Emerging from an eight-year hiatus, songwriter Gianluca Divirgilio brings his darkest and most introspective thoughts to light with Arctic Plateau’s Songs of Shame.
A series of impressions drawn from Divirgilio’s own experiences in the time since the band’s last release The Enemy Inside, this record is a compendium of lost love, missed opportunity, crestfallen remorse, and lasting trauma, self-inflicted and otherwise. It is a deeply personal record that often points its finger at the mirror and winces as it’s reflected back. But in its complex self-exploration it also gains life as a living document affording the artist an opportunity to turn the page, and by accord provides its audience safe space to look to the darkness within, feel the emotion freely, and eventually discover a path through.
Of the video premiere track, Gianluca writes: ‘Song of Shame’ is about discrimination, focusing on it using the ancient feeling of the shame. Shame is one of the tools with which entire societies in time have fed themselves, putting limitations to and censoring the freedom of a human being. I simply described its silhouette, shaking it up a little bit with the everlasting and almost never resolved issue of the mother/son relationship. What this song wants is to sublimate the pain one feels when they get discriminated.
Songs of Shame is an album that channels sadness and exhibits a tortured soul lay bare, but there is a formidable maturity in its honesty and triumph in its catharsis, giving it the dual quality of lifting the listener up while acknowledging the daunting weight of carrying sorrows through the years. It’s bleak and dreamy, and never anything less than soaring and beautiful.
Songs of Shame is released on December 3, 2021 via Shunu Records, and can be pre-ordered here.
