We Speak Music

Lil Crush Crafts a Cinematic World with ‘Reel Music’

Published

3 weeks ago

March 31, 2026

For an album titled Reel Music, Lil Crush’s latest project often feels like scrolling through the emotional highlights of a life lived online and offline simultaneously. Across 30 tracks and 91 minutes, the artist constructs a digital-age scrapbook of longing, late-night introspection, and genre-fluid experimentation.

The album opens in a space of quiet vulnerability. “I Hate Partying Alone” and “Devilish Angel” establish a mood of self-reflection, their soft melodic structures floating over understated production. Lil Crush’s voice sits somewhere between rap and confession, more interested in capturing feelings than delivering tightly structured bars.

As the album unfolds, Reel Music reveals a fascination with sonic hybridity. Hip-hop remains the gravitational center, but elements of R&B, alternative country, and experimental pop drift in and out of the mix. The result is a soundscape that often feels intentionally unpolished, a collage rather than a carefully streamlined pop album.

Recurring collaborator Colombian Crush appears across much of the record, functioning almost like a co-narrator within Lil Crush’s musical universe. Together, they anchor the album’s emotional core. Meanwhile, appearances from THR333, The Latin Prince, Fa’id, BRIZO, and Beachy add texture and variation, pushing the album into unexpected territory.

Tracks like “Helado,” “Ciudad Amurallada,” and “Poco Loco” hint at the project’s cross-cultural ambition, blending bilingual lyrics with rhythms that feel equally at home in Latin pop and underground hip-hop scenes. These moments give Reel Music its most distinctive character.

At times the album’s length threatens to overwhelm its strongest ideas, but that excess also feels intentional. Lil Crush seems less interested in curating a perfect record than in documenting a creative moment in full. Reel Music ultimately plays like a snapshot of an artist exploring identity, emotion, and sound in real time.

“With Reel Music, Lil Crush isn’t just releasing an album, he’s unveiling a universe,” says music publicist Danielle Holian, Decent Music PR. “Thirty tracks, zero boundaries. He moves effortlessly between cultures, genres, and identities, and somehow makes it all feel cohesive, intentional, and deeply human. This project doesn’t chase trends; it sets its own frequency. Lil Crush is proving that evolution isn’t a phase for him, it’s the foundation.”

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We Speak Music

Michele Ducci teases new album with uplifting indie single ‘Woman Like You’

Published

16 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Don Reed

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 5^th 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.