Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Italian progressive rock band Metamorfosi released their album Purgatorio on October 14, 2016. The album’s tracklist features several references to the second half of Dante’s Divine Comedy including “Paradiso Terrestre”, “Porta del Purgatorio”, and “Beatrice”. The band previously released albums titled Inferno and Paradiso (see our post on those works here).
French singer-songwriter Héloïse Adélaïde Letissier (AKA Christine and the Queens) released their electropop EP La vita nuova on February 27, 2020. The album’s title makes explicit reference to Dante’s text La vita nuova. The album was accompanied by a short film featuring Christine and her relationship with a mysterious figure known as “The Faun”.
Watch the short film and listen to the EP here.
Read a review of the EP, posted on Pitchfork, here.
In 2017, Toronto artist Nurgul Jones released the blackgaze album Upper and Lower Hell어퍼와 로어 지옥. Through soft, atmospheric industrial sounds, each track creates a dreamscape that might send the listener on a journey from “Circle 1: Limbo아지태” all the way to”Circle 9: The Traitorous배 교자.” A circle of Dante’s Inferno takes a titular spotlight on each one of the nine tracks.
Listen to and download the album on bandcamp here.
Italian death metal band Kyterion released their album titled Inferno I on July 22, 2016. The track titles and songs make frequent reference to the text of the Divine Comedy including “La selva de’ suicidi”, “Limbo”, and “L’etterno dolore”. This album will be discussed by scholar Francesco Ciabattoni in his contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.
The Metal Archives User “Samtropy” has this to say about the album:
“This is the first of trilogy Black/Death metal interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy by a band of anonymous Italians.
“As a concept, it’s pretty interesting: turning Dante’s words (in their original Florentine vernacular) into relentless song-sized chunks furious blackened death metal. If you’re short on time, the takeaway is: listen to this if that idea sounds good to you. Don’t if it doesn’t.” [. . .] –User “Samtropy”, The Metal Archives, June 8th, 2020 (retrieved November 29, 2021)
The full text of this archival review is available here.
A music video for one of the songs (“Gerione”), as well as other videos from the band, can be found here.
See our post about another metal adaptation of the Inferno here.
Hexperos’ 2020 release, “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life” draws inspiration from Canto I of the Inferno.
“‘Midway upon the journey of our life, we could found ourselves within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.’ Never there was a sentence more apt to describe the disturbance we all feel at some point of our lives, when we feel lost, empty and we don’t know if the road that we have chosen, the journey of life undertaken, is actually the right one for us.
“The songs are stories of life, of sharing as well as in the Divine Comedy. As a matter of fact, who is in pain, often makes new encounters, shares their stories, through sharing and listening to the experiences of others we grow, we find a light in the darkness.” [. . .] — Alessandra Santovito, Hexperos
Listen to the song here.
Learn more about Hexperos on their website, here.
Album art by Nicolás Menay
