Captain Mantell, the Italian progressive-rock project is happy to reveal the details on their upcoming new LP, ‘Human Or Not‘ due to Release June 23.
Genres: Alternative rock, post-punk, electronic music.
Format: LP, CD, Digital.
FFO: TV on The Radio, Soulwax, LCD Soundsystem.
Label: Overdrive Records/Go Down Records.
Tracklist:
1.Miracle Mojo – available for the airplay
2.Making Night Day – available starting May 20th.
3.A Thousand Words
4.You Didn’t See What I Saw
5.Living in a Video
6.No Other God
7.Down in the Slime
8.Miracle Mojo or Not
9.Making Night Day or Not
10.A Thousand Words or Not
11.You Didn’t See What I Saw or Not
12.Living in a Video or Not
13.No Other God or Not
14.Down in the Slime or Not
CAPTAIN MANTELL is a project that has been exploring the boundary between rock and electronic music for nearly twenty years, blending rock’n’roll attitude, science-fiction imagery and a constant tension towards the future. Founded in 2006, the project has performed at national and international club and festivals, making cross-genre contamination its defining trait.
With its seventh album, HUMAN OR NOT, Captain Mantell pushes this research into a more radical and contemporary direction. The record takes shape as a vinyl conceived as a conceptual object, where the two sides mirror and distort the same musical material.
Side A features songs performed and produced by human musicians, rooted in the project’s established language: a balance between rock and electronics, physical energy and melodic focus.
Side B uses the same tracks as raw material, reworked through artificial intelligence tools and transformed into experimental electronic remixes — more unstable, nocturnal and club-oriented. Commenting on the concept of the release, the founding member Tommaso Mantelli explains: “Captain Mantell has always gravitated around non-human presences, and right now we feel AI is the most immediate and unresolved version of that idea, a new kind of alien presence, something already embedded in our lives, but still not fully understood.
At a certain point we felt that making just another rock record wasn’t enough, and this was the right moment to push things further and reflect what’s actually happening around us right now.”
Artificial intelligence is not used as a replacement tool, but as a distorting lens: a presence that observes human music from a non-human point of view and recomposes it according to different, sometimes coherent, sometimes unpredictable logics. Not a competition between human and machine, but a dialogue that questions form, control and authorship.
The lyrics of HUMAN OR NOT explore unstable identities, screen-mediated realities, non-human presences, technology, alienation, and the desire for connection. Balancing irony and unease, the songs portray a present in which the boundary between what is human and what is not becomes increasingly thin.
This dualism is also reflected in the project’s visual identity, curated by eeviac. Two colors — red and blue — represent the human and artificial components respectively. The images overlap but can only be read separately through red/blue 3D glasses, included inside the vinyl package, suggesting a double reality in which the two dimensions coexist without ever fully merging.
Mantelli continues: “This project isn’t about celebrating or rejecting AI, it’s more about questioning it — authorship, emotion, ethics — without pretending to have clear answers. It’s a bit like when you close your eyes facing the sun and everything turns red, then you open them and the world suddenly feels blue — it’s the same reality, but your perception has completely changed.”
HUMAN OR NOT is both a record and an experiment on the present, using the language of rock and electronic music to question how music is created, transformed and perceived today. The album is coming out June 23 via Overdrive Records and Go Down Records – available for pre-order here.
CAPTAIN MANTELL crew
Tommaso Mantelli – aka Captain Mantell – guitar and vocals
Roberto Olivotto – aka Major BD – drums
Andrea Lombardini – aka Commodore Lo – bass
Sergio Orso – aka Starship Officer Ursus – violin
