Nonante: album “Monate” & single “Bank Robber” out tomorrow

After “Grand Tour”, their first album in 2023, which unveiled a post-punk/cold-wave band as hypnotic as it was soaring, Lausanne quartet Nonante return with a second, still hard-hitting effort, with nods to the likes of Molchat Doma, Metronomy and David Shaw And The Beat.

To create “Monate”, their second album, the 4 musicians of Nonante isolated themselves in a house on the shores of an Italian lake (the Monate) in the middle of October, equipped with all their studio gear, amps, guitars and synths. They made a fire in the stove to withstand the cold rain, which almost never stopped falling. All the tracks on the album were composed in that house. The gloomy weather, the cold, the stone walls and at the same time northern Italy, an idyllic setting for a summer vacation but in autumn, and a ray of sunshine that occasionally came to illuminate the garden.

This mood is reflected musically in the rather simple, dry orchestrations on the record. Heady, vintage drum machines to which the bass guitar is added, also repeating the same notes tirelessly, creating a post-punk/cold-wave rhythm section à la David Shaw and the Beat or Agent Side Grinder. The guitars are very bare, with few effects other than a cold reverb, playing melodies reminiscent of the guitars heard in Russian and Belarusian bands such as Motorama or Molchat Doma. And yet, on certain tracks, distortion appears as a reminder that punk and garage are never far away.