Some artists portray space as a high-tech theme park; Cobol Pongide paints it as an interplanetary factory in perpetual strike mode. Kosmodrom, the fourth chapter of his cosmo-materialist saga, feels less like an album and more like a political pamphlet tossed at you from a passing asteroid with a union card. It’s the sound of someone dreaming about the future with a toolbox full of obsolete circuitry and revolutionary pamphlets.

Cobol - the earthling, not the programming language - has spent years wandering through a peculiar corridor where toy instruments, oddball synth-pop, political theory and retro-futurist sci-fi sit around the same table, plotting. Here, he floats even higher. Kosmodrom plays like the soundtrack to an alternate-timeline space program where the proletariat didn’t wait for automation to save them: they simply collectivized the ion thrusters. Its retro-mechanical aesthetic isn’t nostalgia but a way to imagine tomorrow using the least compromised tools available.

Musically, the album hovers in a zone where DEVO, 8-bit arcades and some forgotten Soviet art-rock ensemble could have formed a tiny autonomous union. Nothing feels hand-me-down: each track wobbles on its own eccentric axis, driven by rhythms that sound like machines threatening mutiny, harmonies born from chips longing for retirement, and melodies played on toy keyboards that have suddenly developed cosmic ambitions.

And then there are the lyrics - an unlikely cocktail of proletarian cosmism, evolutionary zoology, political side-eye and tender absurdism. Tardigrades become moral exemplars, trilobites pulsate like neon omens, genomes yearn for collectivization, extraterrestrial communes sprout among asteroid belts, star-crossed lovers drift somewhere near Jupiter, and Soviet cars reinvent themselves as micro-shuttles. The whole thing brushes against the ridiculous, yet it’s the kind of ridiculous that reveals the world more accurately than any sober manifesto ever could.

It all makes sense if you know Cobol: a musician who writes essays on interplanetary labor, travels by bicycle like an urban ufologist, and treats history as a giant cosmic construction site where humanity keeps misplacing the blueprint. Kosmodrom channels that whole worldview - deeply political, but never dour; playful, but never lightweight. It sounds like an aerospace manual rewritten by Stanisaw Lem after a long night fixing a half-dead Commodore 64.

The result is a record that doesn’t court the listener so much as recruit them. It teases, provokes, then gently pulls you into a journey across geological epochs, workerist sci-fi and little bursts of cosmic tenderness. It’s a record that smiles while discussing ecological collapse. That dances while recalling the Biennio Rosso. That whispers about lost love as if chairing a general assembly.

Kosmodrom is a manifesto masquerading as crooked electronic pop - or maybe it’s the other way around. What matters is that it stands as one of the strangest, most vivid visions of the future to emerge from Italian music in recent memory: a future not built for colonizers, but for living beings - humans, trilobites or chatty machines alike - who simply want a better space in which to breathe.

And perhaps, with a bit of luck, a Lada-Vaz fitted with an interstellar ignition system.