There are records that function as bridges — architectural structures connecting the geological strata of a musical tradition to the volcanic, restless present of a living and still-evolving scene. “Demoni e Dei,” the new album by Hunka Munka, set for release on March 09, 2026 through M.P. & Records and distributed by G.T. Music Distribution, is precisely this kind of work: a lucid, powerfully executed meditation on the continuum between past and present in Rock Progressivo Italiano, delivered with a conviction and a compositional rigour that few contemporary acts operating within this tradition can credibly claim. The name Hunka Munka has long served as the creative vessel of Roberto Carlotto, a figure whose roots in the Italian Rock underground run considerably deeper than many listeners might suspect. His career as a professional musician began in the late 1960s, navigating a circuit of groups — Big 66, Cuccioli — before a defining collaboration with Ivan Graziani in Anonima Sound Ltd. provided the first meaningful glimpse of his genuine artistic ambition. The landmark debut “Dedicato a Giovanna G.” in 1972 — remarkable not only for its singular sound, shaped in decisive measure by Graziani‘s guitar and the propulsive drumming of Nunzio “Cucciolo” Favia (ex-Osage Tribe and Dik Dik), but also for its now-legendary gatefold packaging in the form of a toilet — announced Carlotto as a genuinely original voice within the emergent Italian rock scene. His subsequent years as keyboardist for Dik Dik between 1974 and 1977 further deepened his command of the melodic and harmonic grammar that would come to define an era. Five years after the introspective “Foreste Interstellari,” Hunka Munka returns as a fully consolidated band, and the transformation is immediately palpable. The indispensable contribution of Joey Mauro — keyboardist, programmer, orchestral arranger, and producer — elevates the project from inspired solo endeavour to a genuine collective possessed of compositional integrity and sonic ambition to match. Mauro, widely recognized within the Italo Dance circuit yet concealing a formidable and long-cultivated passion for hard rock and Progressive architecture, operates here as both sonic architect and dramatic catalyst. Produced and mixed at his Dr. Phibes Studio in Italy, and masterfully mastered by Alessandro Del Vecchio at Ivorytears Music in Somma Lombarda — with DDP mastering by Mauro Mulas — the album achieves a standard of sonic construction that reflects the seriousness of its artistic intentions. The thematic core of “Demoni e Dei” is as ancient as artistic expression itself: the eternal confrontation between darkness and light, destruction and creation, the demonic and the divine. It is a framework that could easily collapse into bombast or theatrical posturing in lesser hands. Here, it provides genuine structural coherence, threading twelve tracks into a unified dramatic arc that moves from atmospheric invocation through visceral eruption to sombre contemplation and, ultimately, a danse macabre resolution of real symbolic weight. Crucially, the album interweaves newly conceived material with decisive revisitations of compositions from Carlotto‘s earlier career — pieces from “Dedicato a Giovanna G.” and from his Dik Dik period — recast in demonstrably heavier and more aggressive incarnations that honour their origins while insisting, with quiet but unmistakable authority, on their continued and undiminished vitality. The album opens not with an assault but with a threshold. “Addio Dolce Edel” functions as an overture in the most classical sense: guitars and keyboards weave a tapestry of dreaming melancholy, establishing the emotional and tonal register from which the heavier passages will subsequently depart with maximum dramatic impact. Its brevity is not a limitation but a deliberate compositional choice — an invitation extended with care before the door is flung decisively open. The transition into “Ossessioni” is immediate and authoritative. A revisitation of material rooted in Carlotto‘s Dik Dik tenure, the track is presented here in a resolutely modern Progressive-Heavy guise that retains every gram of its Italian melodic character while investing the arrangement with muscular, driving urgency. The interplay between keyboards and guitar is particularly striking: melodic lines that might, in their original context, have floated freely above the arrangement are now anchored to a propulsive rhythmic foundation, courtesy of Marcantonio Quinto‘s percussive precision and Andrea Arcangeli‘s resolute bass work. The Italian-language lyrics carry an intensity that the instrumentation amplifies rather than merely accompanies, and the keyboard-guitar dialogues in the solo passages display genuine technical fluency and melodic invention. The track escalates toward near-metal density before the returning vocal brings it to a controlled and deliberate close — a structural arc that will recur, in varied and increasingly sophisticated forms, throughout the record. Another reconsidered composition from the Dik Dik period, “Cavalli Alati” opens with piano lines of genuine lyricism — a moment of apparent repose that proves, in retrospect, entirely strategic. Mauro‘s orchestrations gradually assume weight and textural complexity, and the rhythm section pivots into decidedly heavier terrain with collective fluency and authority. The melodic choruses serve as crucial structural counterweights, preventing the denser instrumental passages from collapsing beneath their own accumulated mass. Andrea Rinaldi’s guest guitar solo — his sole but well-placed contribution on the record — introduces a further dimension of timbral richness, integrating seamlessly into the compositional fabric while asserting a distinct and confident musical personality. What is most remarkable about this track, and about the album’s broader approach to its historical material, is the complete absence of nostalgia: these are not commemorations but transformations, acts of creative reinvention that interrogate the original compositions from a decisively contemporary perspective. Brief but structurally purposeful, “Justine” operates as a sharp rhythmic interlude — keyboards and marching figures establishing a processional quality before the central section opens into broader harmonic territory. The integration of classical compositional thinking within a concise Rock framework, delivered with economy and precision, renders this compact piece considerably more substantial than its running time might suggest. It serves the album’s architecture with quiet but genuine efficiency. A further revisitation from “Dedicato a Giovanna G.,” “L’Aeroplano d’Argento” demonstrates with particular clarity the band’s interpretative intelligence. The melodic and Progressive atmosphere of the original is scrupulously preserved even as the instrumental passages are reimagined with a propulsive near-metal intensity that reframes the material entirely without violating its essential character. Keyboard solos of considerable elegance alternate with Gianluca Quinto‘s electric guitar work, generating a sustained discourse between refinement and raw power that proves one of the album’s most consistently compelling qualities. The lyrics retain their full narrative engagement across five decades; their resonance, if anything, is deepened by the new sonic context in which they are now delivered. The album’s first genuine centrepiece, and among its most fully realized achievements. “Cattedrali di Bambù” — yet another composition drawn from the 1972 debut, reconceived here with an ambition fully commensurate to its historical significance — opens with arpeggiated guitar and a vocal performance of sustained expressive weight before the rhythm section enters in the mode of a full and elaborately constructed gallop: Quinto’s drumming solid and dynamically nuanced, Arcangeli’s bass purposeful beneath. The symphonic apertures provided by Mauro’s orchestrations create dramatic contrast against the heavier passages, while Barbara Rubin‘s viola and violin contributions introduce a textural dimension of particular beauty, her strings weaving through the arrangement with both delicacy and structural purpose. The track navigates multiple tempo changes and extended instrumental sections with assurance, its vocal-instrumental alternations generating a narrative momentum sufficient to carry the listener through its five-plus minutes without a moment of fatigue. The return to arpeggiated guitar in the closing measures functions as a structural parenthesis — a compositional gesture of considerable elegance and architectural clarity. A measured interlude of deliberate emotional weight. “Nati Sotto una Stella Solitaria” offers the album its most genuinely contemplative passage: a melancholic piano over delicate orchestral textures in the background, functioning simultaneously as a moment of repose and as an emotional preparative for the more demanding material that follows. Its placement within the overall dramatic arc is calculated with evident compositional intelligence. Thunder opens “La Vendetta degli Dei” — an operatically familiar gesture that proves, in context, entirely effective — before the track erupts into one of the album’s most expansive and compositionally ambitious statements. The terrain here is Heavy Progressive shading into Progressive Metal, and the band navigates it with a technical command that demands genuine acknowledgement: continuous time-signature changes are absorbed naturally into the musical flow rather than imposed upon it, the vocal delivery adapts dynamically to the shifting demands of the arrangement, and the central synth solo — refined, melodically inventive, harmonically interesting — provides a moment of lyrical clarity within the surrounding density before yielding, with well-timed assurance, to Gianluca Quinto‘s electric guitar in the track’s more assertive second half. The melodic passages function throughout as genuine points of structural resolution rather than mere concessions to accessibility. A deliberate and strategically placed change of register. “E lo Chiami Vivere” returns to the melodic vocabulary of Italian Rock classicism — organ-driven, softly rhythmic, melodically generous — recalling without reproducing the atmospheric sensibility of the genre’s foundational decade. It serves a crucial function within the album’s larger architecture: a moment of historical recollection that contextualizes the heavier material surrounding it and reminds the listener of the deep cultural and melodic roots from which this music draws its most authentic sustenance. The dual title, “Una tranquillità apparente-Il comico triste,” announces internal contradiction, and the track delivers it in full. Opening with keyboards and mellotron establishing an atmosphere of cultivated, precisely calibrated darkness, the piece develops — with the arrival of the rhythm section — into one of the album’s most structurally dense and compositionally Adventurous Progressive statements. The organ assumes harmonic leadership throughout, with Marcantonio Quinto‘s drumming providing a percussive foundation of considerable power and dynamic range. Symphonic apertures alternate with more austere passages; melodic moments yield to elaborately constructed instrumental sections of genuine complexity. The final crescendo — accelerating drum patterns interlocking with a guitar-synth dialogue of escalating intensity — brings this remarkable piece to a close of real dramatic force, one of the album’s quietly defining moments. The album’s gravitational centre and its longest track. “Demoni” opens with sonic textures that invoke the sustained tension of cinematic horror before launching into the most uncompromising Heavy Progressive statement on the record. The organ is prominent and commanding throughout, its timbre cutting through a rhythm section operating at near-maximal intensity — double bass drum work from Quinto delivering visceral and relentless propulsion beneath the arrangement. Symphonic passages provide essential contrast to the heavier material, while Carlotto‘s vocal performance is arguably the most impassioned on the album: the delivery matches the thematic gravity of lyrics that engage with genuine seriousness with the record’s central thematic conceit. Male and female voices — Barbara Rubin‘s contributions here particularly striking — alternate through the track’s extended passages, generating timbral variety and genuine dramatic dimension. Released as the album’s advance single, “Demoni” serves as an accurate and compelling ambassador for the record’s broader ambitions: its final crescendo — vocal and instrumental forces combining in a sequence of escalating refrains — constitutes one of the most genuinely powerful moments the album has to offer. The album’s closing statement is, appropriately, its most overtly symbolic. “Danza Macabra” honours its iconographic title through harmonic atmosphere and rhythmic character even as its melodic choruses assert a final moment of compositional resolution. Organ and granite-Heavy guitar riffs operate in sustained counterpoint; the vocal delivery is incisive, rhythmically precise, and unflinching. That the album titled “Demoni e Dei” should conclude with a meditation on the ultimate equalizer feels neither gratuitous nor predictable — it is, rather, a gesture of thematic honesty, a final and unsentimental acknowledgement of the existential terrain the record has traversed with such commitment and craft. “Demoni e Dei” is not merely a strong Italian Progressive Rock album in a year that has already offered compelling examples of the form. It is something considerably more significant: evidence that the tradition can sustain genuine creative reinvention without resorting to pastiche or the hollow invocation of a glorious past. Roberto Carlotto‘s decision to revisit compositions from “Dedicato a Giovanna G.” and his Dik Dik years within this explicitly heavier, more confrontational framework is a statement of genuine artistic confidence — a declaration that quality material is not period-specific, that authentic feeling survives transformation, and that the continuum between 1972 and 2026 remains, in the right hands, unbroken. Joey Mauro‘s role in achieving this cannot be overstated. His production intelligence, his keyboard contributions, and his evident understanding of how to bridge Italian melodic sensibility with Progressive heaviness constitute the connective tissue upon which the album’s formal ambitions rest. The assembled musicians — Marcantonio Quinto, Gianluca Quinto, Andrea Arcangeli, Barbara Rubin, Tony Minerba — perform throughout with a collective commitment that transforms individual technical proficiency into genuine ensemble coherence. The Rock Progressivo Italiano is alive. Hunka Munka, with “Demoni e Dei,” offer some of the most compelling evidence currently available.
Purchase “Demoni e Dei” here: https://www.mprecords.it/
Tracklist
01. Addio Dolce Edel (1:59)
02. Ossessioni (3:46)
03. Cavalli Alati (5:10)
04. Justine (1:55)
05. L’Aeroplano d’Argento (3:10)
06. Cattedrali di Bambù (5:16)
07. Nati Sotto una Stella Solitaria (1:40)
08. La Vendetta degli Dei (5:22)
09. E lo Chiami Vivere (3:48)
10. Una tranquillità apparente-Il comico triste (3:45)
11. Demoni (7:06)
12. Danza Macabra (4:46)
Lineup
Roberto Carlotto / Vocals and Keyboards
Joey Mauro / Keyboards, Programming and Orchestra Direction, Minimoog model D # 4763, Backgroud Vocals
Musicians:
Marcantonio Quinto / Drums and Percussions
Gianluca Quinto / Guitars
Andrea Arcangeli / Bass
Barbara Rubin / Viola and Violin, Female Vocals
Tony Minerba / Background Vocals
Andrea Rinaldi / Guitar Solo on “Cavalli alati“
I listen the video
That’s a masterpiece
I’m with you. It’s a great release. – Jacopo // PRJ