Good things take time and Nuovo Testamento is a band that’s keenly aware of that. About a year after releasing their 2023 full-length, Love Lines, the L.A.-based trio returned to the studio and, just last month, they released the result, a five-song EP called Trouble. In the context of recorded music’s history, two-and-a-half years isn’t much of a gap between releases. Still, singer Chelsey Crowley says, during the in-between time, the band heard, “you guys haven’t put out music in so long.”
It’s an extension of the art vs. content debate. How often should bands be releasing music? Should you pump out the jams to satiate the platforms or wait until the songs you want to make are ready? Crowley offers a definitive answer. “We prefer to have songs that we like,” she says. “We’ll let them marinate for a second.”
It’s an attitude that’s reflective of the band’s roots too. While Nuovo Testamento’s music is steeped in late 20th century pop influences, they’re still punk to the core. They tend to tour extensively and are proponents of physical media. “It’s not just about this digital space,” says Crowley.
When we spoke, Nuovo Testamento had recently returned from a one-off gig in New York and were about to head out Tucson for another show as they prepare for the fall tour. In September, they’ll play along the West Coast for a short run that includes dates opening for Sextile, as well as a few headlining gigs. The following month, they’ll head back out on the road with Sunami, Scowl and Whispers for a trek that begins on Wednesday, October 22 at the Hollywood Palladium.
Crowley, Giacomo Zatti and Andrea Mantione had all been in punk and hardcore bands before forming the dance floor-minded Nuovo Testamento. Crowley and Zatti met while playing in Oakland’s scene and Zatti and Mantione grew up together in Italy. Late in 2018, Zatti had an idea, “I needed to change and I knew that [Mantione] was a secret weapon, like a really good musician, and Chelsey is one of the best singers I know.” Nuovo Testamento released their first album, Exposure, in 2019 and, for a while, the band was everyone’s side project.
Soon, Crowley and Zatti moved to Los Angeles. “We got priced out of Oakland,” says Zatti. Crowley grew up in L.A. and there’s enough overlap between the L.A. and Bay Area scenes where Zatti was able to fit in pretty quickly. “It was the natural move,” he says.
Post-pandemic, Nuovo Testamento became the trio’s primary focus. Their 2021 album, New Earth, with its Italo disco influence, unleashed multiple hits for darkwave dance floors. They followed it up with another banger-heavy collection, Love Lines, two years later. But, with Mantione in Italy, making music was difficult. “I moved one year ago because it was insane to play on Zoom. Like impossible,” he says.
“Now that he lives here, we play every day, it’s Monday to Friday,” says Zatti. “We just nerd out about sounds and I could just take hours to have a snare sound that fits the song.”
If you listen to Nuovo Testamento’s releases chronologically, you can hear the band’s trajectory. Exposure leans darkwave and, with New Earth, you can hear Italo disco creeping into the mix. By Love Lines, the late 1980s dance vibes are more prominent and the sound is overall brighter than on the previous albums. With Trouble, Nuovo Testamento veers into the 1990s, incorporating elements that are more commonly associated with house and Eurodance. “More than anything, we play with pop music and, I think, if you look at what was happening in popular music, there was a lot of bleed from house, from Eurodance, into the mainstream,” says Crowley.
These shifts, the band members say, come out of a lot of experimentation. “I never thought that having a piano would have been a great idea, but when we started to write in that way, it felt very natural,” says Zatti.
For Trouble, Nuovo Testamento opted to keep things concise and limit the release to just five tracks. “You’re not going to waste songs,” Mantione says.
An EP can also be better for holding the attention span of listeners amidst the onslaught of constant distractions. “We’re not big enough where people are going to listen to our stuff past song number five. There’s also that part,” says Zatti. “That’s why on Love Lines, for example there are a lot of songs towards the end of the record that I really, really love, but they don’t get the attention that they deserve.” (As an example, Zatti mentions the Love Line’s sublime closing song, “Heaven.”)
One of the standouts on Trouble is “2 Hearts,” which harks back to the slow jams of the 1980s and 1990s, when it was much more common for dance music artists to have at least one ballad with a groove. “Everyone is always bringing up how ‘80s we sound, how ‘90s we sound. A lot of our choices are conscious, but we’re never trying to mimic something,” says Crowley. “That’s just what we grew up on, what we still listen to and what we love. So, what comes out now is really an organic distillation of those influences and I think, exactly what you’re saying, the ballad part has disappeared and that used to be a lot more present in those genres and in that era.”
She adds, “This is the first time that we really felt comfortable playing with it and I’m glad that we did because I think that we can feel more comfortable experimenting moving forward.”
Nuovo Testamento’s latest EP, Trouble, is available now on digital, CD and vinyl formats.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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