Product Description
2 In Darkness USHK92638102
3 Give Your Heart to Me USHK92638103
DELREI feat. Collin Hegna (of Federale, formerly of Brian Jonestown Massacre)
Genres: Gothic Americana, Psychedelic Rock, Indie Rock
After 2023’s Projekt release of the iconic future western album Desolation And Radiation, DELREI’s Alessandro Mercanzin returns from the red desert with this seductive collaboration of slow-burning tension. On Wicked Wicked Ways the Italian guitarist joins forces with Portland, Oregon’s veteran vocalist Collin Hegna of Federale; the three brand new tracks’ dreamlike atmosphere sees desire, danger and fatalism blur into one! Blues, psych-rock, gothic americana, and dark country converge carried by Hegna’s hauntingly magnetic voice and Mercanzin’s reverberating “Lynch-Badalamenti” electric guitar twangs immersed in shadowy, atmospheric tones.
Post-Punk.com wrote about DELREI’s debut, “It’s a territory where the nights are awash with an eerie chill, a land of crimson horizons drenched in melancholy solitude. Each note summons forth an ethereal spectre that draws you into a hypnotic trance, unveiling an arid yet mesmerizing world of forlorn solitude. This is the new West.”
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DELREI (Alessandro Mercanzin): guitars, bass, synth, & drum programming
Collin Hegna: vocals & mellotron
⟡ “Wicked Wicked Ways” talks about a past that continues to haunt. It centers on a dangerous relationship where allure and desire coexist with fear, suspicion, and the awareness that certain behaviors keep causing pain. Wicked wicked ways, all your wicked wicked ways…..
⟡ “In Darkness” seems as if David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti crafted an uncovered continuation of LOST HIGHWAY as a song unfolding somewhere between a flickering neon motel sign and an endless desert road at night. The track moves like a shadow through the dark, seductive and unsettling: cinematic spirals both familiar and disturbingly new. Would you join the ride?
⟡ “Give Your Heart to Me” describes a dark love, marked by pain, control, and the impossibility of breaking free with an almost ritualistic and cursed tone. In the middle section there’s a spoken part called the “Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia:” the Hymn asks Hestia, goddess of the hearth and of domestic order, to welcome and bless the song that will follow.
As if that wasn’t enough, DELREI will be touring Europe in April 2026 with dates across Germany, Austria, Croatia, France, Belgium, Italy, and Hungary. Follow them on social media and if you can don’t miss the chance to experience DELREI live!
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
There is a particular kind of darkness that belongs neither to horror nor to sadness. It is the darkness of memory when it refuses to leave. Not dramatic enough to become a tragedy, not distant enough to become a lesson. DELREI’s Wicked Wicked Ways inhabits precisely that territory: a twilight landscape where desire and regret continue their endless dance, stepping on each other’s feet while pretending to be in love.
Behind the project is Italian musician Alessandro Mercanzin, who has steadily developed a distinctive aesthetic that draws from post-punk, darkwave, Americana, and cinematic atmospheres without fully settling into any of them. His music often feels suspended between geographical and emotional coordinates, as if the European imagination were dreaming of the American frontier through the lens of a sleepless night. On this three-track EP, that vision becomes more focused and more confident.
The presence of Collin Hegna, known for his work with the legendary Portland collective Wovenhand, proves particularly significant. His voice carries a weathered gravity that perfectly suits these songs. Rather than dominating the material, he inhabits it like a ghost returning to a familiar house, recognizing every room yet feeling slightly unsettled by the passage of time.
The title track opens the EP with a slow-burning meditation on toxic attraction. Mercanzin avoids the temptation to portray emotional dysfunction as glamorous. Instead, the song captures the uncomfortable coexistence of fascination and self-preservation. The arrangement moves with deliberate restraint, allowing guitars, bass, and synthesizers to create an atmosphere that feels simultaneously intimate and expansive. One can almost picture a horizon at dusk, beautiful enough to admire, dangerous enough to avoid. Human beings, naturally, tend to walk straight toward it.
What distinguishes DELREI from many contemporary darkwave projects is his understanding of space. These songs are not overcrowded with effects or nostalgic references. Every instrument appears carefully placed, as if the silence surrounding the notes were as important as the notes themselves. The result is music that breathes. It lingers rather than rushes.
The brief instrumental interlude “In Darkness” functions as more than a transition. Lasting little more than a minute, it serves as a corridor between worlds. Rather than developing into a full composition, it presents a fragment, a glimpse through a partially opened door. Such restraint is refreshing in an era where every idea is expected to justify its existence through maximum exposure. Sometimes mystery remains the most effective special effect.
The EP reaches its emotional center with “Give Your Heart to Me”. Here the themes of attachment, dependency, and surrender acquire an almost ceremonial quality. The inclusion of a spoken passage inspired by an ancient hymn introduces an unexpected spiritual dimension. What could have remained a simple tale of doomed romance becomes something broader: a reflection on the rituals through which human beings seek comfort, meaning, and protection, even when walking willingly into situations they know may wound them.
Throughout the record, one senses an artist increasingly comfortable with ambiguity. There are traces of post-punk’s emotional austerity, dark Americana’s expansive horizons, and dreamlike cinematic textures, yet none of these influences become dominant. Mercanzin assembles them into a language of his own, one that feels less concerned with genre than with mood.
At barely nine minutes in length, Wicked Wicked Ways could easily be dismissed as a minor release. That would be a mistake. Some works function not as destinations but as signposts, revealing the direction an artist intends to travel. This EP suggests that DELREI is refining a world rather than merely writing songs: a world populated by restless hearts, empty roads, half-remembered promises, and shadows that seem surprisingly reluctant to disappear.
The most compelling aspect of Wicked Wicked Ways is that it never treats darkness as an aesthetic accessory. Instead, it approaches it as a condition of human experience, one that can be unsettling, seductive, illuminating, and occasionally absurd all at once. Much like memory itself, the songs refuse to stay where they are placed. They follow the listener home. Rating: 4/5 -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From Sodapop
Delrei’s return takes shape with three tracks crafted in collaboration with Colin Hegna—formerly of Federale and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Colin Hegna’s vocals lend a brighter, more theatrical quality to the Western-noir atmosphere, literally surfing over sinister landscapes where one can easily picture the duo idly flipping coins across their knuckles. The sound is swelling and searing, followed by an even darker interlude before returning with the third track, “Give Your Heart To Me.” Love, death, a burning landscape in the distance—all the requisite tropes of the genre and the world itself are present. And yet, it works—evolving almost into a cross between Chris Isaak and the character Budd, played by Michael Madsen. -Vasco Viviani
Reviews Editor –
From Rockerilla 548
Alessandro Mercanzin, known as Delrei, made a strong impression with his debut album; his compelling desert blues with gothic undertones left a lasting impact. He returns with this three-track EP, featuring the collaboration — on vocals and mellotron — of the leader of Federale, an American band inspired by Western soundtracks. Evocative tracks that create the perfect climax to transport the listener into the cinematic imagination so dear to many of us. WESTERN GOTH. -Giancarlo Bolther
Reviews Editor –
From Rockerilla 549
It arrives with the velvet tread of one who knows sin—and caresses it without haste. Delrei weaves guitar lines steeped in reverb and dust, while Collin Hegna’s voice descends—low, murky, insinuating—like black smoke drifting over warm skin. It is a slow, carnal fever, driven by a dirty blues that seduces and wounds, leaving a scent of desire and menace hanging in the air. More than an EP, it feels like a nocturnal talisman: a handful of tracks, a single incantation, a long trail of shadows, blood, and silk—where the darkness finds its rhythm and allure becomes destiny. There is a vicious grace in this slowed-down pace—the pace of a cursed jukebox, of a motel waiting just around the bend. -Mirco Salvadori
Reviews Editor –
From Sun 13
Following his 2023 LP, Desolation and Radiation, Alessandro Mercanzin returns under the DELREI banner with the three-track EP, Wicked Wicked Ways.
Featuring vocalist Collin Hegna (Federale, The Brian Jonestown Massacre), these songs are desert-inspired Americana laced with cigarettes and whiskey. Think Chris Isaak and The Black Angels trading blows. But with DELREI at the helm, the journey darkens the further one delves.
This is rock music built for soundtracks. All humid guitars and western echoes that reach far and wide, as Wicked Wicked Ways sees DELREI thrive in the vast lands.
Reviews Editor –
From Off Topic
Remember back in 2023 I told you about Delrei’s album Desolation and Radiation, released by Projekt Records, a historic Portland label that’s been active in the dark, wave, and ambient scene for forty years? If you don’t, you can read it again here. I’m announcing that, after two years on stages across Italy and Europe, Delrei’s new EP will be released on March 13, 2026, under the same label, in collaboration with Collin Hegna, former member of Federale and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Three songs in total, the first of which, “Wicked Wicked Ways,” is accompanied by an official music video, confirming the songwriting talent of Delrei, born Alessandro Mercanzin, a master at evoking the atmospheres of Westerns and visionary artists like Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, and Quentin Tarantino. Notes reminiscent of desert sand, speaking of loneliness and an extremely dystopian future: in light of what’s happening in the world, they even sound prophetic in some ways.
As is well known, talents resonate and resonate, so much so that Collin Hegna’s voice seems to fit perfectly with Delrei’s melodies, for the warmth it exudes and the aura of mystery that surrounds it. The EP’s distinctive elements are once again the dark and intriguing riffs, the at times ghostly sound, and the reverberations that paint dramatic scenes. The three songs from the EP will be featured as bonus tracks on a CD reissue of Desolation and Radiation by Go Down Records, which also released the album on vinyl in July. Starting April 11th, Delrei and his band will be performing on various stages in Italy and Europe, starting in Buja (UD), where they’ll play at the Auditorium della Biblioteca, before moving on to Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and France, before returning to Turin’s Blah Blah on April 26th. For a taste of his live prowess, I’d also like to point out the album Curtarock Festival, also released by Projekt Records and recorded live at the Curtarock Festival, where Mercanzin played, accompanied by Giovanni Beghetto on drums and Davide Dalla Pria on bass, two veterans of the Italian underground scene, as the opening act for The Black Heart Procession. For those who live in the Marghera area, Delrei will also perform on Saturday, March 14, together with other groups such as Messa, Mamuthones, and NAGA at the CS Rivolta in via F.lli Badiera 45. -Stefania D’Egidio