With La Nueva Normalidad, the Rome-based cult band Mushroom’s Patience comes together very deliberately as a tight three-piece: Raf Cerroni, also known as Dither Craf, who has been the artistic force and conceptual mind behind the band since its founding 40 years ago; J. Weber (of Austrian Nový Svět); and Léo Maury (of French Niedowierzanie). It seems I’m not the only one who sees this lineup as the perfect fit – a true supergroup for the band. Alongside their voices and compositions, each member brings a distinct instrumental signature to the album: Weber contributes, in addition to voice & lyrics, accordion, modular synth textures, harmonica, and electronics; Maury provides cello, bass, setar, analogue synth work, and brass/woodwind colors; while Dither Craf shapes the core with keyboards, guitars, percussion, and programming, and a guest appearance by Vinz Aquarian adds Kaoss Pad on “Never Really Anywhere.”

The manic-stoic play of diverse instruments that defines Niedowierzanie's unique aesthetic blends effortlessly with Mushroom’s Patience’s approach, especially notable since their first collaboration on Jellyfish in 2014. Since the completion of the Element-Tilogy with Water (2005), For the first time in 20 years, J. Weber returns to lend his unmistakable voice in two languages — German and English – a vocal presence that was set aside 20 years ago and has been missed ever since. To describe the spirit of the project that Dither Craf has been shaping since the ’80s, one would have to get poetic.

Mushroom’s Patience has always pursued the musical precision of an ambivalent feeling – one that refuses strict definition because even the person experiencing it cannot fully locate it. There’s a distinctive approach to pain, sadness, and their absurdities, often dismissed as “humorous” – a theatrical expression, stumbling with slapstick-like desperation, which some might interpret as an Italian attribute. Dither Craf has frequently played with imagery like headless chickens, freak-show aesthetics, and band photos featuring arms made of bananas. But looking deeper, you realize that these expressions are more than just black humor or references to artistic movements; the sting goes much deeper, revealing an intricate, layered meaning beneath the surface. Some songs operate on entirely different perceptual levels, with dreamlike images that shift from haunting unease to close, meditative observation. Towering buildings against fiery red sunsets turn into black stripes in the sight, and the world is reimagined: melancholy becomes music, rendered in exaggerated, monstrous forms. Even under sedation, the muscle still twitches, ready to strike.

 With La Nueva Normalidad, this intensity gains a new precision, both musically and lyrically. As a reviewer, it’s tricky to classify the music into genres or to compare it to other bands, so I won’t. Yet it’s impossible not to notice the album’s echoes of the ’70s and ’80s – with Dither Craf’s bass lines, glimmering guitar splashes, sharp beats, and the almost soulful, octave-jumping howls of Weber’s instinctive, impulsive vocal surges in some songs. These are images of shiny shoes, shoulder pads, and disco balls flashing briefly, only to vanish in the acid-warped mirror of Mushroom’s Patience's signature sound: an unsettling mix of broken post-industrial and psychotropic-mutated folklore that flickers always just out of focus.

Not only through the front-cover painting – civilization-integrated, normalized monsters rendered in naive-expressionist style by Dither Craf himself – but also through the album’s title, lyrics, and track names, the band adopts a notably political tone. Yet it’s not as simple as it might appear. While La Nueva Normalidad addresses the rise of monstrous forces – malignant double standards, mind-numbing dogmas, and egocentrism disguised as social norms that deceive and confuse – it is far from a straightforward social critique. Instead, the criticism takes shape through shifting, dazzling contradictions that inevitably turn inward. In all the lyrics, it is ultimately about personal failures, uncertainties (as in “König”), the weight of old wounds and abandoned dreams, and the compulsions that manipulate our actions and judgments, as in “Dolores y Soledad” and “Darklands.” Then the album confronts the most destructive parts of ourselves, as in “New Dawn–Old Scum.” This self-reflection is severe and cautionary, yet it always places a steady hand on the cheek, guiding us through the dark valley of modern times.