thasup

The Arc of thasup

The pivots — what forced thasup to reinvent.

1. 01

   Rebranding and Pop Expansion

   Shortening the moniker to thasup and toying with the yungest Moonstar moniker, Mattei hit the big-budget studio circuit to challenge Italian pop conventions. He dropped c@ra++ere s?ec!@le in 2022, retaining his fractured typographic titles while welcoming heavyweight collaborators from across the radio dial. Instead of dumbing down his beats for guest stars, he forced singers like Tiziano Ferro and Coez into his hyperactive vocal spaces. The result was a polished, sprawling 20-track monster that demonstrated his production signatures could scale to stadium size without losing their frantic core.

2. 02

   The yungest Moonstar Purge

   Exhausted by the pressure of high-stakes pop mechanics and industry expectations, Mattei slammed the brakes and retreated entirely into solitude. In mid-2024, he dropped sFaCioLaTe miXTaPe under his yungest Moonstar persona, rejecting features, polished commercial mixes, and radio singles outright. Written, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely alone, the 21 tracks strip away the glossy exterior for blown-out, unfiltered rap energy and aggressive tempos. It served as a violent palate cleanser, proving he could still turn in a raw, unhinged tape without an army of A&Rs breathing down his neck.

3. 03

   The Family Altar

   Instead of chasing another trap cycle, Mattei pivoted immediately toward spiritual soul and blood harmonies by linking up with his sister, Mara Sattei. Closing out 2024 with Casa Gospel, released through his own imprint Thasup s.r.l., the sibling duo traded hyper-digital trap antics for warm chord progressions and choral arrangements. His wild vocal processing took a backseat to genuine dynamic range, leaning into Sattei's classic phrasing while keeping his weird rhythmic instincts intact. It was a massive sonic shift that finally separated his work from the teen-idol bedroom producer stigma.

Influences

• Salmo — Salmo kickstarted Mattei's career by taking his beat for the 2017 smash "Perdonami" and mentoring the young producer inside Machete Empire. You hear that abrasive, punk-infused drive under thasup's hardest trap rhythms and clipped kick patterns. The kid learned how to command an industry room without ever selling out his weirdness directly from Salmo's playbook.
• Neffa — Before Mattei was even born, Neffa was pioneering melodic hip-hop and soul in Italy with Sangue Misto and his solo records, setting up the exact path Mattei used to pivot between singing and rapping. Mattei paid direct tribute by pulling Neffa into the studio for their massive 2021 rework single "uNa DiReZioNe giUsTa." You can hear Neffa's classic Italian R&B cadences buried underneath all those hyper-processed vocal layers on 236451.
• Fabri Fibra — Fabri Fibra literally laid the foundational blue-collar rap cadences in Italy that Mattei grew up dissecting before eventually collaborating with him. You hear Fibra's ruthless, punchy syllable-stacking in the rapid-fire rhyme schemes scattered across sFaCioLaTe miXTaPe. Fibra proved you could rap with caustic, oddball eccentricity in Italian and still break mainstream records.
• Travis Scott — Mattei has routinely cited Scott's dark, psychedelic vocal processing as a foundational blueprint for how he treats his own voice as an instrument rather than a clean microphone feed. Scott's heavy use of distorted Auto-Tune and chopped pitch-shifts is all over the production tricks on 236451 and c@ra++ere s?ec!@le. It taught him to turn the vocal booth into a hardware synthesizer.
• XXXTentacion — Mattei came of age in the mid-2010s SoundCloud rap boom, pointing to the late Florida rapper's distorted, lo-fi crossover experiments as proof that genres were dead. You hear that influence in the jagged guitar passages, raw angst, and blown-out digital clipping across sFaCioLaTe miXTaPe. It gave him permission to jump from pop-punk guitars to screeching 808s inside the very same two-minute track.