Medi – My Dark Thoughts Are Too Real
Alberto Bernardini, operating under the name Medi in the Italian underground, makes music for those who don’t look away from the darkest part of themselves. With ‘My Dark Thoughts Are Too Real’, he presents a concept album that merges hip-hop, horrorcore and dark trap into a whole that feels more like a personal reckoning than a recording. Compared to his previous EP ‘I Literally Love You Mixtape Vol. II’ the growth as an artist is clearly audible: Medi sounds more assured, the production is more layered and the conceptual thinking has gained in sharpness.
Productionally, the work moves in familiar genre territory: heavy 808 basslines, muffled melodies, and atmospheric layers that are deliberately suffocating. What sets Medi apart from many contemporaries is the theatrical structuring of the material. The three intermissions, ‘Demon’s Intermission’, ‘La Casa Del Diavolo (Interlude)’ and ‘Intermission 2’, function as breathing spaces that don’t allow the listener to escape but instead pull them deeper into the artist’s world. The choice of Italian titles alongside English ones is no affectation but a natural choice for an artist operating from his mother tongue and culture, giving the album a cinematic quality reminiscent of the Italian horror tradition.
Of the three intermissions, ‘Demon’s Intermission’ stands out as the most radical moment. The track places the listener somewhere deep in the vaults of an abandoned castle, where footsteps approach that seem to belong to nothing human. It is one of those rare tracks that conjures not so much a mood as a physical sensation, a discomfort that cannot simply be switched off. The songwriting elsewhere on the album moves between direct, confrontational passages about personal suffering and more poetic, surrealist lines that evoke inner chaos. ‘Carillon’ is particularly strong: the reference to a music box creates a sharp contrast between childlike innocence and adult pain. ‘Black Paradise’ manages to hold two seemingly contradictory feelings, longing and despair, simultaneously, without tipping into melodrama.
The album’s weakness is its length. Seventeen tracks is ambitious, but the intensity the genre demands also requires restraint. Tracks like ‘Infami e Troie’ and the outro ‘Il Ballo Degli Scheletri’ feel conceptually logical but emotionally less essential. A tighter tracklist would have given the peaks more weight. Those without an affinity for the dark aesthetic of horrorcore will also find that the uniform tone gradually loses its impact. Not easy listening, but honest. (7/10) (La Roccia Sound)
