Tullia Benedicta grew up in Ravenna in a Neapolitan family, which is to say she grew up inside two Italys at once. The North that never asked where she came from. The South that was always asking where she had gone. NZIRIA, the project she releases under, is what happens when a producer decides not to choose between those Italys but to slam them together at full volume.
She calls the genre Hard Neomelodico. It pulls from neomelodica — the working-class Neapolitan pop that scores weddings and funerals and the long slow late-night walks home — and runs it through gabber, hardcore, and the kind of distortion that makes the speaker cone visibly move. Her debut XXYBRID came out on Gabber Eleganza's Never Sleep imprint. ULTRANCE followed and pushed even further into the red.
What makes her work particular is the vocal. She sings the way nonna sings on a Sunday — full chest, slightly cracked, completely sincere. Then the kick drum hits at 180 BPM and you realise she is doing something nobody else is. There is no distance between the tradition and the rave. They are the same song.
Live she is a presence. The Boiler Room set she did last year was one of those clips that goes round group chats for three days. People DJing in T-shirts that say MAMMA. Someone crying in the front row. Someone else laughing at the same time. That is the territory she works in — the place where the joke and the prayer are the same gesture.
The non-binary thing matters here too. She has been clear that the project is about borderlessness as a lived experience, not as an aesthetic. North/South. Masculine/feminine. Tradition/contemporary. The hyphen is the point.
NZIRIA is what new Italian music sounds like when it stops asking permission. Start with XXYBRID, then ULTRANCE, then go listen to your grandmother's records again.
Allastair Voss
