BKOTR

Blue Kid On The Rock is the recording project of Italian producer and singer Pierpaolo Abbatiello.

Pierpaolo grew up in the witch-haunted, history-rich Benevento. He left at 18, and spent the next two decades circling a handful of coastlines and riverbeds: Naples, Dublin three times over, San Francisco, Rome, London. He has released 19 tracks since 2017, mostly EPs and singles written, produced, and mastered alone on a laptop with a dynamic mic and Ableton.

The productions take their cues from 00s art rock, 10s chillwave, and 20s melodic electronic acts like Jan Blomqvist, Ben Böhmer, CRi, Tourist, and French79, but Pierpaolo sings over them in a low, unhurried baritone closer to Matt Berninger, now and then reaching for higher pitches and falsettos that betray his Radiohead-ish upbringing and Broken Social Scene love. The synths are hazy and vaguely 80s, what he calls “an 80s DNA left out in the sun.”

The lyrics return to a numbed, media-drunk world and the search for a silver line in it, to absent fathers, and to love as something you endure. Under all of it is the home he left and moved back to in 2025, going out and coming back: The Way The Ocean Waves.

In execution the catalog wanders, synthwave to ambient to a lone techno experiment, plus a cover of Califone’s “Funeral Singers” routed through Sylvan Esso. Outside notice has been modest so far: an interview in Starry Magazine, a mention from Italy’s Parkett Channel, sporadic radio in Greece, Argentina, and Italy.

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