Måneskin are giving more than you bargained for

Rush!

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Italian Eurovision superstars deliver måre than is necessary

IF LORDI WERE suaver, hornier and Italian… er, they might be playing a sold-out O2 Arena this May. They’re not, but Måneskin are. The Roman four-piece countered Eurovision’s 15-year rock flaccidity in 2021, winning the competition with Zitti E Buoni before thrusting onto festival main stages worldwide and tossing off a sticky stream of raunchy, infectious singles. Do they have anything left in the sack, though?

Given their shtick is essentially ‘White Stripes, Royal Blood and Franz Ferdinand, but sexy’, your sustained pleasure through album number three depends on how much more-neskin you want. There are 17 tracks across 53 minutes, all either ‘the uptempo banger with the Meg White bass drum bit’ or ‘the wistful ballad about shagging and/or loneliness’. It’s the same shit: Victoria De Angelis’s basslines thiccer than God’s booty, Thomas Raggi’s choppy riffs recalling the mid-2000s sans chinos, and Damiano David’s ragged drawl still finding ways to express how much he loves to fuck.

Opener Own My Mind deploys the trademark build-andrelease Måneskin chorus, accented by Ethan Torchio’s climaxing snare rolls that genuinely sound like gunfire samples. He’s at it again on album highlight Gasoline, laying down militaristic beats to underpin the ‘We’re gonna dance on gasoline!’ gang vocal that modern-day Fall Out Boy would, dunno, trade a llama-shaped NFT for?