”
That meant taking their time, recording when it actually felt right, refusing to chase a trend or audience.
“In Italy, and in this scene in general, there are a lot of great bands but also a lot of stuff that kinda sounds the same, just to fit a certain audience or all the clichés that come with the genre. At this point, we’re not really interested in pleasing anyone but ourselves first. The most important thing is that we genuinely like what we’re doing, and that what we’re writing feels true to us. Everything else will come as a consequence of that.”
The seven-track sequence reads as a continuous argument with the dream/nightmare duality the band have been chasing. Italian phrases carry idiomatic weight that mostly doesn’t survive translation, so it’s worth letting them walk through each title in their own words.
Opener “Paradiso” lifts a line from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” (“in heaven everything is fine”) and asks what happens if that heaven turns out to be a too-bright purgatory you can’t escape. The band describe it as a song about idealisation: “about not really seeing things clearly anymore. You get blinded by the idea of someone or something, and you completely lose sight of yourself. And more often than not, you end up hurting yourself and the people around you.”
“Cose semplici” carries that same idealisation into smaller territory. “It’s about how even the simplest things can get blown way out of proportion because of that same idealization. They suddenly feel huge, meaningful, and then, just like that, they lose all meaning. A kiss that means everything and then nothing the next second. It’s kind of like a wake-up call to rationality, or from another point of view, the death of those pure, simple feelings you find in small things especially when you start following your fears, your anxiety, or just logic, instead of actually feeling them and living them.”
“Soliloquio” turns inward. “It’s really about that kind of paralysis you fall into when you stop relating to other people. You keep everything in your head, stuck in this endless inner dialogue. You end up getting lost in yourself and completely shutting everyone else out. You stop seeing the bigger picture, you kind of erase the people around you, thinking you can understand everything on your own. And what you’re left with is this soliloquy where you just stand still, watching the world burn.”
“Ansia” gives a voice to the dream collapsing into nightmare. “It’s like a tentacle tightening around your neck. And the more you try to find answers in those dark waters it comes from, the more you forget how to swim, how to breathe, how to live. But really, how long can you actually hold your breath like that bro?”
“Un bravo cane non morde” (“a good dog doesn’t bite”) is the one Davide flags as still feeling the most personal. “I’ve always been a really calm, quiet person, and that often means being afraid of conflict, afraid to bite, to stand up for your voice, your life. But is being gentle really the same as being good, if inside you’re just holding back an explosion of feelings you never let out? Right now I’m definitely trying to be less of a good dog and more of a person who actually lives their life instead of just surviving it!”
The title track sharpens the central question. Davide flags one line as the one he cares about most: “How do you stop other people’s dreams from becoming your nightmares?” “You’re born, you come into the world without even choosing your own name, and pretty soon you’re already set on paths that feel kind of pre-written by family, by society but they’re not really yours. For a lot of people, it’s hard to break away from that and follow their own dreams. And you end up living in a nightmare shaped by FOMO, expectations, anxiety, and fear which, honestly, can also grow inside the dreams you choose yourself.”
Closer “Brutto scherzo” (“bad joke”) lands the answer such as it is: “There are no dreams without nightmares. No hope without fear. No love without pain. You can’t predict what’s gonna happen, or where your choices will take you. But life is life only if you live all of it, the good and the bad, staying open to other people, taking that daily leap into the unknown that human relationships are. And yeah… it’s always worth it!”
The duality didn’t come from theory. Davide traces it back to a stretch of his own life he’d spent trying to fill an emptiness through the wrong relationships, work environments that didn’t value him, and chronic self-doubt.
“There was this constant FOMO, this feeling that I could never truly enjoy any achievement. Like, right after something good happened, I’d immediately feel like I wasn’t enough, not for myself, not for others, not in relationships. I didn’t even have time to turn dreams into reality before I was already turning them into nightmares. A relationship would become something to be afraid of losing, instead of something to just live and be happy in. Releasing our first record turned into this spiral of ‘is it enough?’, ‘do I even like it?’, ‘will anyone else like it?’, instead of just being proud of all the work and passion that went into it and what it meant to me and to the people around me who were part of it.”
What broke the loop, he says, was real human connection. “For the first time in a long while, I felt truly seen. And I realized that what I’d been looking for all along was right there in human connections, the real, deep ones! Every day we kind of fill ourselves up with others with new experiences, new people, new love, new wins or disappointments. But it’s all of it that makes us feel full. The good and the bad, everything life throws at us. There’s no love without pain, and no hope without fear. Writing this record was honestly super cathartic and a huge moment of realization for me, ngl!”
Singing in Italian, tracklist included, isn’t a default move in a scene where most bands lean on English. For Davide, it took years to land there.
“Years ago, I was almost scared to write songs in Italian for an Italian audience. I kinda hid behind English, it felt like a shield, something that protected me from the fear of actually being understood. Which is kinda a contradiction, but yeah, it mostly came from insecurity. Over time though, thanks to the relationships I’ve built with people, I’ve grown a lot more confident. And now I actually prefer expressing myself in Italian. I don’t really think anymore about who’s gonna listen or whether they’ll fully get me, I just try to put things out there as honestly and openly as possible, no filters, no limits.”
He’s curious how it travels outside Italy. “We don’t really know how we come across, to be fair. But we do feel like when you listen to music in another language, if there’s real energy and sincerity there, it can go beyond the language barrier. And a lot of the time, it even makes you wanna dig deeper and understand what’s being said. So yeah, we hope that the honesty and emotion we put into our songs can be felt even outside Italy, to the point where someone might actually wanna look up what Davide is screaming about in the tracks haha. At the end of the day, we think it all comes down to being real. That’s something that goes beyond any language barrier, it makes you feel something, it makes you think. That’s where we all end up speaking the same language through music, and through art in general!”
The Italian post-hardcore and screamo ecosystem they’re plugged into is, in their words, busier than it’s been in a while. Murosuono cite La Quiete, Raein, Batien, Øjne, Radura and Riviera as elders that still shape the air, alongside a long list of currently active acts: Put Purana, Noverte, Konoha, Dagerman, Chevalier, Irma, Futbolin “and tons more.”
Collectives doing the day-to-day work of putting on shows are city-specific. Up north: Warmroom, Ali di Cera, Desfemo, Life is Strange, Turin Moving Parts, Mondo delle uova, Heavyshows, Cielo Perso, This town needs skramz, Twogirlzoneskramz, Collettivo La Defense, Formabase. Down south: Malditesta, Envy. In Rome itself: Weirdside, Disbieco, Romaskramz, Tilldeath, Kosmica Dischi, Fuzzabbestia, Music from ass, Hibiscus.
The honest part: they don’t think the Roman scene is as connected as it could be.
“Rome is full of amazing bands and collectives, with all kinds of different projects, screamo, emoviolence, post-hardcore, post-punk, shoegaze, math rock, emo, hyperpop, and everything in between. And at the end of the day, we all kinda know each other. But it’s still hard sometimes to really meet halfway and build a proper ecosystem where everyone can grow together. A lot of the time people end up focusing on their own thing first, and everything else comes after. And you kinda forget that a scene only really works if it’s actually united. Sometimes it feels like everything turns into a competition, or a race, or just about personal gain or even a bit of gatekeeping. We definitely think everyone, including us, could do better in that sense.”
The connectivity that does exist is in the touring history. Murosuono have spent 2024 and 2025 supporting Riviera at Init Club in Rome on October 24, 2024 alongside Quasi Buio, playing Desfemo Fest in Rovigo on April 19, 2024 alongside Futbolìn, Meant, Winter Dust and others, and playing Kosmica Dischi nights with Listrea, Pheeninvest Chartreuse and Shonen Bat, plus Weirdside events with Lillà, Konoha, Irma and Low Standards, High Fives.
The release itself is where the DIY ethos gets practical. “Chimera” comes out via five labels: Kosmica Dischi (the Roman label that put out the debut), Slow Down Records, Pasidaryk Pats Records, Spleencore Records and Prejudice Me Records. Mechanics were simple. The band shared the record with each label ahead of time, the labels were into it, and they all jumped on board.
“We specifically tried to involve different realities, especially outside of Italy (we already had support from Kosmica Dischi since our first record), to help the album reach more people, not just in terms of listeners, but also to hopefully make it easier to set up shows abroad in the future, even with the language barrier. So yeah, we figured the best way to do that was by working with labels outside of Italy that could help us push things further.”
Digital release lands May 1st. A cassette pressing follows in September, produced by Slow Down Records and distributed across the rest of the labels involved, alongside a run of Italian shows.
“At the end of the day though, the core idea is pretty simple: in a DIY scene like ours, unity really is strength. It just feels right to work together with different people on something we all care about. That’s always been the spirit for us. DIY forever!!!”
Instrumental tracking went down at SuoniBelli Studio with Matteo Ferrari and Simone Iacopini. Vocals were tracked by Roberto Mascia at Officina Musicale. Mix and master came from Mario Rizzotto at Pioggiadanza Produzioni. Artwork is by Anna Dietzel, photos by Alessandra Florea.
Davide, Federico, Alessandro, Michele and Thomas, signing off on the record itself: “Right now, we’re honestly really proud of this whole journey and of this record and we just can’t wait to play it live wherever we can!!”
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