Interview: Getting to Know The Valley

Italian alternative/progressive metal band, The Valley, recently released their new single, ‘Like I Never Lived (Without You)’. In this interview, we get to know them a little better.

1. Hello! Thank you for taking the time to chat to us. First things first, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started.

MATTIA (GUITARIST): Hello and thank you for having us on GBHBL! We are The Valley, we come from Liguria, in the north-west of Italy, and we are a four members crew composed of Alessandro on drums, Eros on vocals, Simone on bass and me, Mattia, on guitars. We started playing together around the twenties, but we officially exist as a band since 2025, when we signed with Volcano records and released our first three singles.

2. Someone comes to you and asks you to sum up what kind of music you play – what do you tell them?

MATTIA (GUITARIST): We play a music that can be classified under the alt-prog genre, but to be completely honest we don’t like labels very much, since we try to be original and somehow out of stereotypes. We blend post-metal music with odd time signatures and melodic approach, and we hope that this marriage of different sensibilities creates some sort of tension that is fresh and engaging for the listener as much as it is for us to play.

3. What’s currently keeping you busy? A new album/EP/single release? A new video? Playing live, or planning ahead?

EROS (SINGER): At the moment we are promoting our new single “Like I Never Lived (Without You)”. It’s the first single of the year and the fourth release with Volcano Records. The track was recorded in our private studio in Italy and then produced in the United States by the legendary Fab Grossi and mastered by the amazing Pete Doell. Our promotional tour will start soon: it kicks off on Friday, March 13 in Savona and will run until July 9, covering a good part of Northern Italy, with more dates currently being booked. We also released the official video for the track on YouTube, which is performing very well, and the streaming numbers are really taking off, also thanks to this special production.

4. What is about this current period that is particularly exciting for you?

MATTIA (GUITARIST): We are very excited for the recent announce of our LINLWY tour, which will touch different venues in the North of Italy. This will be the occasion to promote our latest single “Like I Never Lived (Without You)” and we cannot wait to bring our music on stage. Composing and recording is great, but nothing can beat the energy of people singing and yelling before the stage when you are playing your songs for them.

5. Tell me about the work that has gone into making it a reality and what it means to you.

MATTIA (GUITARIST): There’s a lot going on to make a musical project work, come out from rehearsal space and become something real. First of all, we have worked pretty hard on playing tightly together, creating a chemical between us that would translate both into recordings and live performances. And obviously you have to believe in your project, invest time and money into it and have the will to bring it forward. And this must be the same for all the members of the band – not the easiest task! But if you have the luck to find the right people to work with and the will to persevere and chase your dream together, you finally start to see some results, and this means everything. Create and play together is much more than a hobby for us, it is a way to express ourselves and our personality, so The Valley is really an important part of our life, and this is the case for all four of us.

6. Making music and being creative can be a very positive experience and can be very good for the mind. In what way has making music had a positive impact on your mental health?

EROS (SINGER): Each of us, in one way or another, needs to step outside the structures we build around ourselves—structures that come partly from social conventions, partly from a sense of duty, and partly from many other pressures of everyday life. I believe that for our mental well-being it’s essential to have an irrational side of our mind that can express itself freely, outside of predefined patterns and without being tied to any form of obligation, like work or family responsibilities. For some people this might be painting, for others sport, and for others religion. In our case, it’s making music: that’s our outlet. Personally, it makes me feel good regardless of what the real return of creating art might be. It isn’t my job, and even if one day it became my job, it still wouldn’t really feel like one, because it’s the non-rational side of me expressing itself. For that reason, I would never place it in the category of duties or tasks.

7. It can also be incredibly challenging, more so in the modern times. What have been some challenging aspects of making music and how have you overcome them?

EROS (SINGER): One of our main characteristics as a band—actually even before that, as a group of people—is that we’ve created a kind of microcosm. All four of us share the same mindset and, very naturally, we decided that what truly matters to us is making our own music. So we stay in our rehearsal room and focus on creating exactly what we feel like creating. When we finally feel ready to show it to the world and stop being self-referential, it’s because we’re genuinely satisfied with what we’ve made. There’s no pressure or expectation—just the pure process of creating.

8. How do you handle the online aspects of being in a band? Having to put out content constantly, promoting across several different social media platforms, and having your success measured in likes and follows?

MATTIA (GUITARIST): We have the luck of having Simone in our band, who’s not only a great bass player, but takes the duty of all of our social media on every platform. It is quite a big work, that you have to take care of every day in order to be interesting, be heard and seen. But we think that socials are a means and not an end, that sure it is important to grow a fanbase on Instagram or Facebook, but eventually success cannot be measured with likes and follows and. An applause from a fan under the stage, during a live show, is far more important and rewarding than a like.

9. How do you make this part of things enjoyable, and fulfilling, for yourself?

MATTIA (GUITARIST): Social platforms can be useful indeed, because you can reach your fanbase all over the world with the latest news, keep them updated about what’s going on with your plans and create a bond with people. If you think at it as a way to promote your music and find more people, it can act like an extension of what you’re trying to communicate with your music, and this is certainly and enjoyable thing. We try to consider social media as a megaphone to spread our music even louder and further.

10. Speaking directly to listeners – what would you ask they do to help support you?

EROS (SINGER): Years ago I was at a concert by Samuele Bersani, a fairly well-known Italian singer-songwriter—completely different from our style—but what struck me was that during his show he said he never asks the audience to clap, because it’s up to them, using their own free will, to decide whether to do it and whether the artist deserves it. That idea really stayed with me, so we don’t ask our listeners for anything. It’s entirely up to them what they want to do with our music—whether they want to share it, spend an evening with us under the stage, or just enjoy it. Beyond all the commercial rules behind a release, when one of our tracks comes out, it belongs to everyone, and they’re free to make of it what they will.

11. Outside of music, what do you like to do to relax?

MATTIA (GUITARIST): Music is really the biggest passion of my life: I love listening, playing, recording and mixing it. But there’s a lot of other things that I like and relaxes me, and eventually become a source of inspiration for the music that I write. For example I love philosophy, which is the very subject I choose for my graduate studies – thinkers I love are Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas. I also like reading books and one of my favourite writers of all time is Enrico Rocci, an Italian novelist that I’ve been lucky enough to know in person and become friend with, whose obscure and thrilling stories I find very inspiring. I also like movies and TV series, and if I would have to mention only one filmmaker I would name David Lynch. But a walk in the green can also be extremely calming and relaxing, and in the end even the sing of a bird can be an inspiration for an odd time signature riff to bring into a new song!

12. Where can people find you?

SIMONE (BASS PLAYER): Our music is available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music. You can watch our band’s videos on our label’s YouTube channel, Volcano Records—just search for the label name along with the song title. Here’s our LinkTree, where you’ll find everything you need: social profiles, music, and videos.

https://linktr.ee/_thevalleyband_

If you’d like to get in touch or just have a chat, our main social platform is Instagram: @thevalley.band. As for merchandise, we’re working on something truly original and meaningful, and for now, it’s only available at our live shows.