The second single from Djunah’s new album, Giallo, is out today on Bandcamp, ahead of the album's full digital release on October 30.
I wrote “Death of the New Wave” by starting with a bossa nova beat and seeing how heavy I could take it. Giallo soundtracks are famous for mashing up genres like jazz, lounge, and bossa nova with everything from psych and prog to liturgical, orchestral, and atonal music. Using gialli as inspiration allowed me to pull from all sorts of genres I love and mix them with noise rock and metal conventions to create something new.
The lyrics were inspired by one of my favorite gialli, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. That film encapsulates so much that I want to say about relationship violence and complex trauma, and it’s what inspired me to dedicate the entire album to giallo.
Watching Strange Vice, I see all the colors of complex trauma and relationship violence: the blurring of love and fear, the confusion of violence and sexuality, the power of emotional memory, derealization and the destabilization of identity, the experience of madness, and the blending of terror and the mundane.
To me, gialli are so much more than absurd hypercolor bloodletting. They say so much about women’s and even children’s experience of violence and exploitation—and probably not in the way the filmmakers intended.
It might seem strange that I took on an exploitation genre whose classic films were all directed by men and whose scores had few credited female composers—Nora Orlandi, the composer for Strange Vice and other gialli, being the one notable exception.
But that’s exactly what interests me about it. I think women artists and composers have a lot to say about the legacy of music and film from that era and how it continues to shape attitudes toward women.
I know I do.
