The name translates from Latin as “iron of the stars”, meteoric iron, the kind pulled from the sky and hammered into ritual blades by ancient Egyptians and Tibetan monks. It is not a subtle title for a not-subtle band. ZU, the Roman trio who have spent twenty-five years grinding the edges off every genre they’ve touched, lean fully into the mythology on Ferrum Sidereum, their seventeenth album and the most ambitious thing they have ever committed to tape.
The line-up is unchanged: Luca T. Mai on baritone saxophone, Massimo Pupillo on bass and 12-string guitar, Tomas Järmyr on drums and percussion. Three people. Eighty minutes. Recorded live to tape in Bologna over the course of a year, with Grammy-winning engineer Marc Urselli behind the desk, the first time ZU have worked with a producer, the result is both the most refined and the most uncontained record they’ve made. The contradiction is intentional.
“Kether” opens the album and immediately sets the terms of engagement. The title comes from Kabbalah, the crown, the highest of the ten sephirot, and the music carries that sense of reaching upward from somewhere ancient and earthbound. What begins as a locked-in percussive groove, heavy with tribal undertow, slowly fractures and reforms around Pupillo’s bass, which alternately growls and presses like something geological. Mai’s saxophone cuts across it in slanted phrases, not quite free and not quite contained, threading through the rhythm like smoke through latticework. By the time the 12-string guitar enters with its bright arpeggiated runs, the song has become something genuinely difficult to name.
The rest of the album moves through similarly strange territory. “La Donna Vestita Di Sole”, the woman clothed in the sun, another figure drawn from sacred tradition, builds from near-silence into a churning mass of interlocking parts, one of the record’s more hypnotic stretches. “Fuoco Saturnio” has a harder, more angular quality, the bass leading with something approaching metal riffing before the saxophone dismantles the structure from within. “A.I. Hive Mind” is the album’s most unsettling cut, grinding and fractured in a way that feels genuinely contemporary in its unease. And “The Celestial Bull and the White Lady,” the double album’s centrepiece in feel if not necessarily in position, draws out the tension between density and space that runs through everything here.
What distinguishes Urselli’s production is how clearly it renders all of this. ZU’s previous records could sound thick to the point of opacity; here the three instruments sit in their own spaces, the bass wide and low, the saxophone bright and forward, the drums vivid without crowding. You can follow each player individually even when they are all moving at cross-purposes. It rewards headphone listening in particular, where the spatial separation becomes a compositional element in itself.
If there is a reservation, it is simply one of scale. Eighty minutes is a long time to spend in this particular headspace, and the album doesn’t always move with enough urgency to justify every minute. A few passages in the double album’s second half feel like they are circling rather than developing. But this is a minor complaint against something that achieves, more often than not, what only very few records at this length manage: the sense that the music needed exactly this much room and no less.
Standout tracks: Kether, La Donna Vestita Di Sole, The Celestial Bull and the White Lady
