Nemico Immaginario is the sound of Fanciullino taking the idea of a band back to its most fragile, volatile core: two people in a room, a guitar, a drum kit, nothing to hide behind. Born from the encounter between Andrea Del Bravo and Davide Cappai, the duo treats this minimal setup not as a limitation but as an ethical position - if something happens, it must pass through bodies, sticks, strings, skin. Every hit and chord is traceable to a gesture, to the microsecond in which one player chooses to lean in or pull away. The “imaginary enemy” of the title could be anything - the inertia of habit, the clichés of genre, the temptation to over-arrange - but it is faced and dismantled with the most direct weapons they have: tension, risk, and the refusal to add even one unnecessary layer.

Composed between 2022 and 2025 and recorded in Pisa in the summer of 2025 together with Nicolò Caltabellotta, the album gathers 20 tracks that behave less like a sequence of songs and more like a constellation of encounters. The structure is broad and porous by design: there is enough room for abrupt bursts and awkward silences, for sudden alignment and deliberate missteps, for the kind of tiny timing shifts that only emerge when two musicians spend a long time listening to each other at close range. Ideas recur in altered form, a fill reappears as a question mark, a voicing is stripped down to a shard, as if the record were documenting an evolving conversation rather than presenting a fixed repertoire. This is music that insists on existing “in the relationship” - in the unstable air between a beat and a chord, in the invisible feedback loop where one movement immediately redraws the other’s next choice.

That relational focus is sharpened by the duo’s background. Originally rooted in hardcore punk and emo-punk, Fanciullino carry with them a sense of urgency that never quite goes away, even as the music moves into more open and undefined territory. You can hear the residue of that scene in the insistence on brevity, in the refusal to romanticize virtuosity, in the way intensity is treated as a matter of conviction rather than volume alone. Yet Nemico Immaginario is not a genre exercise or a nostalgic nod; it feels more like a document of what happens when those formative impulses are allowed to leak into spaces they were never designed for. The riffs are less about power chords than about contour and attack; the drumming often works as a counter-voice rather than a metronome, shifting the ground under the guitar instead of simply supporting it.