-
An Exclusive Interview with Captain Mantell
Jammerzine Exclusive
31:57
Exclusive Interview Alert: Before diving into the review, make sure to check out our exclusive interview streaming above with Captain Mantell, where founder Tommaso Mantelli discusses the ideas, anxieties, and strange creative possibilities that shaped the band’s ambitious new album, ‘Human Or Not’, released today.
Few bands are willing to stare directly into the technological abyss and then turn the experience into a rock record. Captain Mantell has spent nearly two decades building a sound that lives somewhere between sweat soaked rock clubs and neon lit science fiction dreams, and ‘Human Or Not’ might be the project’s most fascinating experiment yet. While plenty of artists are busy shouting either praise or doom about artificial intelligence, Captain Mantell chooses the far more interesting route of asking questions. Imagine that. Curiosity in 2026 feels almost rebellious.
The album’s concept is brilliantly simple and deceptively complex. Side A delivers the songs in their human performed form, packed with driving rhythms, sharp melodies, and the band’s signature collision of rock energy and electronic textures. These tracks feel alive in the way great alternative music should, carrying equal parts urgency and atmosphere. The songwriting explores identity, alienation, digital life, and the increasingly blurry line between human experience and technological mediation. Heavy themes, sure, but Captain Mantell never lets the record sink under the weight of its own ideas.
Then comes Side B, where the same material is filtered through AI driven reinterpretations that twist familiar structures into something darker, stranger, and more nocturnal. What could have been a gimmick instead becomes the album’s defining achievement. The AI remixes are not presented as superior or inferior versions. They function more like alternate dimensions, revealing hidden angles within the original songs. Listening to both sides back to back feels less like hearing remixes and more like watching reality bend in real time. Somewhere along the way, ‘Human Or Not’ turns into a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on authorship, perception, and control without ever sounding like a college lecture disguised as music.
What ultimately makes ‘Human Or Not’ succeed is that Captain Mantell understands technology is only interesting when it serves human expression. The AI elements never overshadow the emotional core of the songs. Instead, they expand the creative vocabulary available to the band and deepen the album’s central questions. In an era where discussions about artificial intelligence often collapse into predictable talking points, Captain Mantell delivers something much rarer: a genuinely engaging artistic conversation. ‘Human Or Not’ stands as one of the year’s most inventive releases, proving that the future of music may not be human or machine, but the strange and compelling space where the two meet.
About Captain Mantell & ‘Human Or Not’
Captain Mantell is a project that has been exploring the boundary between rock and electronic music for nearly twenty years, blending rock’n’roll attitude, science-fiction imagery and a constant tension towards the future. Founded in 2006, the project has performed at national and international club and festivals, making cross-genre contamination its defining trait.
With its seventh album, ‘Human Or Not’, Captain Mantell pushes this research into a more radical and contemporary direction. The record takes shape as a vinyl conceived as a conceptual object, where the two sides mirror and distort the same musical material.
Side A features songs performed and produced by human musicians, rooted in the project’s established language: a balance between rock and electronics, physical energy and melodic focus. Side B uses the same tracks as raw material, reworked through artificial intelligence tools and transformed into experimental electronic remixes — more unstable, nocturnal and club-oriented. Commenting on the concept of the release, the founding member Tommaso Mantelli explains: “Captain Mantell has always gravitated around non-human presences, and right now we feel AI is the most immediate and unresolved version of that idea, a new kind of alien presence, something already embedded in our lives, but still not fully understood. At a certain point we felt that making just another rock record wasn’t enough, and this was the right moment to push things further and reflect what’s actually happening around us right now.”
Artificial intelligence is not used as a replacement tool, but as a distorting lens: a presence that observes human music from a non-human point of view and recomposes it according to different, sometimes coherent, sometimes unpredictable logics. Not a competition between human and machine, but a dialogue that questions form, control and authorship.
The lyrics of ‘Human Or Not’ explore unstable identities, screen-mediated realities, non-human presences, technology, alienation, and the desire for connection. Balancing irony and unease, the songs portray a present in which the boundary between what is human and what is not becomes increasingly thin.
This dualism is also reflected in the project’s visual identity, curated by eeviac. Two colors — red and blue — represent the human and artificial components respectively. The images overlap but can only be read separately through red/blue 3D glasses, included inside the vinyl package, suggesting a double reality in which the two dimensions coexist without ever fully merging. Mantelli continues: “This project isn’t about celebrating or rejecting AI, it’s more about questioning it — authorship, emotion, ethics — without pretending to have clear answers. It’s a bit like when you close your eyes facing the sun and everything turns red, then you open them and the world suddenly feels blue — it’s the same reality, but your perception has completely changed.”
LINKS:
https://captainmantell.bandcamp.com/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6nvIJzkMU5KjAJmCVbSAJV
https://www.instagram.com/captainmantell/
https://www.facebook.com/captainmantell/