Marco De Luca has spent close to three decades writing music that pays attention. On La Stagione Decisiva, out May 20, 2026, the Italian singer-songwriter from Atri, in the province of Teramo, turns that attention on contemporary society and doesn’t look away from its worst corners. Racism, marginalization, the spectacle of painful television, prostitution, war. These aren’t backdrop for De Luca. They’re the subject.
The album runs eight tracks, and three of them carry history with them. “Videospazzatura,” “Il Mostro,” and “Un Uomo Gentile” come from the repertoire of Sine, the group De Luca played in until 2000. He’s reworked and rearranged them to sit alongside five new songs, and the whole thing was written, arranged, and recorded by De Luca himself in a studio. That solo, hands-on approach isn’t new for him. It’s how he’s worked for years.
His path started in the 1990s with Sine, a band that played De Luca’s own material alongside covers of The Cure, whose influence runs through everything he’s done since. When the group broke up at the start of 2000, he pulled back from live performance and put his energy into writing. STANZE REMOTE followed in 2006, an experimental, self-produced record built on 80s new wave sounds and made entirely in his home studio. The 2008 EP DUE brought in other musicians, a bassist, drummer, and percussionist, and pushed toward a more open, catchy pop sound that picked up radio play. Canzoni Inedite arrived in 2012, pulling together songs from different periods into something closer to straight singer-songwriter territory.
What separates La Stagione Decisiva from those earlier records is the keyboards. They’re all over this one, in every track, and they give the album a different weight than anything in his back catalog. De Luca describes his sound as a mix of alternative rock, new wave, and dark, with singer-songwriter and pop threads running through it. On this album, he says, he tried to bring together everything he’s listened to. That list is long and tells you plenty about where the music lives: The Cure, The Smashing Pumpkins, David Bowie, New Order, Radiohead, U2, and Franco Battiato.
The protest here doesn’t come as slogans. De Luca writes through scenes and emotional states, letting public pressures bleed into private life rather than shouting headlines at you. “Videospazzatura” opens the record with tight vocal harmonies and heavy guitar riffs, and the chorus repeats the title like a chant you can’t shake after one listen. It’s confrontational and it sticks. “Il Mostro” leans harder into his rock roots, distorted from the jump, with synth layers threaded through gritty guitar and a bass-and-drum foundation that stomps. The vocal lines stay melodic even when the track turns forceful, which is the balance De Luca keeps returning to across the album.
What he wants out of all this is simple, and he says it plainly: he hopes people who hear the record come away seeing things a little differently. That’s the whole point of a protest album that trusts observation over lecture. De Luca isn’t handing anyone easy answers. He’s asking listeners to stay awake to what’s around them, and building songs sturdy enough to make that worth doing.
La Stagione Decisiva is available to stream on SoundCloud and to listen and download on Bandcamp. You can follow Marco De Luca on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
