Italian singer-songwriter Claudio Conti has released ‘Verità’, the first single from his forthcoming fourth solo album, Kierkegaarden, due November 11, 2026. Self-released and recorded during the summer of 2025, the album marks a significant departure for Conti as his first full-length project written and recorded entirely in Italian.
At the heart of ‘Verità’ lies the elusive nature of fate and the quiet significance of the choices that shape a life. Drawing on the idea of “sliding doors”, Conti explores how seemingly inconsequential moments, missed encounters and alternative decisions can alter the course of events. Rather than focusing on one defining turning point, the song considers the small details that might have led to an entirely different outcome. Its invocation of truth becomes an expression of nostalgia, driven by the impossible desire to revisit the past and imagine how things might have unfolded differently.
Conti describes the track as an exploration of the elusive, with its narrative rooted in the fatalistic details that can change the direction of a life. As he explains, “The track explores the concept of the elusive, letting ‘sliding doors’ take center stage. The entire narrative unfolds around everyday, fatalistic details that altered the course of events; the invocation of truth thus becomes a deep, nostalgic longing to rewind the tape, reshape the sequence of the past, and rewrite a different ending”.
Musically, ‘Verità’ gives this sense of recollection a rich, tangible character. Acoustic guitar is joined by English horn and harpsichord, while drums, bass and Conti’s vocals complete an arrangement that balances ornate instrumentation with an intimate emotional core. The resulting sound draws on baroque pop, using intricate textures and a nostalgic atmosphere to reinforce the song’s reflections on memory, loss and the passage of time.
The creative process behind Kierkegaarden began with an exercise in reduction. Having written around 50 songs, Conti gradually narrowed the material down to the compositions that would ultimately form the album. The selected songs were developed from home-recorded guitar-and-vocal sketches in collaboration with his sound engineer and arranger. Musicians were introduced as the arrangements evolved, allowing each composition to find its own identity and instrumentation rather than conforming to a predetermined band setup.
The album’s title refers to a cherished place of memory, where people and circumstances that have long since disappeared can nevertheless remain vivid and tangible. This tension between absence and presence informs the record as a whole, balancing the recognition that innocence cannot be recovered and time cannot be halted against the enduring power of memory to bring the past into the present.
Conti’s musical world has been shaped by a longstanding fascination with baroque pop, jangle pop and the psychedelic sounds of 1960s Los Angeles and San Francisco. Songwriters including Gene Clark, Ray Davies, Bill Fay and Andy Partridge have also influenced his approach, which combines classic pop craftsmanship with emotional complexity and close attention to detail.
His solo career began with Saltworks, recorded in 2013 and released through Seahorse Recordings to acclaim from Italian music publications. He followed it with Garnet Dusk in 2017, a deeply personal album that attracted international critical attention, and Frail Boats, released independently on April 17, 2020, during the global pandemic. Earlier, Conti had led the project band Magic Salad, writing the music and lyrics for its sole album, Every Forest Has Its Shadow.
With Kierkegaarden, Conti revisits the emotional concerns that have run through his work while embracing a new language and a carefully considered sonic palette. ‘Verità’ offers the first glimpse of a songwriter preoccupied with the fragile boundaries between memory and reality, and the moments that continue to haunt us long after their consequences have become clear.
Its longing to rewind the tape is ultimately an acknowledgement of an impossibility: the past can be revisited in memory, but never truly changed. In the space between what happened and what might have been, Conti finds the emotional centre of his new work, setting the scene for an album that explores the enduring pull of lost possibilities.
