Returning from death should sound impossible, but on ‘Come Out Lazarus 3 – I Was The Universe’, Genova collective Andrea Pizzo and The Purple Mice make it sound radiant.
The third chapter in the group’s ongoing Lazarus cycle, the single continues one of their most ambitious conceptual narratives yet. The first instalment observed a fatal accident and organ donation from the outside; the second entered the near-death experience itself. This time, the central figure comes back carrying an extraordinary memory: the sensation of having dissolved into everything.
Its narrator has touched something beyond ordinary language and now faces the frustrating impossibility of explaining it to people who will dismiss the experience as fantasy. Yet the track glows with the calm of someone who believes they have seen the final shape of existence and found unity waiting there.
Musically, this is Andrea Pizzo and The Purple Mice at their most immediate and openly melodic. Beatles-like warmth runs through the arrangement, particularly in the emphasis on vocal harmony and melodic lift, while a more spacious melancholy recalls the progressive sweep of Mike Oldfield.
The gospel influence is especially effective. Rather than drawing directly on religious devotion, the band use the form’s communal power to express transcendence on a cosmic scale. Here, the central idea becomes something proclaimed outward: every life is a river eventually returning to the same sea.
Vocals from Andrea Pizzo and Riccardo Morello lead us through that revelation with a balance of theatricality and sincerity. The song’s philosophical ambition could easily have become overbearing, but lyricist Raffaella Turbino grounds it in a simple, memorable image.
The single also reinforces the unusual position the band occupy within contemporary art-pop. Their work regularly engages with artificial intelligence, transhumanism, mortality and the edges of consciousness, but those themes are never treated as sterile intellectual exercises. Here, philosophy becomes melody, while existential speculation is carried by unmistakably human voices.
‘Come Out Lazarus 3 – I Was The Universe’ is bold, strange and unexpectedly uplifting. It asks us to imagine death as a return to something immeasurably larger than the individual self.
Andrea Pizzo and The Purple Mice have created a song that reaches towards the unknowable and, for a few luminous minutes, almost seems to touch it.
