We Speak Music
In the Glint of Blue Jeans, ALEXIS Finds a Spark
A song like Blue Jeans doesn’t just arrive—it struts, shimmers, and insists you pay attention. For ALEXIS, a 22-year-old Filipino-Australian artist from Western Sydney, this debut single feels like both a confession and an announcement. She calls it “upbeat sad girl” energy, but it’s perhaps more accurate to call it emotional pop in motion: music designed for the liminal spaces of city life, for the train rides where strangers become stories, for the drives where headlights melt into memory.
The genesis is charmingly ordinary. ALEXIS saw someone on the train—blue jeans, nothing more—and felt a nervous flutter she hadn’t experienced in some time. Instead of brushing it off, she turned that fleeting moment into a fully fleshed narrative. What results is a song that understands intimacy isn’t always grand. Sometimes it’s a glance across a carriage, a spark of recognition, a brief swell of possibility.
Working with producer Tyler Murray, ALEXIS builds a soundscape that mirrors that spark. The synths shimmer with just enough grit to keep them from floating away; the rhythm pulses like quickened breath. Her voice carries the lyrics with a sense of both levity and weight. She’s playful in her phrasing but never frivolous—her delivery reminds us that flirtation and honesty are often two sides of the same coin.
What makes Blue Jeans compelling isn’t just its surface pleasures—though the hook is undeniably catchy—it’s the way the song gestures toward a larger artistic ethos. ALEXIS comes from a musical upbringing steeped in family singalongs, later honed in conservatorium halls and global writing camps. You can hear both the heritage and the discipline in her work: the natural instinct for melody paired with a meticulous ear for arrangement.
There’s a generosity in how she presents herself. While many debuts hedge their bets, Blue Jeans feels refreshingly direct, as if ALEXIS is inviting us into her world without pretense. She’s not chasing perfection, but connection. In that sense, the track works less like a polished statement and more like a hand extended—an invitation to join her on the ride as she navigates the highs and lows of pop confession.
For our listeners, who often seek songs that balance craft with humanity, Blue Jeans is a reminder of why pop matters. It can take the simplest of observations—a pair of jeans on a stranger—and make it feel monumental. ALEXIS has only just begun, but with this debut, she’s already proving that she can turn the ordinary into something worth remembering.
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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