Captain Mantell’s crew is back! The band has announced its seventh studio album Human or Not, coming out June 23rd via Overdrive Records and Go Down Records. You can already dive into this new project with the new ‘double’ single Miracle Mojo/Miracle Mojo or Not.

MIRACLE MOJO is the first single taken from HUMAN OR NOT, the new album/experiment by Captain Mantell. The track is released in two versions — one human-made and one reinterpreted through artificial intelligence — creating a direct comparison between two approaches to music creation. Blending rock energy with electronic tension, MIRACLE MOJO is a disillusioned invocation: the search for a “mojo” to withstand a reality shaped by individualism, appearance and control.
Available now on all digital streaming platforms and Bandcamp .
Creative design by eeviac, visualizer by Alessandro Zanin

 

CAPTAIN MANTELL is a project that has been exploring the boundary between rock and electronic music for nearly twenty years, blending rock’n’roll attitude, science-fiction imagery and a constant tension towards the future. Founded in 2006, the project has performed at national and international club and festivals, making cross-genre contamination its defining trait. With its seventh album, HUMAN OR NOT, Captain Mantell pushes this research into a more radical and contemporary direction. The record takes shape as a vinyl conceived as a conceptual object, where the two sides mirror and distort the same musical material.
Side A features songs performed and produced by human musicians, rooted in the project’s established language: a balance between rock and electronics, physical energy and melodic focus. Side B uses the same tracks as raw material, reworked through artificial intelligence tools and transformed into experimental electronic remixes — more unstable, nocturnal and club-oriented.
Artificial intelligence is not used as a replacement tool, but as a distorting lens: a presence that observes human music from a non-human point of view and recomposes it according to different, sometimes coherent, sometimes unpredictable logics. Not a competition between human and machine, but a dialogue that questions form, control and authorship.
The lyrics of HUMAN OR NOT explore unstable identities, screen-mediated realities, non-human presences, technology, alienation, and the desire for connection. Balancing irony and unease, the songs portray a present in which the boundary between what is human and what is not becomes increasingly thin.
This dualism is also reflected in the project’s visual identity, curated by eeviac. Two colors — red and blue — represent the human and artificial components respectively. The images overlap but can only be read separately through red/blue 3D glasses, included inside the vinyl package, suggesting a double reality in which the two dimensions coexist without ever fully merging.

Release out June 23rd, pre-orders are up now on our website.

“Over time, we’ve explored imagery related to aliens, other forms of life, but also the fears and dualities of everyday existence. Today, artificial intelligence feels like the most concrete and current form of “alien”: something external to us that is nevertheless deeply embedded in our reality, raising ethical, moral, and practical questions that are far from resolved. In this sense, HUMAN OR NOT aims to be more than just another rock record. It’s an attempt to broaden the perspective, to open a discussion — especially within a musical environment that often reacts to this topic with rejection or distrust. I consciously chose not to avoid artificial intelligence, but to use it as a creative tool, trying to transform a tension into an expressive opportunity.

These remixes are not generated passively. It’s not a matter of writing a prompt and accepting the outcome: we used artificial intelligence as a kind of distorting lens, as if it were an alien gaze applied to our music. We fed the machine our original recordings and guided the process by generating multiple versions, giving precise stylistic directions, and then heavily reworking the material. In some cases, more than fifty versions of the same track were generated, from which we selected even just a few seconds to build the final remix. There is, therefore, a significant amount of human work behind the “artificial” side as well.

I believe AI is, in every sense, one of the most powerful tools ever created. Like any tool, its impact will depend on how we choose to use it: it could lead to the cure of diseases and greater well-being for humanity, or push us toward dystopian scenarios, like those imagined in science fiction and in the works of Philip K. Dick. This project is not about providing answers or taking a definitive stance. The lyrics themselves contain a certain degree of criticism toward AI, but the goal is neither to celebrate nor to reject it. Rather, it is to observe the phenomenon from within, by putting it into practice through an artistic experiment.
We are probably still too deeply immersed in this transformation to fully understand it or to gain the right perspective.” (Tommaso Mantelli)