Lucynine: Confronting Darkness on "Melena"
Courtesy of The Metallist PR
In the landscape of extreme music, few albums achieve the visceral rawness of Lucynine's latest offering, "Melena." Released October 3rd, 2025 via Talheim Records Germany, this post-black metal and post-hardcore opus is the work of Turin-based multi-instrumentalist Sergio Bertani, who handles all aspects of the project solo. The album's very title—a medical term for the passage of black, tarry blood through the digestive system—sets the tone for what Bertani describes as "a record born from suffering to make you suffer as well."
Unlike his previous full-length "Amor Venenat" (2020), which featured collaborations with Italian actors and dubbers, "Melena" strips everything down to its most essential elements: pure anger, pure darkness, and an unflinching confrontation with despair. Over five tracks spanning 32 minutes, Bertani crafts a claustrophobic sonic experience where vocals are deliberately buried beneath walls of compressed sound, creating an atmosphere of suffocation that mirrors the psychological states explored in the music.
We spoke with Bertani about the creation of "Melena," the relationship between personal ruin and creative freedom, and why sometimes discomfort is exactly the point.
Melena feels like a physical manifestation of despair—even the title evokes blood and waste leaving the body. What did you need to purge when you wrote this record?
During the three months I worked on the album (summer 2022), I was in a really bad place—I'd hit a pretty intense peak of my depression, and I think you can feel that in the record, completely unfiltered. It's an honest and raw album; nothing in it was done for the sake of "aesthetic." It just came out exactly the way you hear it.
You worked completely alone this time. How did isolation shape the sound or the mental state behind Melena?
I had just moved back to the city after spending more than ten years in a small town in the middle of nowhere. So loneliness and isolation were almost inevitable—it took me quite a while to reconnect with old friends, make new ones, and get back into social life. At first, I basically lived like an urban hermit. My depression and that sense of isolation definitely shaped the sound of Melena. Being alone with yourself is important, but it's not always easy—and the extremes, as you can probably hear, don't really help, haha.
"Temi l'uomo che non ha più nulla da perdere" ("Fear the man who has nothing left to lose") could describe both personal ruin and creative freedom. How close are those two for you?
The translation was spot-on! Although that line—"fear the man who has nothing left to lose"—was meant more as a threat, like "be careful, because when a man hits the bottom of his despair, he's capable of the worst things." But to answer your question: those two ideas are pretty connected. The worse I feel, the better I write—especially when it comes to the Lucynine project.
Now that my health has (without any miracles) definitely improved, I wouldn't be able to write an album like Melena. My creativity would probably dig into other parts of my psyche… there's always material to work with.
You've moved from the rollercoaster of death metal and psychedelia in Chronicles from Leri to the raw post-black and post-hardcore aggression of Melena. What drove that evolution—was it experimentation or something you had to become?
I think it's a matter of compositional maturity. At the beginning of a music project, it's kind of normal to "mess around" and throw a bit of everything into the mix. As you grow (and age!), things start to take a more solid and cohesive shape. In Melena, the psychedelic elements are still there—they still exist—but they're more blended into the overall sound, at least in my opinion. It also helped that the album was made in a very short time, so all the material was written within the same period and with the same mindset. My previous albums, on the other hand, were made of fragments written at very different times, with ideas that were much more all over the place.
Sergio Bertani
Some listeners describe Melena as immersive to the point of discomfort. As a producer, how do you know when the discomfort serves the art instead of overwhelming it?
Well, I think a good and honest producer (and I'm not talking about the big pop or mainstream music business here) should first and foremost be a good listener. He should clearly understand what a listener wants—and doesn't want—from a record. But this kind of music follows completely different rules from any other genre: in its violence and darkness, it's actually intimate, in a way even spiritual, and it aims to pass on discomfort and distress to the listener—raw and unfiltered.
The other day there was a SUNN O))) concert in my city… and yeah, they're the perfect example of a band that's all about "pure experience." You have to dive into their trip—surrender to the suffering, the sound pressure, the fog from the smoke machines—you have to love that physical and mental discomfort. It almost becomes a kind of endurance test with yourself, a sort of anti-meditation.
My music is obviously more structured; it even has moments of groove that, in the chaos of all that darkness, help the listener catch their breath—if you can call that a euphemism—and find some earthly reference points again. But still… when I put on an Amenra or The Secret record, I know clearly that I want to hurt myself. I crank the volume up as high as it goes and hit play!
"Melena" is available here through Talheim Records Germany
and at Bandcamp.
