Marta Del Grandi – Dream Life
Milan-born songwriter Marta Del Grandi releases Dream Life, her third album on Fire Records: genre-hopping, sharply produced, and her most confident record yet.
Marta Del Grandi doesn’t fit neatly anywhere. Classically trained, jazz-educated, sometime soundtrack composer: she’s spent her career building a pop practice that borrows from all of it without belonging to any of it. Her 2021 debut Until We Fossilize arrived quietly. Selva in 2023 was the real statement, dense and pastoral, full of what she called oil paintings. After a hundred-plus tour dates, Dream Life lands as the sharper version: same instincts, better focus.
It opens with “You Could Perhaps”: synth arpeggios, uncertain keys, vocal loops going in circles. Careful start. But the album moves fast from there. “Antarctica” comes in with a nervy Dirty Projectors-style guitar figure and synths doing a Bernard Herrmann impression in the background, the lyrics naming climate anxiety and Del Grandi’s own complicity in plain language, no metaphor required. Then the title track pivots completely: cowbells, walking bass, guitar chords that land somewhere near Buddy Holly, a folk-pop chorus that fully commits and doesn’t apologize for it. “Neon Lights” goes the other direction, dissonant and noise-flecked, closer to Deerhoof than anything she’s done before. “Alpha Centauri” builds through prog structures and stacked harmonies until it becomes a genuine anthem by the end, one of the clearest peaks here. “Some Days” brings in Fenne Kuppens of Whispering Sons for a cemetery-ballad duet, the contrast between their voices doing most of the work. “Oh My Father” closes things with acoustic guitar that gradually picks up strings, saxophone, choir-influenced harmonies. By the end you’ve traveled much further than the quiet opening suggested.
What actually surprised me is how little the genre-jumping bothers you while it’s happening. Folk, art-pop, noise, jazz, ambient: she moves between them track to track and it never feels like a genre exercise.
Italy’s mainstream has never had much room for artists like this. Del Grandi built her audience on her terms, internationally signed, touring widely, making records that don’t make obvious commercial sense. Dream Life is the most fully realized thing she’s done. It’s why it’s here.
