There’s a strong connection between the eerie theremin and feelings of psychological unease, a relationship that Italian cinema has long exploited. This distinctive sound, hovering somewhere between a bowed instrument and a beheaded soprano, was brought to prominence in the mid 1960s by Ennio Morricone, who threaded it through soundtracks for Mario Bava and Sergio Leone films. Later, Dario Argento introduced it to the worlds of giallo and thriller, and his collaborations with Goblin pushed this unsettling aesthetic even further into synth-driven, neon-lit horror realms. Don’t worry, MJB has not (yet) branched into film, but you’re right to wonder where i’m going with this. ‘Every Tongue has its Thorns’, the first song on Italy’s Ponte del Diavolo sophomore album De Venom Natura closes with a full minute of theremin hum, held almost to the point of irritation, and in doing so it sets the mood and occult imagery for everything that follows.
Ponte del Diavolo are a band I’ve been following for a few years. I’ve waxed lyrical about their debut Fire Blades From The Tomb, and after seeing them live at Roadburn last year I gave myself a small, self-satisfied pat on the back for getting it right. On record, they nail the atmosphere. Live, they nail everything. Be that as it may, I hadn’t really thought about what the future held for them. At the end of 2025, I was still deeply enamoured with that debut, still spinning it regularly and unwilling to let go. The future, turns out, arrives this Friday the 13th. And if you’re not yet familiar with Erba del Diavolo and co., there are worse days to start digging into their dark (but disarmingly fun) world.
Self-described as “blackened post-punk”, Ponte del Diavolo are black metal and wave for people who like to dance and headbang at the same time, and who have long since stopped caring about genre purity. De Venom Natura delivers exactly that: a dreamlike experience drenched in alchemical imagery, streaked with nihilism and punk defiance, and quietly boundary-pushing in its unassuming form. Across seven tracks, immaculately edited and packaged into forty minutes, the band craft a descent down the spiral staircase of the psyche. What makes it compelling is the choice they offer: listen casually and enjoy the pleasures floating on the surface, or listen closely and emerge slightly altered, with a shifted perspective on art and the act of creating it.
Without deep-diving into lyrical exegesis, it’s worth noting that the band move fluidly between English and Italian, as if operating across multiple levels of reality. Music in one’s mother tongue often allows an artist to stay rooted, tethered to memory and place. Meanwhile, English lets Ponte del Diavolo address the wider world, while also hinting at a fractured, dual identity of sorts, something already embedded in the album title alone, which is what I assume a hybrid of Latin, English and Italian (“On the nature of poison”). Language becomes one mode of resistance here. The instruments provide another. Each song carries its own carefully placed glint: trombone on ‘Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment!’, theremin on ‘Every Tongue has its Thorns’, synths on ‘Il Veleno della Natura’ , bass clarinet on the hypnotic ‘Delta-9’, even an acoustic guitar on ‘Silence Walk with Me’. None of these feel ornamental. They seem to function as narrative devices, small disruptions to recalibrate your attention. And then there is the the elegant elephant in this chamber of doom: the dual-bass setup. With a disciplined arrangement where each one occupies its own spectral territory, what could have collapsed into a wall of low frequency murk instead becomes living architecture—something you can feel in your chest, yet which remains vigilant enough to know when to stomp on your ribs and when to allow space for something else to breathe.
Built on hooks and repetition, Ponte del Diavolo songs are deceptively sticky. Motifs loop and return, drilling into various truths and moods. The repetition mirrors patterns of intrusive thought, a constant excavation of the subconscious, a spell of creation that feeds upon itself. With songwriting that is tight and cinematic, the magic of these melodies lingers and reappears days later, uninvited. At the centre of it all stands Erba’s voice: equal measure aggressive and sweet, but never unthreatening, always imbued with mysticism and intent.
There is clever use of panning throughout the record giving the mix definition and breathing room. On ‘Delta-9’, however, it takes almost a visceral role, with synths flitting and burrowing like insects inside the skull, apt for a song concerned with altered states and the ways they reshape perception and creativity itself. It is one of several moments where production becomes storytelling.
It is in these micro decisions where Ponte del Diavolo ultimately reveal their devilry. Elements recur with subtle mutations, textures reappear just enough to haunt, and the album functions less as a collection of songs but as a single, coherent incantation. Like the finest Italian horror cinema, it is intensely visual. You hear it, but you can also see it: ritual spaces, narrow corridors, flickering lights, half-remembered dreams, unfolding like a sequence scored by a post punk coven. Deeply rooted in traditions of stylised unease yet unambiguously contemporary, De Venom Natura thrives on obsession and cohesion. Much like its central arc, it is built to be revisited and reinterpreted, and patiently calls you back to discover it anew.
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