Nico Guzzi is an Italian artist who divides his time between composing, singing, obsessing over technology and the internet, and sometimes, maybe, watching football. It is this combination of high art and low life that permeates his music, making him the sort of artist who can geek out over orchestral arrangements in one breath and refer to crypto culture in the next. Nico has a lot of publications under his belt. His musical range is quite broad as he has released one pop-rock album and one instrumental album. Nico was also qualified till the semi-finals stage of the 33rd edition of Sanremorock in 2020.
“Nine tracks to soundtrack the beautiful disaster of being alive right now”
This is a nine-track album that addresses the burden of modern life: our phone addiction, our desperate need for status, our collective numbness, but does so with production that truly slaps. Consider the album’s take on calling out our addiction to shallow success.
Songs such as “Loser” and “Mama” aren’t just pointing fingers at crypto-bros and Tesla enthusiasts. It’s the expression of that hollow feeling we all get when scrolling through feeds, watching everyone else live their best life while we end up feeling more and more empty on the inside. “Follow Me Now” and “The One” are songs that build these sort of cinematic worlds that are almost religious in their scale.
What makes this album work beyond its conceptual ambition is that Guzzi never forgets he’s making music. Everything serves the song, even when the songs are serving larger themes. So, by the time you get to the end of this album, you will have experienced something. Guzzi has this phrase about being “barely present in our own demise” that keeps circling back, and it might just be the most accurate description of modern life out there. We are watching ourselves scroll, shop, consume, and retreat, and we know that it’s not quite right. But at the end of the day, we’re also too exhausted or too numb to do anything about it.
“The Game of Life” might be too woke for purists, too weird for pure club bangers, too organised for people who want complete and utter mayhem. But for the rest of us, who are stuck in the middle, who feel too much and too little at the same time, who are watching the world from the sidelines while wanting something real, this album is for us.
Muse Chronicle 
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