Messa

The Arc of Messa

The pivots — what forced Messa to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Belfry Drone-Jazz Roots

   For their 2016 debut Belfry, the band recorded in a cold northern Italian studio with producer Filippo Buono. Piccolo bypassed standard metal pedalboards to plug his guitar straight into vintage tube heads. This setup forced Bianchin to sing around the massive, warm low-end frequencies rather than trying to scream over them. The result is a sluggish, black-metal-adjacent drone record that occasionally gets hijacked by an unexpected Rhodes piano solo.

2. 02

   The Fender Rhodes Water-Logging

   With 2018's Feast for Water, the band shifted their primary writing instrument from the guitar to the electric piano. This structural pivot came from a deliberate choice to explore fluid, jazz-infused dynamics instead of dry stoner riffs. The rhythms became syncopated and the guitars retreated into the background to act as ambient textures. You can hear this shift immediately in the jazz-club-at-the-end-of-the-world atmosphere of tracks like Leah.

3. 03

   Mediterranean Instrumentation Shift

   Before recording Close in 2022, the band toured extensively through Mediterranean regions and began collecting traditional folk instruments. They brought the oud, the saz, and the duduk into the studio to clash with their heavy amplifiers. This expansion broke them out of the standard Anglo-American blues scale entirely. It turned their sound into a massive, desert-burnt fusion of heavy doom and traditional Eastern instrumentation.

Influences

• Windhand — Messa has cited Dorthia Cottrell's vocal delivery as a massive influence on how to sing over modern doom riffs. You hear this in the way Bianchin holds long, mournful notes over massive walls of fuzz without getting lost in the mix. It is the blueprint for their early vocal arrangements.
• Paul Chain — The band constantly references the eccentric godfather of Italian doom metal as their cultural foundation. You can hear his dark, occult atmosphere and loose jam-heavy guitar solos all over Belfry. It is the DNA of Italian metal.
• Bohren & der Club of Gore — Messa cited the German doom-jazz outfit during the promotional cycle for Feast for Water. The slow, dripping tempos and smoky saxophone lines on that album are a direct nod to this influence. They took the pitch-black jazz lounge vibe and cranked it through a fuzz pedal.
• Dead Can Dance — The band's shift toward Mediterranean folk elements on Close is rooted in Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry's catalog. The microtonal acoustic string work on songs like Orphalese mirrors the atmospheric world-music fusion of Into the Labyrinth. It is the source of their non-Western melodies.
• Chelsea Wolfe — Messa opened for her on European dates early in their career and have cited her acoustic-to-heavy dynamics. The stark, minimalist folk passages that suddenly explode into crushing drone-metal walls on Close are directly modeled on this style. It is the art of the sudden dynamic drop.