Interviews About Albums: Nagual - How We Kept The Night Away (2026)
1. What can you say about this new EP?
How We Kept The Night Away is a very important release for us because it represents the first completely unreleased material we've recorded since And Once The Storm Is Over… in 2024. It is a four-track EP, around twenty minutes long, but we tried to make it feel like a complete journey rather than simply a collection of songs.
The four tracks are quite different from one another, but there is a common thread running through them: human fragility, mortality, relationships, loss, resilience and, ultimately, the possibility of finding some kind of meaning in all of it.
It is also a completely self-produced project, recorded at Elfo Studio with Alberto Callegari, who co-produced it with us. In many ways, it is a very honest representation of where Nagual is today, twenty years after the band began.
And, of course, the EP is closely connected to our twentieth anniversary and to the documentary Nagual – 20 Unfashionable Years, which tells the story of the band from 2006 to the present.
2. What is the meaning of the EP name?
The title comes from the final lines of Amalgam, the closing track:
The line comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson and immediately seemed to us to encapsulate what Nagual has been about for the last twenty years.
The "night" can mean many things: fear, uncertainty, failure, loneliness, ageing, loss, disappointment, or simply all the things that life throws at you. Music doesn't necessarily make those things disappear, but sometimes it gives us a way of getting through them.
We have been doing exactly that for twenty years: making music, playing together, arguing, laughing, getting frustrated, starting again and somehow continuing. So How We Kept The Night Away is really a metaphor for the band itself.
3. Which one is the composer of the EP?
There isn't one single composer. The songs are credited to Nagual, and the music is the result of the collective work of the band.
Different members may bring a riff, a melody, a lyric, a keyboard part or an arrangement, but the final songs emerge through the interaction of all six musicians.
That's something that has become increasingly important to us over the years. Nagual isn't really about one songwriter imposing a vision on the others. The songs are shaped by the people who play them, and that's also why the final recordings often become quite different from the ideas we started with.
As usual the lyrics heve been written by our singer/guitarist Luca Sabia.
4. If you had to pick one song, which one would you pick?
That's a difficult question because the four tracks represent different aspects of Nagual.
If I had to choose just one, though, I would probably say “Gilgamesh”, because it opens the EP and, in a way, contains many of the themes that run through the whole record.
It is loosely inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh and deals with one of the oldest human questions: our awareness that we are mortal.
Gilgamesh begins by seeking something that no human being can possess — physical immortality — and eventually understands that what survives us is not our body, but what we leave behind: our actions, our memories and the stories others tell about us.
For a band celebrating twenty years, that idea has a particular resonance.
5. Is there a special message in this EP? If there is, what is it?
I don't think there is a single message, and we don't particularly like telling people what they should think when they listen to our music.
But if there is a common idea, it is probably about acceptance.
We can't control everything. We can't avoid pain, ageing, loss or death. We can't always understand why people leave us, why relationships change or why things sometimes go wrong despite our best efforts.
But we can choose how we respond.
Gilgamesh is about accepting mortality. Hollow deals with absence and emotional disorientation. If Only looks at fragility, truth and the difficulty of moving through pain. And Amalgam ultimately turns towards the possibility of continuing the journey.
So perhaps the message is simply: we keep going.
We travel towards the day, and while we do, we sing.
6. Are there some lyrics that you'd love to share?
Definitely. The refrain from Gilgamesh is probably the most representative:
There is something almost celebratory and melancholic in those lines at the same time. We know that the night will eventually end, but we also know that so will our lives.
And then there is the closing thought from Amalgam:
Those two passages probably explain the title of the EP better than any interview answer could.
7. Which inspirations have been important for this album? Like musically or friends, family, someone you'd love to thank specially?
Musically, Nagual has always been influenced by a very broad spectrum of rock music. The roots are obviously in the great bands of the 1970s — Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and the heavier side of classic rock — but also in bands from the 1980s and 1990s such as Whitesnake, Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Alice in Chains.
On this EP there are also elements that perhaps weren't as obvious in some of our previous material. Hollow, for example, has some echoes of The Sisters of Mercy, The Cure and early U2, while the general approach remains rooted in the rock language we've developed over the years.
But inspiration doesn't only come from music. Literature has always been important to us. Gilgamesh comes from one of humanity's oldest surviving literary works, while the title Amalgam and consequently the EP itself were inspired by Emily Dickinson.
And then there are the people around us.
After twenty years, Nagual is much more than six musicians. There are friends, partners, former members, technicians, producers, photographers, filmmakers and people who have come to our concerts over the years. Some have stayed with us, some have disappeared from our lives, and some have returned.
I'd especially like to mention Alberto Callegari and Elfo Studio, where we have recorded so much of our music, and Davide Fortunati (DoP) and Claudio Bianchi (our drummer and film director), who made the documentary 20 Unfashionable Years with virtually no budget and very little time.
And, of course, the biggest thank-you goes to everyone who has continued to listen to us. Twenty years is a long time for a band that has never exactly followed the easiest or most fashionable route.
8. Something to add?
Yes: don't expect Nagual to become fashionable anytime soon!
The title of our documentary, 20 Unfashionable Years, is obviously ironic, but there is also a lot of truth in it. We've never been particularly interested in following trends. We've simply tried to make the music we wanted to make with the people we wanted to make it with.
Twenty years later, we're still here.
We've released six records, made countless mistakes, played some great concerts and some terrible ones, lost people along the way, gained others, changed our musical direction several times and somehow continued to write songs.
The new EP and the documentary are therefore not really a celebration of "success". They're a celebration of persistence.
We are still travelling towards the day, still singing, and still trying to keep the night away.
And for us, that's probably enough.
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