Greek mythology has long treated the witch as a warning label. Now, with Essaira’s latest single, she is given a microphone to celebrate her strangeness.
In 2023, as the planet lurched from heatwave to headline to horoscope, Essaira were busy building a small fortress of noise in Bologna, Italy. Climate dread, political absurdity, astrological drama…the usual end-of-days cocktail. Out of that stew came From the Guts of Essaira, written across 2023 and 2024 and recorded with Nico Pasquini: ten tracks that stake out psychic ground with the confidence of a three-headed guard dog.
Essaira describes their approach as “punkstrial.” The music runs on tension, synths are tightened to a wire, guitars land in sharp diagonals. Industrial rhythms advance, halt, reconfigure. The trio (Paola, Nico, and Gelo) shares the microphone as if it were contested property. Voices overlap, split, and return in altered form. No one claims centre stage for long. The result feels communal, even conspiratorial, as though the songs are plotting something just out of earshot.
The record’s theme circles power and survival. 2023 reawakened a global fight-or-flight reflex; Essaira chose fight, though not in the chest-beating sense. Their resistance is structural. Every passage has a purpose. Tension is allowed to stretch until it almost snaps, then recalibrated. The album accumulates mass, then pares it back. It advances through friction and release, through the ongoing negotiation between control and chaos.
At the heart sits Xirxe, Essaira’s revision of Circe. Xirxe celebrates weirdness, the monstrous feminine, the right to redraw the boundary lines. What tradition called “escape” reads instead as self-preservation, as authority is framed as disobedience. While dismantling the patriarchy is serious business, Essaira slips in a bit of sly humour in this fierce reclamation: Circe as project manager of her own island. Cerberus reimagined as a band mascot with strong opinions about labour conditions. Essaira leans into the theatricality without sacrificing bite. The monstrous becomes a mirror, then a tool.
If patriarchy and capitalism are the real beasts, the answer is strategic noise. Musically, Essaira draws from industrial abrasion, no wave abrasion, avant-garde sprawl – a lineage that brushes past Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle, through the confrontational edges of DNA and The Contortions, with occasional flashes of John Coltrane’s ecstatic reach. These references feel embedded rather than displayed, as Xirxe operates on its own internal logic.
The video for Xirxe, directed by Paola Paganotto, heightens the fever. A haphazard montage of eerie memories and jagged half-truths unfolds in quick succession. Grotesque figures drift in and out of frame. Faces distort. The edit spins. It is dizzying, unsettling, and oddly magnetic. The monsters are not subtle. They represent systems and tropes: patriarchy, capitalism, the familiar pantheon of everyday villains…yet the tone never sinks into lecture mode. There’s a wink amid the dread, as if to say: yes, the world is absurd; we might as well dance around the bonfire while dismantling it.
Watch Xirxe below:
From the Guts of Essaira claims space in body and time by refusing passivity. It asks for sustained attention. It favours immersion over distraction. In a culture that scrolls, Essaira insists on staying put. Burning what no longer serves them, they build anew, breathing in unison, three heads alert at the gate, guarding the present with a crooked grin.
Listen to XIRXE below and order From The Guts of Essaira (out now via Raw Culture) here.
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