Infrarosso
Se mi guardi, cambio forma
Come fuoco nell’oscurità
Infrarosso
Barcelona-based duo VILLANELLE have figured out something plenty of club records forget while staring lovingly at their own machinery: rhythm gets interesting when there is a body inside it. Infrarosso, the debut single from Jessica Bellomo and Carmilla Sioux, runs on that friction. Synthesizers press forward with clean, metallic authority, the bassline prowls beneath them, and the beat keeps tightening the room until Bellomo’s voice becomes another pressure point in the arrangement.
Their shared connection to rock and darker electronic music comes through two distinct histories. Bellomo is an Italo-Argentine interdisciplinary artist whose production, DJ sets, and live work span dark disco, electro, breakbeats, EBM, techno, and trance. Sioux began as a bassist in the post-punk scene before moving into electronic music as a DJ and producer, founding From Hell To Disco in 2024. VILLANELLE gives those experiences a shared form, bringing their understanding of club music into close contact with songwriting, visual presentation, and the possibilities of performing together.
The writing of Infrarosso began with the instruments. Sioux developed the foundations of the bassline, and Bellomo built layers of synthesizers around it. The music took shape before the words, giving the duo a structure against which to test melodies, vocal rhythms, and different languages. That sequence helps explain the close relationship between the arrangement and the singing: the voice developed through a conversation with sounds already in motion.
Traces of Pet Shop Boys appear in the chilly economy, Ladytron in the clipped sensuality, and Boy Harsher in how desire folds into sensual repetition. VILLANELLE draws from their influences without turning the song into a résumé. The bassline has enough shape to carry the track by itself, but the synth layers keep introducing new angles, giving the arrangement a strange sense of forward motion even when repetition becomes the hook. Analog warmth and digital precision meet in a track that keeps its emotional temperature unsettled.
Italian gradually became the natural language for the song. Friends independently imagined the instrumental with Italian vocals, reinforcing a direction the duo were already discovering through experimentation. Its musicality, warmth, and sensual undertone suited the track’s character. As Bellomo worked through melodies, spoken-word phrases, rhythm, and rhyme, the provisional title Infrared became Infrarosso. The choice took shape in the act of singing, with the sound of the words helping determine what the song would become.
Infrared suggests a presence beyond ordinary sight, something registered through heat when appearances offer little guidance. The opening line, “Se mi guardi, cambio forma”—“If you look at me, I change shape”—adds another complication: being seen can change us. Read as a statement about intimacy, it suggests the strange adjustments people make under another person’s attention, when attraction and exposure become difficult to separate. The title offers a way to sense what remains beneath those changing surfaces.
The phrase Sotto la pelle, “under the skin,” became central to the duo’s conception of the track. Bellomo circles a few elemental ideas—heat, skin, darkness, disappearance—and treats language as percussion, stretching words across the beat until meaning and sensation start leaning into each other. The lyrics ask what survives between two people when the world loses light and only sensation remains. There is romance in that image, though VILLANELLE leaves enough tension in the track to imbue that romance with a bit of salt rather than sugar-sweetness.
This approach also reflects the poetic dimension behind the project’s name. For Bellomo and Sioux, words participate in the rhythm and atmosphere of a composition, with repetition giving a phrase room to change emphasis. On Infrarosso, the voice works almost as another instrument, adding movement while preserving space for an emotional response. The lyric’s economy allows small shifts in delivery to carry considerable weight; the same words can feel inviting or uncertain depending on how they sit against the beat.
Nicole Krämer’s video extends the same fascination with body and machine through darkness, movement, and controlled physicality. It belongs to the broader visual language VILLANELLE are developing around the music, where nocturnal elegance and bodily presence reinforce the tension within the songs. The imagery suits a track built around pressure and restraint, where sensuality comes from withholding as much as release.
Read alongside the opening lyric, the camera introduces a further layer to that exchange. A song about changing under another person’s gaze becomes a performance offered to the viewer’s attention. Movement gives the rhythm a visible form, while the words continue to point toward something that cannot be understood through appearance alone. The relationship between music and image grows from that shared concern with what a body reveals and what it keeps private.
Watch the official video for Infrarosso below:
Live performance has helped the duo understand how these ideas reach an audience. They describe their debut at Stella Nomine as an early lesson in how strongly people could connect with the material while hearing the songs for the first time. Repetition offered listeners a point of entry, while the duo’s physical stage presence and visual interaction added another means of communication. In their account, the response in the room helped clarify what VILLANELLE could become.
That experience makes the stage an essential part of the project’s development. A repeated phrase can establish familiarity within an unfamiliar song; a gesture or an exchange between performers can give its tension a visible expression. For music so concerned with perception and proximity, a live setting brings those ideas into a shared space. The audience encounters the people responsible for the sounds, and the performers discover how those sounds affect others.
Released September 10, 2026, Infrarosso introduces a duo already thinking beyond one song. An album is planned for spring 2027, with further exploration of the relationship between voice, instruments, electronic production, and the body. Their debut establishes the terms with considerable assurance: post-punk’s rawness, Italo’s melodic appeal, and electronic music’s physical force all have a place in the conversation.
The duo describes the intention behind Infrarosso as “music intended to be felt — somewhere beneath the skin.” Across the recording, the video, and their account of performing live, that idea takes a concrete form. A bassline becomes a framework for synthesizers; a voice finds its language inside their patterns; movement carries the song into view. By the time an audience answers, the private sensation has become something people can share.
Listen to Infrarosso below and order the single, out now via From Hell To Disco, here.
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