We Speak Music
Nuclear Cowboy’s Poetic Collision on ‘If You Need Me, I’ll Be Here’
Brooklyn-based musician Nuclear Cowboy has carved a unique path in contemporary music, fusing rural nostalgia with city-born experimentation. His new EP, If You Need Me, I’ll Be Here, embodies this tension, offering five tracks where folk and electronics collide, intimacy meets spectacle, and vulnerability feels performative yet genuine. It’s music for the spaces between, where binaries break down and subtlety reigns.
The EP opens with “Keepsake” and “Easy Come,” tracks that lean on alt-folk sensibilities infused with electronic textures. Acoustic guitars shimmer alongside gentle synths, creating an atmosphere of quiet introspection. By the time “Mirage of Me” and “Bite the Bullet” arrive, Nuclear Cowboy shifts toward alt-pop, weaving rhythm, texture, and melody into layered emotional statements. The closer, “Find Myself,” strips everything back, offering a brief, synth-driven reflection that lingers long after the music ends.
At its core, this EP is about communication. Nuclear Cowboy approaches songwriting as documentation, capturing personal discoveries in a way that extends beyond the self. Growth, gratitude, and the complicated feelings of moving forward are central, making the EP less a finished statement and more a keepsake of evolving selfhood. It’s an intimate glimpse into an artist negotiating his own trajectory.
Nuclear Cowboy’s live presence reinforces this ethos. Performances are immersive, playful, and sincere, blending humor, dance, and emotional transparency to transform music into experience. The forthcoming music video for “Keepsake” and a slew of singles slated for release promise to expand this dialogue further, inviting audiences into an ongoing journey rather than a single moment.
If You Need Me, I’ll Be Here is refinement over reinvention. Nuclear Cowboy carries his past forward with nuance, producing a body of work that is emotionally resonant, sonically diverse, and defiantly hard to categorize. It’s an EP that doesn’t just mark a moment—it charts the evolution of an artist learning to hold his contradictions with grace.
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.
-
We Speak Music1 week agoMemory Spells Unleashes An Album That Glows With Human Connection
-
We Speak Music6 days agoPaul Archer Unleashes New Single ‘No Fear’
-
We Speak Music1 week agoMatt Thompson turns late-night doubt into pop fire on ‘Echo’
-
We Speak Music1 week ago
Christian Balvig offers up stunning first taster of new album in collaboration with Ensemble Hermes