Ritmo Lento

There comes a moment, after years of running, when everything stops. The nights on stage and endless highways fade away, leaving behind a fertile silence. In this lapse of apparent suspension, Leatherette found the space to reinvent themselves. After an intense, captivating journey in which they established themselves as one of the most intriguing and international acts in Italy’s new indie scene — playing festivals and touring Europe and UK — Leatherette return with Ritmo Lento, their third album released by Bronson Recordings. A record born from the need to slow down, switch off the autopilot, and rediscover the essence of songs without worrying about fitting them into a genre.

“Ritmo Lento was born from the desire to reimagine ourselves,” the band explains. “After years of relentless touring, we took a pause and decided to put the focus back on the music and the songs, without worrying too much about labels or sounds. With this album, we chose a freer approach, taking care not only of the writing but also of the production and arrangements in a more personal way.” The record is a mosaic of everyday gestures: notes scribbled in bars and late-night vocal drafts. For the first time, Leatherette decided to write everything from scratch, without digging up old material. They worked as a shared laboratory, where every idea was dismantled, transformed, and rebuilt together. “The intention was to work without constraints, to follow ideas at the right pace, bringing with us the experience accumulated on the road but without falling into routine.”

Ritmo Lento captures this transitional moment toward limitless, more innovative spaces, where the predictability of a standard formula gives way to songs that step outside canonical structures and instead respond to the question: Why not? The album’s opening track, Magic Things, embodies this perfectly: a slow but expansive and porous rhythm, echoing the restless sense of infinite possibilities. It’s a modern record, able to capture the tension of the contemporary world we live in. Ritmo Lento is split evenly in two parts to represent the different directions the band is exploring. One is more frenetic and adrenaline-driven; the other more haunted, like a slowed-down vinyl, animated by a timeless, almost crooner-like spirit. This is not just two different musical approaches, but two sides of the coin underlining the inner evolution of Leatherette. “Musically, we tried to bring out the songs’ essence. We imagine it as a journey through consciousness, between fears and desires, where abstract and dreamlike atmospheres meet consistent electrical rock vibes,” the band continues.

Recorded at Studio Duna in Russi (Ravenna) with Andrea Scardovi as co-producer, the songs took shape there, in an isolated space in the countryside far from the chaos, like a refuge: a suspended place where the hidden could find a voice, between consciousness and the unconscious, between wakefulness and dream. Ritmo Lento is a record of atmospheres that perfectly balances catchy melodies, sing-along choruses, fuzzy cavalcades, and more reflective moments. “There’s no concept devised at a desk,” says the band, “but an intertwining of stories told through sounds and images, like a collective painting taking shape over time. Each song has a precise starting point.”

The first single, Lovers Drifters Foreigners, begins as a haunted nightmare, then launches into a frenetic electrical stride before opening into atmospheric post-jazz suspensions. If it sounds absurd, it makes perfect sense when you listen on headphones. The very title of the album, Ritmo Lento (“Slow Rhythm” in Italian), speaks of this dialectic: the constant tension between frenzy and pause, neurosis and breath, the desire to accelerate and the need to stop. The vinyl is divided into two distinct sides: six impetuous and catchy tracks and six denser, more meditative ones, like an inner diary of contrasts. “It’s a journey through fullness and voids. That’s why the record is perfectly divided into two parts. Like a concept where opposites meet.” If Leatherette’s roots are in punk, today they choose to step away from it without denying it. Because punk, they explain, is above all freedom. True coherence lies in allowing oneself to change shape. The second single, Hey There, pushes the band’s boundaries further into experimental minimalism, combining a rough, slacker bass riff with fragile, intimate vocals, all drifting in a dreamy and untouchable atmosphere. In Ritmo Lento, everything becomes a fragment to collect and return in a new form. This experimental disorder lies at the core of the third single, Cold Hands: a riff born from an idea on a recorder, deformed and filtered until it turned into a strange drone coming from the outer world.

“Blurring boundaries within pop has always been one of our fetishes,” say Leatherette. “Maybe this time we’ve been even more explicit about it. We like contrasts, challenges, absurdities.”

The soul of the album lies in its ability to embrace contradiction. The lyrics are simple and repetitive, almost childlike, but within that apparent innocence, mysterious openings appear: words arriving from the subconscious, cryptic images the band has learned not to reject. Love, anger, sadness, and hope coexist without order.

Noir and nightmarish atmospheres emerge in the title track Ritmo Lento, a song chewing up the 1950s like an endless night. Eerie guitars seem to utter those two words, and the band decided to follow them until they became a hypnotic incantation closing the circle. Ritmo Lento is a living record, unafraid to show fragility and contradiction. A collective painting made of drips, stains, and overlapping colors. A journey that 
leads from the feverish energy of punk toward a wider, more multifaceted, more mature yet still restless language. An album that invites listeners to get lost.