Violet Blend are an Italian alternative metal band, featuring extraordinary vocals, rich sonic power, and unbridled energy. Founded in 2014, Giada Celeste Chelli (vocals and piano) was joined by Michel Agostini (drums), and next, Ferruccio Baroni (bass), in Florence, Italy. Known for culture and fine art, many believe this city was the birth-place of The Renaissance, and while famously populated, its musical community is ironically lean and tight-knit. Therefore, it is not surprising that these four talented musicians knew each other long before the release of their debut album White Mask, which received high praise from audiences and critics, both locally and abroad.
In terms of touring, Violet Blend has opened for renowned bands such as Radiohead, Garbage, Palaye Royale, Chris Slade (AC/DC), Vinnie Moore (Alice Cooper), Starcrawler, Eva Poles (Prozac+), and Rezophonic (Mario Riso, Cristina Scabbia). Moreover, the band has won several awards, including Band Revelation of 2019 from the F.I.P.I. – International Intellectual Property Federation, #togetherforthemusic 2020 of Elio e le Storie Tese, Trio Medusa, Cesvi and Radio Deejay, and the Et Music Prize at Sanremo Rock 2019.
This kind of meteoric rise to celebrity is often launched by some sort of scholastic acclaim, and it is interesting to note that band members of Violet Blend earned degrees, or have been named members of the faculty, at some of the most prestigious institutions in Italy. As for the music more specifically, Violet Blend do not simply write and perform “catchy songs,” but rather, they make haunting and glorious musical portraits that personify beauty, discontent, passion, and rage. The debut album White Mask exposed the fallacy of using social media to represent “the self,” and the sophomore record, Demons, continues the journey by moving the focus to the more personal, internal mechanism we use to make our own tragic masks. We do this to represent ourselves favorably to others, as our fragile, raw truths remain fatally hidden. Still, the glory is in the crucial moment we decide to unveil. Not for others, but for us. For the sake of the soul.
Demons
Demons by Violet Blend was released worldwide on April 1, 2022. The full-length album contains thirteen tracks, all cornerstones for the theme of ambitious yet contradictory facades, and each song is represented in the cover-art as masks of demons from every culture in the world, stemming from Greek mythology, Chinese tradition, and Dante’s literature, to the Aztec Empire, Celtic mythography, and African rituals, etc.
Track 1 titled “Rock DJ,” is the album’s first single, and it is associated with God Bes – Ancient Egypt: protector of music and entertainment, the patron saint of dancers. The song projects this with the awesome power of the vocal and the driving backbeat that would have massive appeal to rockers, glam rockers, metalheads, and sludge-lovers alike. The guitar is lavish and at times ornate, featuring satisfying chord-changes and a lead portion composed of blistering sweeps and big bends and wails.
Track 3 titled “Among These Fools,” is the second single, and it is associated with Oni – Japan: bringers of disaster and spreaders of disease who are destined to punish the damned in hell. Much of Violet Blend’s appeal is expressed through contradiction: dissonance alongside sonic elequence, hard guitar scratch juxtaposed with carefully sculpted riffs overtop. This song embraces such powerful and poetic irony with a harsh theme delivered through a lovely ethereal vocal that reminds us of the exquisite pain and beauty in the world.
Track 5 titled “Need,” is the third single, and it is associated with Medusa – Ancient Greece: the Gorgon with snakes instead of hair and the power to petrify anyone who looks at her. This tune is a mystical masterpiece featuring a stripped-down guitar’s acoustic effect transitioning to a metal feel, percussion going from halves to full tempo, and a climax based on clever dynamics rather than volume.
Track 8 titled, “La Donna Mobile”, is the fourth single, and it is associated with Kālī – India: Goddess of active and disruptive feminine energy, representing the female force in all its extreme power. This song features a strong, exotic rhythm section and it is sung in Italian, making the experience for the listener romantic and heart-felt. If this tune does not give you chills and also make you want to stand on your chair and scream, nothing will.
Consequently, “La Donna Mobile (Fickle Woman)” is accompanied by a prominent social campaign to raise awareness against discrimination and gender-based violence. The project is non-profit and is in collaboration with AIDOS – Italian Association of Women for Development and with the collaboration and sponsorship of the Municipality of Florence (Italy) and the Department for Equal Opportunities. The intent is to carry out a project to promote equality, empowerment, education, and information, focused on the role of women in the workplace, through a social campaign that leads the community to reflect through art, in the widest of its meanings.
Recent Singles
The single “Voices In My Head“, released on November 2, 2022 via Eclipse Records, is an inner conversation that screams instead of whispering. The track is about insecurity, fear, and doubt of not being good enough. It contains a furious urgency, a violent need to free yourself from all those mental chains and thoughts that prevent you from living freely. The music video represents the lonely and delusional life of a woman admitted to a mental health center while portraying the fluctuating time, fear, uncertainty, and delirium of a life lived in chains. Giada’s blindfold, which we can see on the cover of the single and in the video, represents the blindness we are led to when we allow negativity and judgment to overwhelm us, preventing us from seeing reality.
The new single “My Head is Broken” (April 28th, 2023) is a powerful new hard rock ballad featuring a guest vocal appearance from Virginia post-hardcore vocalist Tired Violence. The song embraces feeling numb and fear of being happy, while describing the confusion surrounding moments when you felt wrong, unfit, and so damaged beyond repair. To everyone else though, everything seems to be fine because the deepest wounds are never visible on the surface. In the music video, a woman leads an investigation into a mysterious disappearance. Her house is covered with maps, newspaper articles, photos, notes and clues. This desperate and spasmodic investigation represents her search for herself. She is lost in the mental fog and confusion and cannot heal from the pain. The cover art represents a transorbital lobotomy, used to treat psychiatric diseases in the early 20th century, transformed people into docile, absent, numb individuals with little emotion or intellectual abilities.
Violet Blend are an awe-inspiring female fronted band that make us measure our internal landscape differently. Demons is an exciting record with something for everyone, from the superlative vocal to the rhythm-chops that seem to echo the true pulse of the world. Are you ready to join them in this? Are you fired up now? Are you ready to rock?
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