Pigeonholing is a hazard here. The press materials gesture towards alternative rock and art-rock, and both labels fit loosely, like a borrowed overcoat. What matters is the sense of architecture. A filmmaker's instincts run through the record. Scenes are framed, light is rationed, and space is treated as an instrument in its own right. Guitars and electronics share the room like two guests who have decided, after some initial wariness, to get along. The band plays as though the walls were listening, and in doing so conjures the hush and grandeur of an old Venetian hall without ever resorting to pastiche.
That restraint is the single's best quality. Experimental rock too often mistakes noise for ambition and length for depth. "PALAZZO" knows the difference. It moves with a confident, unhurried tread, and when it chooses to gather force, the effect feels earned rather than engineered. Here is a group that understands how to build a song as one builds a set: with a clear eye on how it will sound when thrown into a real room full of real people. The brief says the track was conceived for the radio and the stage as much as for streaming, and that ambition is audible. This is music with elbows and lungs, made to be heard through a proper speaker, ideally a loud one.
The video extends the conceit. Drawing on Venice and the Palazzo Dandolo setting, it treats the city as more than a postcard backdrop. Venice has spent centuries perfecting the art of looking magnificent while slowly sinking, and that tension of grandeur and decay sits comfortably alongside FORRM's sound. The imagery and the music feed each other, and the pairing never feels like a promotional afterthought. FarmanFarmaian's background in film is evident in how the whole package holds together. Sound and picture are conceived as one gesture, not a song with a video bolted on.
The manner of the release is quietly admirable too. In a business obsessed with playlist placement and algorithmic favour, FORRM has chosen the harder road of independent radio, specialist press and direct contact with listeners, backed by limited physical editions through the FORRM BOUTIQUE. It is an old-fashioned, even defiant approach, and "PALAZZO" repays it. This is a single to be discovered at an odd hour, on a station somebody actually cares about, and then chased down in the shops.
The band's wider résumé, taking in the JUNKIE WAYZ EP, GALACTICA and the NOMADS PRAYER soundtrack for the award-winning documentary PATH, suggests a restless intelligence that refuses to settle in one place. France, New York and Morocco all leave fingerprints on the project's sensibility. "PALAZZO" feels like the point where that wandering curiosity acquires a sharper focus without sacrificing any of its appetite.
Released on 4 July 2026 via WRTN Music, it is one of the more distinctive rock singles of the year: cinematic, deliberate and handsomely made. One finishes it wanting the album, the film, the gig and a ticket to Venice, preferably in that order. FORRM have built a palace out of sound, and the door is open.