“L’altro ieri: distacco” (The day before yesterday: detachment) is the debut album by !housebroken: straddling the line between a band and an artistic collective, the Turin-based band offers us six heterogeneous tracks where nostalgic melodies and sudden tempo changes support introspective lyrics in which English alternates with Italian.

The album’s track order casually reflects the sequence in which the tracks were composed. As we go along, we notice that most of the lyrics refer to a break-up or estrangement that occurred in the past, which created an unintentional thread inspiring the title. An indefinable but definite feeling permeates this work: an almost luminous melancholy, a nostalgia that conceals some kind of hope, like a light rain that lets the sun shyly shine. Melancholic and airy open tunings meet sudden changes of tempo and mood – tracks that reject a classical structure to dive into unexpected turns. The crescendos of post-rock, combined with the emotionality of midwest emo, meet a darting math rock unpredictability.

But the actual special feature of this album and this project is the choral approach to the vocals on these tracks. The line-up, without a regular frontman, has made collaborations its stylistic hallmark. On the album, in addition to various band members we can hear the voices of: Tommaso Brignoli (now active with the Izaya project, formerly in Poets Were Wrong), Last//Saigo (pseudonym of Alessandro Atzei, also the voice of Carthago) and Luca Giuseppe D’Aloia and Mario Rizzotto from Radura.

Even the choice to keep the work bilingual (Italian and English) came accidentally. Starting with the idea of writing an album in English, in the process some of the Italian drafts resulted as already complete and consistent, so it was decided to leave them in the original language.