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Måneskin Talks Creating Art, Breaking Boundaries, & Choosing Freedom
The band opens up to Out about writing their new album and breaking boundaries as Grammy-nominated queer artists.
2023 is off and running for Italian band Måneskin.
In late January, prior to making their Grammy debut, the young rock group took the stage of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show where they performed their new single “Gossip” alongside Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
But the morning after, Måneskin sings a different tune. Four bare-faced twenty-somethings, dressed in color (white and gray count, right?), are tightly perched on a sofa, adjusting the camera for an early afternoon Zoom interview.
The nonchalance of it all contrasts their typical get-up: loud prints, thick eyeliner, platform heels, and head-to-toe black. But even stripped down, the essence of the four Italian rockers is on full display.
“We’re just doing what we like,” drummer Ethan Torchio says, shrugging off the overwhelming response the band has received. “It’s just a part of the journey.”
A few years ago, Måneskin was busking the streets of Rome. Four teenagers performing music they wrote in a garage at a time "when no one believed in it." By the end of 2021, countless fans had shifted that narrative, making Måneskin — Italian for "moonlight"— a band to watch.
Following their Eurovision Song Contest win, the band reached over 7 billion streams, amassed millions of social media followers, and beckoned a call from Mick Jagger, himself, asking if they’d open for The Rolling Stones (which they did in Las Vegas that November).
Their newest achievements are no small feat either: a 2023 Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and the recent release of their third studio album Rush!, a 17-track brainchild of "four different visions," as lead-vocalist Damiano David puts it.
“[It’s a] process of trusting each other,” bassist Victoria De Angelis adds about finding common ground amid the band’s varying artistic visions. (She describes her taste as “heavier” and “punky” while David’s is softer “with more ballads.”)
“It’s just [about] embracing all four of [our] Identities,” David reiterates, nodding to De Angelis, drummer Ethan Torchio, and electric guitarist Thomas Raggi.
The band is committed to creative freedom, to say the least. They did, after all, commemorate the release of their new album by symbolically tying the knot— red roses, white garbs, chapel, and all — in a four-way marriage, in January.
“Everything we do is just part of who we are,” De Angelis says, emphasizing that their expression of queerness is no different. Two of Måneskin's members identify within the community: De Angelis as bisexual and Torchio as sexually free.
“We want to give [queerness] representation,” she continues. “I think that's still something [where] there is a lot of work to do… to show something that is not just heteronormativity.”
Beyond their music, the band has ignited conversation surrounding their gender-bending fashion sense, sporting styles that David Bowie, Prince, and Freddy Mercury (just to name a few) once wore as second skin.
Though some publications have accused Måneskin of queer baiting, the band adamantly denies it.
“You don't destroy [stereotypes] by creating new stereotypes,” Torchio says, emphasizing that makeup and clothing innately have no gender or sexuality. “It's about [destroying] the concept of stereotypes itself.”
“I think it's something so wrong,” De Angelis says of “the limitations society puts on you.”
“The whole purpose should be freedom.”
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