Milan, September 17, 2026 – “Who leaked the secret?”. “Who distorted the story?”. In the hands of Sig, a humanoid with a golden skull promoted by Cesare Cremonini as the testimonial of the uncomfortable truths addressed in the new album “Amateur” arriving on October 23, the Daily Times becomes the Daily Lies and the truth “a whispered secret, a blurred shot, and a scandal ready to explode.”
It happens in the video of the single “Paparazzi”, on the radio at midnight to offer a “garage rock” taste of the precious artifact, the ninth chapter of a solo discography launched back in 2002 among the “daily lies” of a scene where the man of the northern lights escapes the fascinations of the Great North sublimated in “Alaska Baby” to close himself within the suffocating walls of a dive bar in the gloomy London suburbs of the seventies and bring out the anger he carries inside.
“I wanted to be a pop star, but I am Diletta Leotta” roars, in fact, Cesare in front of Pepsy Romanoff’s camera pointing the finger at a reality he struggles to recognize. “You believe the paparazzi and you don’t talk to me anymore, but do you want to know what’s there? Are they right about me or about you?” he continues, holding a sparkling gold bass while the macrocephalic Sig, with that image balanced between a “calaca” of Dia de Los Muertos and a dazzling icon of Damien Hirst, keeps the time sitting behind the drum kit.
“You know that the truth is a bigger lie, they caught you once but the photo was blurry…” the former boy with wings under his feet ups the ante, while those of his staff providentially assure that behind the lyrics, written with Davide Petrella, there are no allusions to personal matters, but only a strong desire to get rid of the superfluous, stripping down that sound and that pop image that fame has stuck on him.
The choice to give up stadium rituals to return to sports halls – five nights at the Unipol Arena in Casalecchio between November 27 and December 4, two at the Inalpi Arena in Turin on December 9 and 10, and four at the Unipol Forum in Assago between December 15 and 19 – also comes from this.
“I chose ‘Paparazzi’ as the first single because it has that rough and adrenaline-fueled sound of the beginnings, it really seems like the launch single of a band coming out of the London suburbs,” Cremonini says, accompanied in this new venture carried out in the London studio of Damon Albarn by Malcolm Catto on drums, Donny McCaslin on saxophones, and Paul Stacey on guitars.
The production by Alessandro Magnanini and Alessandro De Crescenzo accompanied by a statement as simple as it is necessary these days: “Written, played, and recorded without artificial intelligence.” “It’s the sound I wanted to hear when turning on the radio and I said to myself: ‘I can try to do it myself.’ I tried to grow together with my music and in the end I discovered that the goal was to enjoy the freedom to make it. Playing forgetting oneself, returning as beginners, removing the artist’s mask and the career so as to be able to surprise oneself. This is what I want to communicate with the title ‘Amateur’: an artistic gesture, as well as an album of songs.”
