Federico Nessi spent more than two decades making images and performing before the 2023 moment he describes as a personal Big Bang finally gave the music a name. Be My Wife takes that name from a David Bowie song on Low and a silent-era film by Max Linder. Raised between Miami and Buenos Aires and now based in Paris, Nessi built the first chapter through two EPs that later sat together as The Restless Pursuit To Deliver A Feeling. The work carried post-punk restraint, minimal-wave cool, crooner gravity, and a Latin sway that never quite settled into a single temperature. Earlier this year ROMBO covered the next step when “Miami Song” arrived, written while Nessi cared for his father in Miami and set against the city’s promised brightness. That single loosened the carefully lit architecture. Long Haul continues the loosening and then steps further into chemistry.
In freight terms a long haul is the stretch of route where the cargo has no remaining choice. Once the container is sealed the distance is fixed and the time simply has to be endured. The song treats an unexpected LSD trip the same way. Written the day after the experience, it arrives already inside the afterglow. The voice opens detached and slightly reverberant, watching neon resolve into drawings and fragments that bleed back and forth. “It’s all interconnected,” it notes, almost calmly, as if the observation has already been made and only needs recording. Then the admission arrives with dry clarity. “I guess it was just one spray. Oh, wait, maybe it was six.” The exact number no longer matters. “So I’m in for the ride.” The long haul has already begun, and the track’s job is to document the duration rather than argue with it.
A dry drum-machine pulse keeps constant time while acid-tinged arpeggios and a deep bass line move around it. The arrangement opens space for long instrumental tails where the boundaries thin and the mechanical rhythm starts to feel less like structure than like the floor under a body that has stopped checking its edges. When the voice multiplies into the repeated “We’re gone, gone, gone,” the phrase works less as climax than as a shared surrender. It functions as a mantra that lets the collective dissolve without requiring a further explanation. Later the delivery drops closer to speech. The reflection that surfaces is quiet and precise: there is more beauty and more meaning, and the most intelligent plan already sits inside your own head. The track does not rush to resolve that thought. It lets the electronics thin into a granular fade, the rhythmic references falling away until only the residue of the pulse remains.
The video, recorded and edited by Nessi himself in his Paris apartment, keeps the same tension between performance and ordinary space. A dark suit and bow tie, a silver mask that covers the upper face, glitter applied under the eyes. The camera stays fixed and frontal. Jump cuts and sudden shifts in posture break continuity while the body continues the theatrical gestures, climbing the stairs, approaching the lens, arms open. Smoke fills the room. Colored points of light appear. The kitchen, the yellow chairs, the glass-block wall become a stage for the same perceptual drift the song describes. Additional production and mixing by Maria Benz leaves the surface exact without adding polish that would contradict the day-after origin. The creative direction remains precise. The project has always treated glamour and raw candour as the same temperature. Here the temperature is chemical, and the domestic room is large enough to hold both the performance and the confession.
What gives Long Haul its weight is the way the theatricality and the naming occupy the same frame. The persona that once carefully lit its stages now performs the loss of control inside a single room, then steps back far enough to state the dose and the insight that followed. The earlier single had already shown Nessi willing to let the architecture loosen. This one treats the loosening as the point. Live a little. Have some fun. Fade away. The long haul is simply the time it takes for that instruction to finish.
