MESSA

A Messa song can comfort you and destroy you inside the same four minutes, often without any warning which one is coming. Sara, Marco, Alberto and Rocco have spent over a decade chasing that exact collision, channelling jazz, blues, punk, prog, black metal, and dark ambient into a sound they eventually just named themselves: Scarlet Doom. Three albums, Belfry, Feast for Water and Close, built the reputation, and The Spin (Metal Blade Records, 2025), their fourth, written inside a five-hundred-year-old villa near their hometown of Bassano del Grappa, has been widely hailed as their boldest and most accomplished record yet.

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At the centre of it all is a simple, almost stubborn rule the band holds itself to: hearing the same idea twice is enough, a third time makes it boring. That restlessness runs through everything Messa does, structures that shift shape mid-song, instruments traded and reassigned, moods that comfort in one passage and destroy in the next. Sara's voice carries the emotional weight of all of it, equally capable of a hushed near-whisper and a full-throated wail, and by her own account she sings in the most honest way she can manage, because, as she puts it, you can't lie when you're singing.

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WHAT TO EXPECT
Messa live rarely rushes to prove itself. Alberto's guitar work is virtuosic but used sparingly, held back until the moment calls for it, and when it finally lets go the release feels earned rather than showy. Sara anchors the stage with a presence that is somehow calming and intense at once, her voice carrying the room without needing volume to do it. Expect restraint stretched taut across most of the set, then broken wide open in the final stretch, a band holding something back just long enough to make you lean in.