Catania-born singer-songwriter Giuseppe Cucé steps into the spotlight with 21grammi, a confessional indie-pop album released June 20, 2025, and it wears its heart like a bruise. Rooted in the idea that the human soul weighs 21 grams, the record explores everything we carry but can’t see, from memory, desire, digital-age loneliness, to reinvention. Crafted alongside revered producer Riccardo Samperi at TRP Studios, a homecoming space for Cucé, the project embraces warm analog textures, Italian melodic sensitivity, and cinematic grandeur. With horns, strings, Hammond organ, and a chorus of collaborators, 21grammi transforms personal history into widescreen emotion. As Cucé says, “the soul holds the traces of everything we survive,” and these songs trace every scar with poetic realism.
Right out of the gate, the opening track bursts with life, with sparkling horns, jittering percussion, flutes flickering like a carnival breeze, and Cucé singing with contagious passion. It’s the record’s exhale before the plunge, the moment of joy still fighting for a voice. Then comes “Ventuno”, the album’s emotional nucleus. It starts delicately, heartbeat-soft before evolving urgently as if the body and soul are wrestling over who gets to stay standing. Cucé’s vocals evoke the bruised and the brave, rising into the light through the night.
Later, the album’s most nocturnal moment arrives with “Una notte infinita.” A gentle piano comes alongside soft vocals, then strings swell like a memory you didn’t want to remember. It’s cinematic, intimate, and spine-tinglingly honest, a song that reveals itself slowly like someone finally admitting where it hurts. You can almost see the streetlights passing by outside the window.
In the end, 21grammi is a reckoning that turns the invisible weight of the soul into something you can hear beating in the dark.
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Review by: Naomi Joan