There is a listener who has been pulled into the world of Måneskin. I can sense their excitement, their carefree spirit, their urge to bite their bottom lip and pantomime bending a guitar string as an affirmative gesture. I know that, in this massively popular Italian band, this listener has discovered a rare and powerful thing. Måneskin are not just three men and a woman who play traditional rock music and—if you can believe it—all wear eyeliner. To this listener, Måneskin are something far more important: an alternative.
An alternative to what, exactly, is the question. The unlikely global ascent of Måneskin—the word is Danish for moonlight, pronounced MOAN-eh-skin— comes off as a collective unconscious need for something else, a retro, lascivious attitude that feels neither cool nor popular, and therefore stands in opposition to what is cool or popular. Their music may sound like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150, yet they won the campy, poppy Eurovision contest in 2021. The same year, they went mega-viral on TikTok with their version of “Beggin’,” a song originally written by the midcentury pop group the Four Seasons. Måneskin are from Rome, a city famous for a thousand things before you get to good rock music. “Can they conquer the world?” asked The New York Times. And Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.
Måneskin now find themselves in a position where Rush! must present the questions that justify their popularity: With everything going on in the world, don’t you wish rock music was horny again? Don’t you wish more albums featured Tom Morello phoning in one of his octave-pedal guitar solos? What if we were the first band to sing the words “kiss my butt”? Don’t you wish cologne commercials were longer? Don’t you wish Guitar Center could win a Grammy? What if Max Martin worked with Wolfmother? Remember the band Foxy Shazam? Why is no one talking about how fake and phony Hollywood is? Don’t you think lyrics like “Oh, mamma mia, spit your love on me, I’m on my knees, and I can’t wait to drink your rain” are the kind of thing people are just too afraid to sing nowadays?
It makes for a sweaty and effortful album that always seeks attention and never commands it. The wildest attempt to justify their status as the alternative to something is “Kool Kids,” where frontman Damiano David adopts a faux British accent to deliver a satirical broadside against “cool kids” that sounds like a Tory version of Mark E. Smith shouting over the Vines. “We’re not punk, we’re not pop, we’re just music freaks,” yelps David. “Cool kids, they do not like rock/They only listen to trap and pop,” he continues, hoping for more upvotes on his comment. This is an interesting social grievance from a band who are not just dressed in Gucci, they are dressed by Gucci.