His music is a sunshine-soaked joy. Breezy melodies, life-affirming lyrics and a sense of adventure define instantly addictive songs which sound at once familiar and fresh.
Discovered while still in high-school in Turin and signed to leading live agency ITB in his teens, Kiol has already toured Europe for years, performing over 200 gigs and supporting artists including Jack Savoretti, Joan Baez, Sons Of The East, Patti Smith, Placebo, Natalie Imbruglia and many others.
His debut EP, I Come As I Am, released on Warner Music Benelux in 2017, spawned the million-plus streaming hits Broken Up Again and Wrinkless, which soundtracked a Fiat 500 ad.
A longtime Paolo Nutini fan, in 2018, Kiol collaborated with Nutini’s producer Dani Castelar on his second single Hard Things and worked in London in 2019 with producer Dimitri Tikovoi (Placebo, Blondie) on the songs Mallow and No Peace.
In November 2019 Kiol has been named a future festival headliner by ITB.
His latter release "Techno Drug Store" marks a sonic leap on for Kiol. His folk-rock influences of old – Nutini, Mumford & Sons and Ben Howard – still surface in his catchy choruses and use of acoustic guitar, but self-produced using Logic, the new songs are more electronic, with hip hop drums, dashes of disco and lashings of playful pop.
The album’s title track neatly sums up Kiol’s past two years.
“Since my first EP, I feel like I’ve lived a whole new life,” says Kiol. “Constant travelling across Europe, facing the world by myself, choosing to leave home to live in a different country, with different costumes”.
“Techno Drug Store describes modern life, which is changing so fast due to technology. To me, the title sums up where I find myself now – in a gigantic supermarket of possibilities thanks to technology. I’ve been living in that drug store for the last years and, even in lockdown, it hasn’t stopped.”
The son of Turin estate agents, Kiol was always destined to make music. From five, he was drumming on household appliances so often that his parents gave in and bought him a drum kit. He got in to punk-pop via Green Day and nu-metal thanks to Limp Bizit and Korn and in his first year of high school formed his first rock band and began writing songs.
Expelled from school, he was sent to a summer camp in Mallow in Ireland aged 17, where he worked in a computer shop to help him learn English and, missing his drums, took up acoustic guitar. Every night, he’d hang out in a park with local teens, who begged him to bring along his guitar and sing his newly-learnt covers of Paolo Nutini and Ben Howard hits. There, to his bemusement, he was called "Ceol" (spelled Kiol). Only back in Italy did he look up Ceol, discovering it meant ‘music’ in Gaelic and, tweaked, it became his stage name.
Constantly writing new songs, Kiol is now working on a new release planned for this autumn.
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L'articolo Biografia Kiol di Kiol è apparso su Rockit.it il 2021-09-17 11:00:34
