Italy’s God In A Black Suit barely paused for breath across 2023 and 2024, their vans rattling from Matera to Berlin while fresh songs elbowed their way onto set lists before the merch tubs cooled. November dragged them back to the studio where their forthcoming album, Thresholds, began to take shape.
Another taste of the forthcoming new album arrives today, with the single “To Forget” and its B-side, “Melissa.”
To Forget snaps with Gang of Four angularity as Matteo Demma sings of perfume gone phantom and embraces misread. Time roars past like floodwater, washing away chance and leaving only the ache of what was missed. The chorus circles that absence with stubborn yearning, hope thinning to a thread. The song’s pounding bass sews a dark plot that finds breath in the melodic openings of guitar and synth, while the melancholic lyrics embrace the square pulse of the drums.
“Forgetting is something fortuitous or unexpected very often, but it happens that we want to do it on purpose when we want to lose the memory of a circumstance or someone,” says the band. “It is not easy at all, because almost nothing prevents us from remembering, while a lot prevents us from forgetting. It often takes a lifetime to put to sleep emotions and sensations that have given us as much happiness as torment. Forgetting intentionally is painful, because that will easily turn into an even more vivid memory, especially when the suffering arises from the memory of a kindness, of a sweetness of which we want to lose the traces when it ceases to be. And so forgetting becomes a threshold to cross, a step towards the darkness for an emotion from which we feel we must detach ourselves to continue along the path.”
Melissa slows the pulse, trades angles for ballast, channeling Pixies and Sonic Youth. Bruno Pantone’s guitar heaves under Annalisa Laterza’s low-end throb while female harmonies ghost the edges. The lyric roams a cold floor, mind looping on self-inflicted wounds. Pride seals the mouth, love is shrugged off, and generosity leaks into loss. Two songs, one verdict: desire devours, memory echoes.
Listen to the songs below and order the double single here.
Back in September 2021, Matera’s God in a Black Suit dropped the Nails EP. its title track and the taut single You Don’t Have Time announced a band already fluent in tension. A third single, Walk, cemented the buzz, proving the five-piece could pair cold-wave chill with indie swing.
By June 2023 the group sharpened its knives further, issuing a self-titled debut via Missing Fink Records, which married a steely post-punk chassis to new-wave glint, while indie guitars added restless colour. Vinyl heads took note: Missing Fink pressed the whole catalogue to wax almost as soon as the masters cooled.
Fifteen tracks in total (thirteen on the album proper) tighten the screws on their earlier blueprint—post-punk backbone, new-wave gloss, while nudging open doors to broader alternative territories glimpsed on the debut.
Where God in a Black Suit hinted at possibility, Thresholds sets out to occupy the space: bigger hooks, deeper gloom, brighter shards of indie light. Consider this the band’s invitation to cross the line with them.
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