New album '8106' captures the spirit of play; the child-like instinct to pursue what you love without compromise - and here it is, that particular magic that rarely survives adulthood, remarkably intact. Each of its eleven songs is sharp, vibrant shards which, when you step back, build a mosaic of Asia Martina Morabito’s world: the growing pains of your early twenties, remaining faithful to your dreams despite the hostility of adulthood, places of escape both real and imagined - and the pulse of Bologna, her home and north star.

 

As a student of old-school iconoclasts like The Fall and inspired by the outsider streak of Jimmy Whispers and Daniel Johnston, it was not any particular musical quality of theirs that Asia wanted to channel in Sleap-e, but their confidence to “explode in a raw, free and authentic way.”

 

'8106' is Sleap-e’s most raucous, unpolished and playful offering to date, steeped in the influence of “egg-punk”, an internet-grown genre which seeks to satirise the tropes of punk with its danceable irreverence. There is joy to be found, Asia feels, in refusing to conform, and it has brought her closer to herself than ever before.

 

Sleep and leap. Two diametrically opposite verbs, a moody tension that perfectly represents the soul of the project, now a (meow power) trio. Live, is a show immersed in lo-fi, winking at the egg punk attitude, a kitten with an impulsive nature playing with bossa nova and anti-folk. Sleap-e takes shape in Bologna in 2018 with the release of her first EP containing the single Hard Times, produced by Italian-American band Baseball Gregg. In 2020 she released Mellow, a second bedroom-pop EP from the same collaboration, and joined the WWNBB Collective. Over the next two years, the line-up, led by Asia Martina Morabito (voice and guitar, born in 2000 in Bologna, Italy), gave life to a whole new sound, devoting themselves to the preparation of the album Pouty Lips, released in May 2022. In December 2022 she joined Bronson Recordings' La Zona D'Ombra project: Sleap-e is ready to come back with a highly anticipated new album in February 2024, recorded during a residency at Bronson Club during the summer of 2023.