Messa – The Spin

Sailing past their tenth anniversary in 2024, Italian doom artisans Messa take another step towards legendary status with their majestic fourth album The Spin, inviting the listener on a breathtaking journey across the wide open skies of their creative imagination, over a beautiful landscape of moods, twists and styles. From a basis in the band’s eclectic, self-defined ‘Scarlet Doom’ sound, The Spin rises and falls, broods and bites, comforts and destroys, while resounding with both instinctive, compulsive magic and obsessive, concerted hard work. After lighting up the underground with a triptych of increasingly distinctive and wondrous records – 2016’s Belfry, 2018’s Feast For Water and 2022’s Close – Messa are audibly equipped for the big leagues, and with the help of Metal Blade Records, The Spin should ensure they attain them. Palpably assembled with love and care, Messa’s heightened craftsmanship rings loud from the album’s elegant architecture. Written over six weeks of intensive daily sessions, in a 500-year-old villa close to the quartet’s beautiful hometown of Bassano Del Grappa (VI) in Northern Italy, Messa applied scrupulously high standards to the process, even while challenging themselves to change the way they work. “When we recorded Close back in 2021, we wanted to be all in the same room together,” explains the band. “This time we decided to do the exact opposite. We recorded the album in three different locations and timings. This record has seen a lot of rearrangement of the same musical material in order to make a coherent work from start to finish. We also aimed at making the songs work with the most minimal structure while trying not to repeat ourselves too much. We applied a simple rule: if you hear the same thing twice it’s enough. Three times? It gets boring.” Messa’s range has always been a factor in their promise; their ‘Scarlet Doom’ signature sound absorbs influences from jazz and blues, punk and prog, black metal and dark ambient, but their restless experimentalism has extraordinarily smooth and assured results. The Spin incorporates another new element, interpolating an 80s gothic rock vibe in typically full-blooded fashion. “We don’t like to repeat ourselves and we constantly try to find a new language to express – while keeping our identity,” stresses the band. “This time we delved into a territory we had never explored before, which is the decade of the 1980s. We are aware that many bands before us took inspiration from that era, but we decided to be careless and get away with it. Mainly because we get involved and question what we do. We are not part of the ‘dark scene’ anyway. The influence for this record looks back to the early goth rock/dark wave rather than the later emanations of the genre.” In addition to Sisters Of Mercy and Virgin Prunes, the band cites records by Killing Joke, Mercyful Fate, Jimmy Page, Journey, The Sound, Boy Harsher and Vangelis as impacting significantly upon the creation of The Spin.