On “Impostor Syndrome,” the latest single from their November 2025 album “Adrift,” Milan-area shoegaze and post-rock band No Pine Mall didn’t stop at the lyrics. They built the feeling of self-doubt into the song’s structure itself: the tension, the repetition, the way the sound either piles up too heavily or starts dissolving. Live, they stretch the closing section even further, and use the extended final impact to end their sets.
Funny thing about No Pine Mall is the small mismatch between how they present themselves visually and what actually comes out of the speakers, and the mismatch works in their favor. At least that’s how it was in my case. The band sits somewhere between post-rock, sad emo, post-hardcore, shoegaze, and indie rock without picking a side, leaves a lot of room inside the songs, and slides you into a pretty pleasant trance. Genuinely nice thing to spend time with.
“Adrift” is the band’s first album after two EPs, “S/T” from 2023 and “Tide” from 2024. They formed in 2019 near Milan and write everything as a band. The album was recorded at Formicaudio, mixed by Luca Vecchi, mastered by Eleven Mastering. Matteo Grisoni handled the artwork, Chiara Giurato the photos.
The band describes “Impostor Syndrome” as something pulled straight from their own working process. “When we wrote Impostor Syndrome, we drew from personal experiences of never really feeling adequate or good enough, a feeling that often shows up even in the way we play and create music,” they explain. “In our experience, though, that sense of inadequacy rarely reflects reality. It comes more from a very demanding, almost perfectionist approach to sound and cohesion, which constantly pushes us to question what we’re doing.”
Their read on it: the perfectionism is both the source of the doubt and the thing that keeps the band moving. A constant question of whether the work is good enough, which then turns into the engine for the next thing they make.
They describe it as a tension that “becomes a positive creative force,” and the song itself as a way to push the feeling out.
“Writing the song was a way to exorcise that feeling, to turn it into something tangible and shareable,” they say. “It’s a very direct statement of how we feel, without too many filters, but framed within a sound that amplifies that sense of fragility and suspension that’s part of our language.”
They didn’t stop at writing impostor syndrome into the lyrics.
“We weren’t just trying to describe impostor syndrome lyrically, but to embed it in the way the song evolves, in the tension, the repetition, and the way the sound can feel overwhelming or dissolving at times,” they continue.
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That carries into how they play it. Live, the closing section of “Impostor Syndrome” gets stretched out, the tension allowed to build past the recorded length until it lands on a final impact. They use it to close their sets.
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