There are records you listen to politely while doing the dishes. Then there are records like Singing to Serpents, which feel like someone slipped something feral into your drink and locked you in a room with a poet who refuses to stop talking until sunrise.
Cello—also known in daylight hours as Marcello Valletta—has created a strange, twitching beast of a record. It doesn’t move in straight lines. It lurches, spirals, mutters to itself, and occasionally explodes in flashes of insight that feel like they came from somewhere deep inside the wiring of the human brain.
This isn’t a clean album. It’s not supposed to be.
From the first track, “Stay Here,” you’re thrown into a nervous monologue of love, desperation, lust, and existential road rage. The narrator is swerving through traffic—literally and emotionally—flipping off the cops while trying to hold onto a lover like she’s the last rope on a sinking ship. It’s romantic chaos. A man begging someone to stay while simultaneously detonating every emotional landmine within reach.
That tension becomes the album’s fuel.
“Elevate” struts in with icy swagger and philosophical smoke, sounding like the thoughts of someone who’s been awake for two days straight contemplating God, sex, ambition, and whether any of it matters at all. It’s hypnotic in the way insomnia can be hypnotic—your mind racing faster than your body can keep up.
Then comes the venom.
“Sucks to Be Used” spits bitterness like a cigarette burn on a love letter. The refrain—“It’s hard to be me, but it sucks to be you”—lands like a crooked grin from someone who knows they’re half villain, half victim. It’s ugly honesty, and ugly honesty is the only kind worth listening to.
Cello spends the middle stretch of the record wandering into spiritual territory with “Pray” and “Faith,” though these aren’t polite Sunday morning hymns. These are late-night conversations with God that start somewhere between desperation and arrogance. One moment he’s declaring himself a star, the next he’s begging for faith just to survive the noise inside his own skull.
“Cravings” and “Full Moon” push things into surreal territory—sensual, atmospheric, a little dangerous. These songs feel like neon reflections in a rain puddle at 3 a.m., when your mind is buzzing and every emotion seems three sizes too large for the room.
By the time the album drifts toward “Sleeping,” there’s a strange tenderness emerging from the wreckage. It’s the quiet after the emotional riot—the moment when someone finally admits they might actually care about the person they’ve been fighting with all night.
What makes Singing to Serpents fascinating is that Cello isn’t trying to look cool. He’s letting the cracks show. The ego, the doubt, the lust, the spiritual confusion—it’s all out there like evidence at the scene of a crime.
And in a music world filled with polished algorithms and plastic emotions, that kind of wild, unfiltered humanity feels like a rare and dangerous thing.
The serpents are real.
And Cello is brave—or crazy—enough to sing directly to them.
–Thomas Huntley
