anedonia – il tempo di un albero

I’ve always felt that emocrust is one of those weird genre tags that rarely manages to describe a band accurately. Most of the time, it gets thrown at screamo bands who’ve listened to a bit of Tragedy or Wolfbrigade, or at sprawling, post‑rock‑influenced epics with ten-minute crescendos, tremolo-picked guitars and sudden prog detours where the simplicity of punk becomes only an afterimage. And while I genuinely love plenty of bands from both of those approaches, neither quite fits what I think of the genre.

Italian band anedonia, on the other hand, are a rare case where the term finally makes complete sense to me. Musically, anedonia pull straight from the second wave of French politicized emo, think the Stonehenge and Ape Records catalogs of the mid-’90s, most notably bands like Peu Être and Anomie / An‑Attâ. There are also hints of Italian hardcore from the same era, most notably Frammenti, and of course the Galician sound of bands like Ekkaia, who helped actually define the emocrust tag in the early 2000s.

Anedonia’s debut album il tempo di un albero delivers seven emotional, politically charged tracks that, except for “silenzio provinciale,” clock in around the two-minute mark and stay unmistakably punk in sound and intent. There’s no blackened screeching, no slow breakdowns, and no atmospheric filler. Just tight songwriting and singer Asja Dominguez Leon’s declamatory, anarcho-punk leaning vocals in place of any kind of metallic growl or screamo shrieks. When I saw a band with just one record and this kind of sound, I assumed this had to be some reissued record from the early 2000s. Finding out il tempo di un albero came out in 2025 was a real surprise.

The record opens with “luci spente,” a track steeped in personal darkness, full of anxiety and broken-mirror imagery, but it’s pushed forward by pure DIY punk energy. “si no ibas a quemarte,” with its desolate arpeggio intro and passionate lyrics, hits hard with emotional immediacy and a seething tone that calls back to Ekkaia’s finest moments. I think my favorite track on the record. “silenzio provinciale” stretches out longer than the rest, steeped in the suffocating anger of provincial life, but still moving forward with purpose rather than wallowing in gloom and desolation.

Tracks like “hai sempre perso” and “parma-brescia” hit the emotional core of the album: the former a bitter unraveling of a relationship, the latter a devastating love story walking toward its own end on a train platform. “comune violento” returns to the collective struggle, recounting the arrest of a comrade during forest defense protests, this time with fists raised in anger and solidarity. The closer, “quel giorno non pioveva,” ties it all together: mourning, resistance, ecology, comradeship. I think it’s cool that there’s also a bit of dub/reggae thrown into the mix.

Il tempo di un albero is exactly what I want emocrust to be: emotional without drifting into “stadium crust” territory, political without empty sloganeering, and rough production without losing clarity. A self-released record with all-lowercase titles and barely making the rounds on any year-end list, but one I keep coming back to with joy. In a weird moment where emocrust is blowing up with bands like Lagrimas and Habak who have tens of thousands of social media followers, anedonia have quietly released one of the coolest and most underrated debuts of the year.