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At this point I think it’s safe to say that Messa is one of the most interesting doom bands out there – if they can even be labeled doom at this point, as The Spin takes them further than they’ve ever been before from the genre.

For those of you unfamiliar, Messa is an Italian doom-ish band formed in 2014. The band has four albums to their name now, including The Spin, alongside a live album recorded at Roadburn and a handful of singles strewn about throughout their entire career.

Messa originally released their 2016 debut album Belfry independently, but signed to Aural Music shortly thereafter. Messa then released their second album Feast for Water in 2018 on Aural Music, signed to Svart Records for their 2022 album Close, and now they’re on Metal Blade for their newest album The Spin.

Messa has pretty consistently set up a gravitational center of doom-heavy riffing on all of their records, allowing elements of stoner rock, blues, prog, and jazz to freely orbit it in a very interesting and well-written way. Now, on their fourth record since their inception over 10 years ago, Messa is splitting that doom-heavy gravitational center right in two, with the other half being all ’80s goth rock and post-punk influenced heavy metal.

And when I say The Spin was influenced by ’80s goth and post-punk music, I mean that in a much deeper way than the band just listened to a bunch of records from that period and then tried to mimic it or rehash it in a pretty uninteresting way. This is a much deeper influence. This is a much deeper love of that type of music.

I actually got to conduct a brief interview with Messa for a recent issue of Decibel Magazine, where we talked a little bit about the band using equipment from the ’80s to make the record, and why they chose to do that, and their love of — again — a lot of goth and post-punk music bleeding into The Spin.

In part, in terms of their choice of equipment, guitarist Alberto Piccolo said: “Using that kind of equipment makes you make some choices and choose some sounds. It’s easier to get to the point. You have to stick to the plan and be able to write well with those sounds.”

We talked about that for a little while, and Piccolo clarified that ’80s equipment is limited in its technology, and that limitation kind of forces you into writing a certain way. It’s that “do what you can with what you have where you are” mentality.

And as far as conjuring up this sort of ’80s vibe — why not just go for an overt throwback replete with synthesizers and stacked vocal harmonies and gated drums and all that stuff? All the stuff you would expect from an ’80s revival record.

In that same conversation, Messa vocalist Sara Bianchin explained that she grew up with a lot of ’80s music like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Killing Joke, and that drawing from that era would kind of force Messa into doing something different — but they also wanted to make it their own. They also wanted to marry it with their love of heavy metal. It wasn’t just supposed to be this strict love letter to the ’80s.

In that same conversation, Bianchin said: “When we were trying to understand what we wanted to achieve for this record, we decided to delve into the ’80s territory because it’s something that we’ve never done before, and it’s interesting for us. It pushes us out of our comfort zone as musicians. There’s always something new you can learn and a new sonic territory you can explore.”

Alright, so now that you kind of have a background of what The Spin is, let’s talk about the music itself.

The Spin kicks off with the post-punk and goth influences that Messa brought to the table worn loud and proud. “Void Meridian,” the album opener, comes to life with a synthesizer that kind of sounds like it’s a vinyl record starting to be played from a dead stop, and then slowly gains momentum until things are moving along with a steady groove and an eventual very well-placed guitar solo.

“Void Meridian” also sets the stage nicely for the rest of The Spin in that it introduces this very watery post-punk sound, but viewed through the lens of more of a traditional rock band. Also, if there’s ever been a song to describe what synthwave and stoner-rock-influenced post-punk would sound like before solidly becoming the latter, this is absolutely it.

The next track, “At Races,” picks up the driving energy that “Void Meridian” left things on, before eventually dropping into a slower tempo and hitting this huge, atmospheric, almost underwater-sounding part. The song only gets bigger at that slow tempo, before eventually picking up the tempo to kind of match the intro’s energy and ending on a pretty sudden note, where everything just drops off completely. Which I guess, given the composition and how the song flows, feels pretty appropriate — as in the song comes in really hot, takes a breather, and then sprints right to the end before completely collapsing.

“Fire on the Roof” is more doom than anything you’ve heard up to this point on The Spin, complete with some huge, full-band unison riffs and yet another ripping guitar solo. “Fire on the Roof” also the first time on The Spin that you get these little hints of some Americana-sounding music bleeding into the record. It’s not something the band ever focuses on directly or really makes a huge point of pushing into their sound — but it’s definitely a sound that’s lurking in the periphery throughout. “Fire on the Roof” hints at it with its very bluesy main riff but never dives into being a total, full-on deserty folk song either. It’s just sort of there, it’s something that you have to acknowledge throughout this album.

Then “Immolation” comes in and turns the energy knob way to the left with just some piano and vocals to introduce the song, until eventually everything comes crashing down with very forceful bass and drums all backing a shredding guitar solo and then a really impressive slide guitar solo. Things wrap up by repeating the opening motif alongside the full band, as opposed to just that opening piano and vocals — and then it’s all over in a haze of dissipating piano riffs.

At this point, I’d like to just take a moment and point out the soloing on The Spin — and not just the songs we’ve heard, but the whole record. Just all the solos throughout this entire thing. No guitar solo on The Spin feels out of place or unneeded. Each solo feels like a composition specifically tailored to that moment in the song, and it’s so impressive and so refreshing to hear players play to the song. Because let’s face it: metal is so rife with these “look at me” solos that are frankly boring as shit. And I really, really love to hear a very well-composed solo. It is so refreshing, it’s so nice to hear.

On the back half of The Spin, you’ve got “The Dress,” which clocks in at eight minutes and seems to be split into two intertwining parts. The first four minutes is pretty straightforward: it’s just this lonely doom track that, much like Messa has done before, uses sparse distortion and kind of lets the heaviness be implied through the space around the song.

Then, the second half kicks off with trumpet and guitar trading these super jazzy licks before the main theme from the first half comes walking into the room — and all hell pretty much just breaks loose into one final solo and one final major chorus.

Have I mentioned how much I love the solos on this record? Because I think I could probably just sit here and keep talking about the solos on this record. They’re so good, man.

“The Dress” is followed by “Reveal,” which is more of a straightforward doom-heavy rocker with some killer slide guitar riffs and quite a lot of blasting on the drums. “Reveal” is cool in that it’s nothing like anything else you’ve heard on The Spin up until this point — but it’s still very much in the vein of The Spin. Like, you’re not sitting there thinking, “Whoa, hold on, what is this?” It still fits the record. It still fits the vibe. It’s just the introduction of a new sound this late into the record — and again, it’s pretty cool.

“Reveal” also harkens back to what I was saying about “Fire on the Roof,” in that it’s got this big old Americana-sounding acoustic slide intro right up top that quickly turns into a crunchier slide guitar riff. Again, The Spin never goes full-on country western, yee-haw, round ‘em up cowboy — but the influence is still very clearly there.

And then finally, you’ve got the longest song on the record and closer: “Thicker Blood.” “Thicker Blood” is this sprawling, slow burner that breaks into a quick fit of fury, a straightforward rock track, and then finally this gorgeous and very somber-sounding melodic section that just sounds so final. It certainly helps that the vocal melodies on this track are extremely haunting, and it just feels very fitting for this to be the end of The Spin.

It’s got such a “this is really the end” vibe to it. That energy is made all the more dark by some straight-up depressive black metal howling right at the end. It’s the only time that that style of vocal surfaces on The Spin, and it could not have been better placed than it is.

For anyone wondering how Messa was going to top their 2022 record Close — they didn’t. They went in a completely separate direction with new sounds, loads of analog gear from the 1980s, and a willingness to stretch the Messa sound into a new and unfamiliar realm that works.

The result is Messa, yet again, putting out a record that everybody really ought to tune into. Sure, Messa has carved out their own unique identity within the rock and metal scene over the past nearly 10 years — but to me, The Spin stands up and says, “Hey, check this out. I guarantee you you’ve never heard a record that does exactly this.”

And clearly, Messa worked really hard on this. They made it clear both in my conversation with them and in their own description of the record that The Spin underwent plenty of rewrites. Again, going back to my conversation for Decibel Magazine with Bianchin, she said: “Back when we wrote these songs, we didn’t have a sharp vision in mind. In order to have a record that made sense from start to finish to us — to make it coherent — we had to rework it.”

And again, Messa did not make that a secret. It wasn’t something that you needed to talk to the band about — they made that clear in the press material for The Spin as well.

The band collectively stated in the press material that they: “Aimed at making the songs work with the most minimal structure while trying not to repeat ourselves too much. We applied a simple rule: if you hear the same thing twice, it’s enough. Three times, it gets boring.”

And like I’ve said throughout this review — and hopefully I’ve made this clear — The Spin never gets boring. There’s never anything copy-and-paste about it. There’s never a moment that feels like things really stagnate. The Spin can bring up a hook or a riff or a melody more than once, but the band is never not moving forward or being forward-thinking about their sound.

You’re never going through this record checking the time. If anything, the only time you’re gonna check the time is to think, “My god, I just listened to that whole record. I should probably go back and listen to that again, because that just flew by.”

I don’t think this is going to surprise anyone, but The Spin is a 9 out of 10 for me — easily.

The writing, the solos, the vocals, the tonal choices — especially with the ’80s synthesizers and analog equipment that Messa chose to record with — truly makes for an experience that is unique unto itself.

The Spin is gothy, it’s doomy, it’s hard rock, it’s metal, it’s jazz, it’s progressive — but it’s never all in on one of those sounds at any given time. As in, Messa kind of finds this line to weave between all these genres, but never really spills over into being one specifically or solidly at any given moment.

They really find a way to ride that fence between a lot of different things and come up with this very cool, unique sound that not only just sounds like them — but I think is also pretty unique to The Spin, outside anything else they’ve done prior to The Spin.

Don’t miss out on listening to The Spin. It’s a very good record. I think a lot of people should check this out.