Release Date May 1st, 2026
Format LP/CD/Digital
Genre Heavy Metal
Origin Italy
Elle Tea emerged in Florence in 2023 as the solo vehicle of multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer and illustrator Leonardo Trevisan. The band began with “Fate Is At My Side,” followed by “The Past From Which I Ran” in 2024 and the “Into The Fall” EP in 2025. “Travelling” is the third full-length and closes the arc formed by those releases. Trevisan handles every vocal and instrument, alongside production and all accompanying art, so Elle Tea has remained a fully self-contained project since its launch.
Its creative character joins late-1970s and early-1980s heavy music with fantasy literature and handmade imagery associated with that era. Each of the eight songs comes with a separate watercolour-and-pencil illustration, collected in the “One Crazy Life” artbook. The artwork and music were created without AI. The earlier albums introduced the band’s mixture of hard rock, progressive detail and heavy metal; this final chapter places travel, time and personal transformation at its centre.
“Travelling” moves through eight songs shaped by late-seventies hard rock, early-eighties heavy metal, progressive turns and NWOBHM melody. Warm production, open dynamics and restrained studio gloss place the guitars, bass, drums and vocals in an era-specific palette; occasional crowded layers expose the limits of a one-man setup. Rounded guitar tones dominate the mix, the bass remains present beneath the melodies, and limited compression preserves the changes between quieter segments and heavier riffs.
Trevisan writes with melodic instinct, and the guitar lines often say more than the vocal melodies when the arrangements widen into reflective sections. “Elle Tea (Travelling),” “Into The Fall” and “Vanish” form the album’s emotional core, linking travel, change, disappearance and cosmic cycles through melancholy, far removed from heroic fantasy. The lyrics work most effectively when concrete images anchor the larger ideas; some lines rely on broad cosmic language and leave less of a mark.
The vintage treatment brings warmth and depth, though the cymbals sometimes smear into the upper range and the vocals become narrow across longer refrains. Pacing stays close to medium tempos, reducing contrast across the second half, while the melodic guitar work and concise song lengths prevent the album from dragging. Taken as a whole, “Travelling” is an engaging, personal heavy rock album whose atmosphere, songwriting and handmade presentation make a rewarding close to the trilogy, although its vocal range and cautious pacing hold several ideas short of their full effect.
|7.5
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