Everything seems to come and go
When the light is gone
In the early 90s, alternative rock was enjoying the peculiar experience of becoming the MTV establishment while still dressing for a poorly heated rehearsal room. The guitars were enormous, the melodies could reach the back of an arena, and private anxieties were suddenly selling in quantities that required additional warehouse space. Between the Smashing Pumpkins’ lavish distortion and Ride’s buoyant rush, there was plenty of room for a song to stretch its legs and get carried away. Milan’s The Backlash taps into that appetite for that daydream excess on Frame, letting heavy riffs, a rolling bassline, and airy vocals take the scenic route across seven minutes.
Premiering here ahead of its October 30, 2026 release through Elefante REC, the single brings together the heavy guitar attack of Smashing Pumpkins, the rolling momentum of Ride, and a generous helping of Britpop melody. It also offers another look at the Milanese quartet’s forthcoming album, Montage, arriving November 20 through the same label.
The opening guitar figure has the thick, overdriven heft of Cherub Rock, with a bass groove underneath that draws the music toward Ride’s more propulsive territory. That connection becomes clearer in the vocals, whose melodic ease recalls Going Blank Again: the singing gives the ear something to follow as the guitars grow increasingly expansive. There is a distinctly 1993 feel to the combination, particularly in the balance between the riff’s physical weight and the tune’s effortless lift. Over just more than seven minutes, repetition gives the band room to push those elements further, allowing their psychedelic inclinations to stretch out.
The lyrics follow a cycle of disappearance and return, asking to be brought back from a fall and promising to keep calling someone’s name. Light goes away and returns, cold wind disturbs the water, and a bell rings as the singer remains caught inside a frame. The closing repetitions leave him waiting, still reaching toward someone who remains beyond him.
“‘Frame’ is essentially a live recording,” says Francesco Lucà, the band’s guitarist, singer and songwriter. “It lasts about seven minutes, exactly as it is played on stage. The interesting thing is the contrast between what remains when it’s stripped back and what it becomes with the whole band: acoustically, it almost emerges as a psych/melodic song (the band’s internal reference is The Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain’), while live it becomes a crescendo of volume, repetition and epicness. The lyrics also lend themselves well to representing this phase: they’re about things that disappear and return, about light going away and being brought back, about still being there, waiting. Without wanting to turn it retrospectively into a song ‘about the band’, it’s hard not to see a certain resonance with the moment the album was born.”
Listen to Frame below, and order the single here.
Alongside Lucà, The Backlash features Alessio Gatto on guitar and vocals, Corrado Carnevali on bass and backing vocals, and Giuseppe Musto on drums. Their discography includes the albums Mindtrap (2018) and Rise (2023). European tours have brought them to Liverpool’s Cavern Club, as well as sharing bills with We Are Scientists, The KVB, and The Academic. Released in collaboration with Flux MGMT, *Montage* follows the singles “Traces” and “Built To Survive.”
Written by Lucà and produced and arranged by the band, “Frame” was recorded and mixed by Lucà at RBS Studios in Milan in 2025, then mastered by James Aparicio. Renée Kohl created the artwork.
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The post “We Bring it Back Again” — Milan’s The Backlash Ride a Wave of 90s-style Psychedelic Shoegaze on “Frame” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
