Rope’s Alessio wrote this album using what he calls guided visualization in reverse. The technique is typically meant to help people relax — picture what calms you. He pictured everything that didn’t.
“I visualized everything that didn’t help me relax at all — everything that caused me pain or fear — and I pushed it out of myself in a record shape so I could look at it with detachment.”
The album is out April 8 via Jungle Noise Records. Rope are Mono, Alessandro, Alessio, and Simone — three-quarters of Turin’s Tutti i Colori del Buio plus ex-The Ponches.
When they started this band they specifically looked for a guitarist who didn’t play hardcore, and it changed how the songs moved. More melody in the guitar parts. A bass that sometimes takes the melodic weight the way Fugazi’s does — not always obvious on first listen, but there if you’re paying attention.
“Gatekeeping is a narrow-minded practice,” Alessio says. “Beauty lies in differences, mixing with others enriches you, the same applies to music.”
The touchstones are Sub Pop, Dischord, and SST. Punk noise and grunge, in Alessio’s words. Already the band is drifting somewhere else.
“Since recording the album we’ve been trying to take this even further, towards a sound that’s definitely more post-punk — this will become even more apparent in the things we’ll be writing next. To be honest, I’m really excited about the things we’ll write next, whether they’re new sounds, a different way of singing, a hundred mistakes, everything — I’m excited by the unknown.”
Three drummers have passed through Rope across two records. Francesco played on the first album and then moved to Australia. Giorgio replaced him in 2020 and wrote the drum parts for this new one. By the end of 2024 Giorgio had left, and Alberto stepped in and partly rearranged everything.
The rhythmic backbone shifts between albums because of it, though Alessio says the songs still carry a thread back to the first record since the previous drummer wrote them. He also sees the tracklist as divided into two musical groups — tied to the band’s ongoing search for a sound that feels true to them.
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Late 2024 marked the band in heavier ways too. Illness and loss, collectively, across the four of them. Alessio, who’s over 40, calls these the most painful lyrics he’s ever written. “I don’t feel this is the last chance we’ll have to make an album, but I do feel it was the right time to make one, to turn the page and make peace with certain things.”
The record was tracked by Davide Donvito at Magma Studio in Turin — Rope had worked with him on the first album and trust him as both friend and engineer. The original plan was to send the files to Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios for mixing, since they’d worked with Will before and rate him highly both as an engineer and as a person. Working remotely this time worried them, though, so Will took the mastering and the mix happened in Turin with Davide. “Dave’s advice and Will’s work were really important. I think we’ll always rely on them.”
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The vinyl wasn’t supposed to exist. Rope had planned a self-released cassette plus streaming — that was the whole idea. While hunting for a company to press the tape, Alessio asked Steve — a friend who runs a label — for recommendations. Steve hadn’t heard the album. He asked for a listen out of curiosity.
A couple of days later he offered to press the cassette himself through his label. A week after that, he came back with a different pitch: “I’ve been thinking about it — I really like the album. I think we should make a vinyl instead of a cassette.” The band said yes. Steve’s label, Jungle Noise Records, mostly handles extreme hardcore and powerviolence. Rope are a different kind of band and they know it. “We hope the album serves as a bridge between various genres,” Alessio says. “For us, diversity is a treasure.”
On the songs themselves, Alessio wrote short pieces on each one:
“Here Goes Nothing” — “My dissatisfaction with myself. My sheer laziness always wins out, even though it’s constantly at war with the hectic pace of life and all its demands. I’m so lazy that I wrote just one line for this song and repeated it throughout the whole thing.”
“Missing Operating Manual” — “Why does it seem that some people are born with a life instruction manual and others aren’t? I certainly don’t have one. Often, when I look at others, I don’t see the indecision, hesitation, or doubts that are, for an anxious person, their closest companions.”
“Lose-Lose Situation” — “Humans are biting the hand that feeds them. They behave as if they were masters of the sky, the earth and the water; they take advantage of other humans and animals, yet they aren’t masters of a damn thing. They’ve only managed to ruin everything.”
“Siamese Twins” — “It’s about the last day I spent with my cat, sitting on the balcony in the sun, waiting for the vet to come and put her to sleep forever. It still hurts so much that I can’t say anything else.”
“Cross My Heart” — paired with “Here Goes Nothing.” Same theme: Alessio’s inability to act despite the need to change things, held back by fear of failure. Boating has always made him physically uncomfortable but fascinates him — he’d like to do more of it if anxiety didn’t keep pulling him back. In the song he imagines himself on a boat, which he describes as “both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.”
“Beating a Dead Horse” — tied to “Siamese Twins.” The phrase means wasted effort on something already lost. “It’s about how I felt useless and broken after that moment, of how all my efforts to prevent that from happening were in vain, and how this loss not only broke my heart but also made me feel deeply helpless.”
“Today’s Gift” — Alessio wanted to use music and the radio as a metaphor for staying connected, staying tuned in to what’s happening here and now. Mid-writing, he realized Joy Division had already done something similar — slightly different meaning, same idea — on “Transmission.”
So Rope openly reference the song in the final section of the track.
Alessio also has thoughts on the Turin scene, though he’s hesitant to spend too much time on them. It’s vibrant but fragmented — events overlap, shows land on top of each other, and Milan’s proximity pulls bigger bands past Turin altogether.
The eviction of squatted social spaces across Italy has gutted what used to be fertile ground for alternative music.
Wages don’t keep up with cost of living, and the survival math is getting harder every year, not just for the underground. “The problems these days are on such a much larger scale that sometimes complaining about the music scene in my city makes me feel like a privileged jerk, so I try to look on the bright side.”
Catch the band live at the following stops:
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