INTERVIEW Messa: Playing live brings the songs to life

Italian doom just sounds and feels different, and Messa will prove it live at DC Rojc Open Air 2025. For over a decade, they have been captivating audiences with their hauntingly beautiful soundscapes. Known for blending elements of doom, ambient, and even jazz into a uniquely cinematic experience, Messa has carved out a distinct space in the heavy music scene. We had the pleasure of learning more about their creative process, influences, and preferences for unwinding from the busy tour life.

You are a renowned band that has been dominating stages since 2014, but we believe you will still be a surprise to many at DC Open Air 2025 – which is a great position for a band to be in. You are persistently being pushed into various categories of doom, dark jazz, post-metal, avant-garde, and even world music in some segments. How do you describe your music, and is there a consensus within the band regarding that?

Thank you for having us! We have called our music “Scarlet Doom” since our very start. This specific shade of red was chromatically helping us define our aim – and we think it still fits us, even if the years passed by. For sure one thing we might say about our material is that it’s a 100% honest expression of what we are.

Is your genre affiliation in that “alternative realm” important to you at all?

Not being a mainstream music act has positive sides – the biggest one’s having the complete freedom of choice in what we write, play, say and think!

Why Messa specifically? Who came up with the band’s name?

Sara suggested this name during one of our first rehearsals and we had no doubt it would be the perfect name for the band. Messa is the Italian term for a religious mass. It resonated a lot to us. We were searching for a name with a feminine connotation that we could all relate to. There is a somewhat ceremonial aspect in our shows, and it’s strongly connected to this name.

Messa’s new album, “The Spin”, came out on April 11, which you will also present to the audience in Pula. How different is it from your previous albums? What was the creation process like, and does it become easier or harder over time to create tangible material that will eventually become a release?

‘The Spin’ is basically our own take on the 1980’s music. That sonic territory was an uncharted one for the band. We never delved fully into it when it came to writing our own material. We felt this thing was kind of a call to experiment something new! We moved out of our comfort zone with the sounds and the “colour” we wanted to give to our songs, but still, there are some key points in our writing process. The dynamics and the song structures are somewhat similar to our past works and, last but not least, we kept the same tuning on our instruments. We focused on composing and jumping into the arrangements for a longer time span compared to our previous efforts, thus accelerating the whole writing process of the album, which took loosely two years. ‘The Spin’ was recorded throughout the whole summer of 2024 and it took quite a bit to complete. We never worked in separate sessions before but we’ve found out that it helps us concentrate a lot more. We delved into our own parts with focus, and we put a lot of attention to detail.

In January, you released a video for the song “At Races”, which you interestingly filmed in countries across the region, from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia to Slovenia and Croatia. How did you discover these Yugoslav monuments (spomeniks), and what inspiration lies behind them as motives?

Our bass player Marco, who also directed the video, became familiar with Spomeniks back in 2014, while traveling with a colleague for work reasons. The aesthetic of Spomeniks did spark an idea and we thought it would totally fit our intentions, and we decided to bring those elements in our creative universe. Spomeniks also are antifascist monuments – which makes them even cooler to us.

The video was designed to narrate a motorcycle journey that leads the subject to travel kilometers to discover themselves. All this to reach a goal: to witness the ‘Wall of Death’ of motorcycles filmed in the second part of the video. The concept of the video also lies in the message of the lyrics: competitiveness, emotion, laps that seem to never end, noise.

In an interview, Sara once mentioned that when you’re on tour constantly in a van, it’s hard to find time for yourself. The band is a collective, and you inevitably spend a lot of time together – how do you guys find that much needed me-time and what do you use it for?

Reading books helps a lot with this necessary isolation. Watching the world pass by out of the vans’ window, during long hours of travel. Sara calls it ‘landscape-escapism’. Generally speaking, after 10 years we know each other deeply, and respect the others’ spaces when we know it’s time for it.

You often talk about music albums that inspired your current career and specific stages of Messa’s musical journey. All the picks & mentions summarized seem quite eclectic and broad. How important is for a musician to listen a variety of music? Which albums outside of metal and heavy music have particularly captivated you or influenced you and why?

We like the idea of having roots in a specific genre, evolving our identity into something different each and every time. Not an easy task for sure! Since the inception of the project, we willingly put less and less conventional elements in our songs. Every record sounds different. It’s also a consequence of our hunger when it comes to personal music taste too. We can say that without a doubt the work of some other bands has played a role while we were writing “The Spin”. Some artists we were referencing often were The Sound, Vangelis, Killing Joke, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Boy Harsher, Journey.

Messa performed in Zagreb in the summer of 2022 at the Močvara club, and now you’re coming to Pula to play in a festival open-air setting. Do you prefer concerts in clubs or at festivals? We’re definitely looking forward to your festival performance under the stars!

Playing live is fundamental for us, we love it. It brings the songs to life – and it’s also important for the alchemy and connection between the band members. To be honest, we like to play both. They are totally different experiences. Club shows are often more intimate, but festivals usually have high energy lingering in the air. We’re very happy to play Pula this summer, we can’t wait!

Interviewer: Sara Jerman

Tickets for DC Rojc Open Air are available HERE.