Gli Alberi - Maturafine

Gli Alberi (Italian for “The Trees”) is a metal band from Turin, who formed in 2012.  Their latest release, “Maturafine,” is their third full-length album.    This is my first experience with this band, but it has been a fantastic surprise and pleasure to experience this album!   Their sound blends several genres together, pieced and threaded together by some of the best dynamics I’ve heard in a while.  

The vocals alone have more variety than most albums.  Cleans, both male and female, blend seamlessly with the more extreme side of the genre.  Every vocal line, every word is just drenched in emotive textures and performances that really feel genuine.  

Having these different vocals really works in favor of the storytelling, especially since the album is a concept album about deserts.  That’s a unique premise, in and of itself.  I’m paraphrasing the band here quite a bit but basically the album takes the concept of a desert as not only an arid place but also one without man, at least that’s how it should be but these ecosystems have been transformed and plundered, adapted to mankind’s idea of civilization.  Ultimately, it’s fruitless because although man destroyed the desert ... so we shall too be destroyed.  The end looms over us all. 

That’s all well and good but does this translate to the music?  That answer is easy because Gil Alberi is quite the clever band of songwriters.  Much like the desert, the music doesn’t give away off its secrets at once.  One can look (listen) over this vast landscape and, rightfully so, assume its depth is wide but it can’t fully be realized until the journey starts.  

The temperatures of this album are extreme in temperature as well, going from deadly, red-hot metal to cool, atmospheric textures with transitions so seamless the danger within seems almost dreamlike.  “Maturafine,” is an album that shifts from doom and sludge to post-rock, and even blackened elements.   

The first song, “Q,” speaks of a book of the bible called the Qoelet, which contains the phrase “Havel havalim,” which translates in English to “Vanity of Vanities.”  Simply put, everything is futile and empty—nothing really matters, it’s all just a continuous cycle.  The song plays with this a bit, with some repetition (but not an over amount) in the riffs and vocal rhythms.  This is a very strong opening song that gives a good idea of what the rest of the album will be like, although it’s just a small piece of a larger puzzle.   The bass is fuzztastic and the drums drive home the rhythm like it's the end of the world.  The vocals are utterly mesmerizing–both the cleans and the extremes. 

“Il quarto vuoto,” is one of my favorite songs on the album.  The lyrics revolve around a portion of land in the Arabian Peninsula called the Rub’ al-Khali.  This portion has remained unchanged for millennia while inspiring stories and legends…..and killing explorers who venture into it.  Much like this mysterious place, this song vibrates with a mysterious atmosphere.  The guitars are fantastic, weaving clean incantations that lull into a false sense of security and then becoming a sandstorm that swallows whole. This song is just under 9 minutes in length—and every second is used to create this story, this vision.  

I want to talk about the last two songs:  “Nomadi grigi,” and “Mare Tranquillitatis.”  The former song is quite a bit different, even for an album that is different in of itself.  A friend of the band, Italian singer/songwriter Mattia Macri, sings it and also wrote the lyrics. Those lyrics are about places in nature where human beings give way to the natural world's command and must yield to it.    This song certainly requires giving yourself away to its spell bound ways.  This is one hypnotic song, what with the unique vocal flavorings and tribal drums.  Near the end, the song gets DARK and the metal flows like the ever-opening night, complete with extreme vocals. 

The latter is a 12-and-a-half epic song that has more depth to it than some entire albums.  The band feels this summarizes the entire meaning of the album—I definitely agree.  The band mentions in the notes for this song that the moon is the apotheosis of every desert: barren, unreachable and the final destination of explorers and dreamers.  It’s a place that would be where we could see that in the end, we are nothing and our importance to the cosmos amounts to, if anything, little.  

The grand scope of this song certainly made me think about these lyrics.  And it’s an adventurous song in its own right–I felt like an explorer as the minutes moved through me.  The saxophone is like a world within a world—kudos to jazz musician Agnese Garufi for added such colorful dimensions to a song that is already stretching itself across boundaries. 

“Maturafine,” is an utterly unique album that is going to appeal to a wide audience of metalheads….and beyond. If you listen to just one new album in this first half of 2026, it NEEDS to be this one.  Metalheads that are looking for something heavy but different and thought provoking can dive right in and I'm willing to bet this will appeal to people who normally shy away from metal.

Rating:  Excellent