What is the point of releasing a posthumous record?
Let's put it like this: We had a very long ride with a tough epilogue. The band was already on life support even before recording the album, it most certainly died and vanished while in the studio in 2020, but the body was never found.
FINE is that body. It is the last frame of what has been an exciting story for us. It is a swansong that was absolutely worth putting out there.
FINE features arguably the best music we have written as a band and that despite the hardship and tensions that surrounded the entire process of writing and recording the Album, which ultimately escalated into an epic feud, worthy of far more famous and iconic rock bands of the past. It is indeed utterly remarkable that we somehow managed to produce such a fine album despite the circumstances that led to our demise. So it was only right that this effort should see the light of day.
FINE is about a time where the band was the center of our lives, and even the relationships within the band were in some way fundamental to its members. Some of those relationships are no more and I remember being left alone mixing and mastering the album with the trusty and patient Fabio at Trai Studio, driven only by the determination to bring the ship home through the storm at any cost, and feeling persuaded that one day we would look back with different eyes and a much lighter heart, or perhaps our children would be able to do that for us in the future.
FINE was born and shaped into what you can hear now in a handful of years, during which some unwritten but shared certainties, values, and standards were beginning to crumble and vital social structures were dissolving at an increasingly alarming pace. Devoid of any presumption to present itself as a prophetic album, coming out now after years of silent burial, it is nonetheless terrifying to witness how the alarms and campaigns of pacifists, anti-fascists and activists raised in those years turned out to be tremendously well founded.
FINE is full of those alarms and drenched with that frustration, in the face of a world that was speeding along and unwilling to hear the most basic reasons and concerns for the rise and proliferation of hatred, discrimination, individualism, nationalism and the worst instincts of voracious capitalism that has given us the world in which we find ourselves living today. The amount of time that has been wasted downplaying and neglecting these issues is really disheartening, to the point where I can now better understand why it was so important for me to scream and lament these topics into a microphone all around Europe.
FINE means end in Italian, but it also means purpose and it clearly suggests a sense of acceptance in English, where everything is fine.
FINE is about love, losing love and losing loved ones, whether it is a person, a city or eventually a band.
It was vital for me to be able to accept the end of the purpose behind this band, through the catharsis of this album and these silent years. We are capable of mean things and sharp words as humans, they hurt, sometimes really deep, to such an extent that they shake the very basis of your personality, especially when what you hold so dear is being torn apart. I had to step away from everything until it was fine again. Perhaps other members of the band went through a similar process, I am not sure.
Over time I'm also learning that accepting the end would give way to a new purpose. It is not at all an easy step to welcome the end as a rebirth, a blank sheet of paper, the start of a new chapter.
The last lines of this record, of this band and its nearly two decades of existence go like this:
"I've seen the fate that future holds for friends and foes, an empty field where freedom grows for me and you.
I've seen the fate that future holds for me and you, an empty field where freedom grows for friends and foes
I've seen our fate."
I hope you enjoy our FINE
