Angelina Mango she’s back. Out of the blue, without warning: a year after her sudden exit from the scene – officially due to “laryngitis”, but it was soon understood that the problem was deeper and partly of a psychological nature – she is back with a new album, caramela play on words that immediately exudes self-love. Not just one piece therefore, but 16 new songs, released on Thursday at 2pm and not on Friday at midnight. An unconventional formula, just as unconventional as this return: no interviews, no tour or Sanremo on the horizon, just “I wrote these new songs”, listen to them, anyway. Form and substance. And let’s put it this way: forget the old Mango, forget it even Boredom; On the plate now there is a new artist, more mature and aware, less pop star and more singer-songwriter. Most importantly, now there is an artist free.

Out of pressure

Ok, bringing up the concept of “freedom” is a shortcut. Free from what? From itself, let’s say. Not that who knows what choice had been forced on her before, but by the victory of Friends (2023) and from that of Sanremo (2024) she had climbed onto a carousel that has precise times and demands, to which she – who has an enormous talent, which one cannot fail to recognize – had had to lend herself to. It is a question of standards and expectations, but also of rhythms, of busy agendas from which it is impossible to break away. Yet, as we know, great records are born by taking risks and time, aspects that are often not contemplated in Italian pop. Meh. The fact is that Poké melodramaalbum released a few months later Boredom, he suffered from being worked in the midst of so many other commitmentsincluding Eurovision, as well as certain choices that are somewhat obligatory today, including the use of the usual authors and the usual radio productions. Of course, the talent was there, she worked, but one might say that Mango shone despite the context.

Well, with caramel we are on another planet, free from ballast. Maybe it’s because she worked on it with the lights off: it’s almost all written and produced by her with Giovanni Pallotti – the right-hand man of her manager, Marta Donà, when it comes to music, it’s no coincidence that she’s also behind Marco Mengoni and Olly, with clear results – often with the help of her brother, the drummer Filippo. With Dardust and Calcutta he signs the only one aiaiaithe only guest is Madame in I heya two-voice piece on the difficulty of accepting one’s body and eating disorders, the final so so so so it is written and sung by one of her dear friends, the singer-songwriter Henna, who tells her that “it doesn’t matter if you lose a game”. It goes without saying that it’s all a family affair – Angelina also designed some video clips, worth seeing – and that, well, in the last year she’s been through a tough time: if Poké melodrama spoke of the desire to arrive, caramel speaks of the trauma of those who are at the top and discover that they don’t like being there at all. And cascading down: the self-doubts, the wounds that were never really healed and that come back to the surface, the difficulty of even explaining why, in a moment of enormous success, one would more than anything like to disappear.

A new singer-songwriter

Yet, if on the one hand this putting your finger in the socket led to an obvious discharge of current, on the other it is as if it had unlocked it, had amplified its ideas. Again, form and substance. The lyrics are urgent and lived-in, somehow specialstuff you’re not always used to, from the single Veil over the eyes (“How do I tell the lady at the bakery who asks me if I’m okay, why am I not smiling today?”) to the same I hey (“I’ve wanted to be anyone else for a while”), and more 7up (“I’m not a trend-setter, I like playing tressette”), Fragile package (“You say we are like machines, but in the van I am the fragile package”) e We got lost in the endprobably dedicated to his father Pino, who died in 2014. Hard stories, of course, of lack of communication, suffering, but also of awareness, personal turning points. The summary: “Now I just want to live”. And this is a record that lives: you can also tell from the music, which is closer to the bedroom pop of Billie Eilish – although happily more free-range – than the hyper-produced one before, with many spare, intimate and essential passages like the lyrics, precisely as a singer-songwriter. Hurray. They are “drafts”, she says, but due to the total absence of superstructures they sound paradoxically more interesting than many songs heard on the radio – as well as those of Poké melodrama.

Free from pressure, Angelina gave her best: a lesson for the entire system?

At this point, there are many ideas. First: her case cannot and must not become the identifier of an entire system, but it is clear that at least she suffered in playing the game of success and that, once free from expectations and pressures, even unconscious ones, she was able to give her best. caramel it should be listened to not to mind its own business, to understand how it has been in recent months, but because it has within it an engine of suffering and urgency which is however rare, for those writing in 2025. And this should make us reflect on the way in which not only the industry, but above all we treat such prominent figures, on what we want from them and the rest. On the other hand, records so devoid of superstructures and work “on the edges” have a difficult life today in the major circuits – Marracash himself, always released surprisingly with Peace is over (2024), admitted that at the beginning the results were disappointing – and once the effect wore off we need to understand how it will go. Or rather: we need to understand if this freer and more disengaged path is just a moment of passage for Mango – and that is, even just a way to regain confidence and love for the profession – or is it really his future. In the second hypothesis, I think we have found a treasure.