A Review of 2heart2crash‘s Latest 8 Track Masterpiece - ‘22’
- Apr 8
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 9
Alessio Grancini has lived a genuinely fascinating life, and all of it feeds into this record. Born and raised in Italy, his passion for music was ignited by witnessing formative live shows in his hometown — international bands, extreme mosh pits, the kind of raw collective energy that rewires your brain permanently.
He went on to front Edge in Imola, Emilia Romagna, whose debut single racked up over 6,500 views on BlankTV, one of the biggest DIY platforms for underground and punk music. Then came the leap: he and his bandmates moved to Los Angeles to immerse themselves in the scene at a professional level. Alongside music, Grancini pursued architecture and engineering, expanded into visual and multimedia work, and eventually landed in San Francisco — in a hacker house near North Beach, surrounded by tech founders and startup culture. That last environment is where ‘22’ was born, and it leaves its fingerprints everywhere.
Recording entirely in his room over the course of a year, 2heart2crash built an eight-track, 20-minute, 20-second debut that is dark, danceable, and completely riveting. Post-punk, new-wave, and synth-pop crash together under a goth sensibility that feels simultaneously classic and urgently contemporary. The album’s central obsession — the anxiety of digital life, the strange intimacy of devices knowing you better than people do, the way texting carries its own rhythms and expectations and quiet dread — is genuinely one of the more original thematic frameworks an alternative record has explored in recent memory.
‘Acid’, ‘Obsessed’, ‘Psycho’ — the track titles alone tell you the emotional register here. But what makes ‘22’ more than just atmosphere is the self-awareness running underneath it. “This reflection isn’t meant to make me darker,” Grancini has said. “It’s simply awareness — understanding how my heart works and how it connects, or sometimes fails to connect, with others.” That honesty gives the album real depth beneath the distortion and the dance floor pulse.
The visual direction from Zeo Zhang and VFX work from Cole Daly — whose credits include Katy Perry and PinkPantheress — rounds out a fully realised creative vision that announces 2heart2crash as one of the most distinctive voices emerging from the alternative underground right now. Genuinely thrilling stuff.
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