NAGUAL release their new EP “How We Kept The Night Away” via Volcano Records & Promotion, a four-track work marking the Piacenza-based band’s return with entirely new material following the album And Once The Storm Is Over, released in March 2024. The release is accompanied by a new official lyric video for the song “Gilgamesh”.
Recorded during the first months of 2026 at Alberto Callegari’s Elfo Studio, with Callegari co-producing the project alongside the band, How We Kept The Night Away features four tracks and approximately twenty minutes of music: “Gilgamesh”, “Hollow”, “If Only” and “Amalgam”. Two of them, “If Only” and “Hollow”, were released in the previous months as previews of the project, paving the way for a work that further expands Nagual’s sonic and narrative dimension.
The EP takes its title from the closing line of “Amalgam” – “We will travel towards the day, telling the story of how we sang to keep the night away” – which becomes a key to interpreting the entire work. The night evoked throughout the record is not only a personal condition, but also a symbolic space shaped by fear, loss, fragility and the need to endure. Opening the record is “Gilgamesh”, loosely inspired by the epic of the King of Uruk and his confrontation with the limits of the human condition, death, friendship and the impossibility of immortality. It is precisely the awareness of defeat that becomes the starting point for a new understanding, opening the way to a broader reflection on what remains of human beings through their actions and through memory. “Hollow”, meanwhile, moves between presence and absence, closeness and disorientation, building a more immediate and spacious sound around the sense of emptiness suggested by its title, with echoes of The Sisters of Mercy, The Cure and early U2. “If Only” addresses human fragility and the difficulty of moving through pain, exploring the thin line between lies, the desire for truth, disillusionment and hope. Closing the journey is “Amalgam”, the track from which the EP itself takes its title. Its final image carries the narrative towards daylight, without erasing what the night has left behind. The album artwork reinforces the same tension: a devastated landscape that turns the arrival of light into a warning about humanity’s capacity to create destruction and inhumanity.
The release of How We Kept The Night Away also comes just a few weeks after “20 Unfashionable Years”, the documentary directed and filmed by Claudio Bianchi and Davide Fortunati, retracing twenty years of Nagual’s history through images, footage and testimonies from people who have shared the band’s journey from 2006 to the present day. More than a simple retrospective, the film tells the story of how music has become, over time, the bond holding together a small community capable of turning differences, enthusiasm and misunderstandings into songs.
Active since 2006, Nagual have spent twenty years moving through rock, hard rock, progressive and grunge influences, ranging from Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple to Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Alice in Chains. How We Kept The Night Away therefore represents a new chapter in a journey that continues to combine classic roots, sonic exploration and a strong narrative component.
Watch the new lyric video:
Watch the documentary “20 Unfashionable Years”: https://youtu.be/btY6B1goaxo?si=JJCU06sWNRv9NnRv
Also watch their earlier singles:
“Hollow”: https://youtu.be/slI1to1z738
‘If Only’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1sGwRAPcM
Further info at
www.volcanopromotion.com
www.nagual.eu
