By Jordan Matthews
There is something almost defiantly unpolished about Cello’s Singing to Serpents. Not unpolished in its execution, but in its emotions. Across nine tracks, the Pittsburgh singer-songwriter, poet and performer refuses to tidy up the contradictions of being human. Love can be intoxicating and destructive. Confidence can coexist with crippling doubt. Faith can sound suspiciously like desperation. And sometimes the person delivering the bravado is simultaneously trying to convince himself that everything is going to be OK.
Released March 1, Singing to Serpents runs nine songs and roughly 29 minutes, moving from opener “Stay Here” through “Elevate,” “Sucks to Be Used,” “Full Moon,” “So Long,” “Cravings,” “Pray” and “Faith” before closing with the nearly five-minute “Sleeping.” It’s a compact album with an unusually expansive emotional footprint.
“Stay Here” establishes the record’s central tension immediately. Cello approaches romance less as comfort than collision, allowing longing, instability and obsession to occupy the same room. His repetition works almost like an intrusive thought: a phrase returns because the narrator hasn’t figured out what to do with it yet. That technique recurs throughout the album, lending the record a restless, circular quality rather than the neat beginning-middle-end trajectory expected of conventional pop songwriting.
“Elevate” pushes toward ambition and self-belief, but Cello rarely lets swagger stand uncontested. Confidence has cracks around the edges. That duality becomes increasingly important on “Sucks to Be Used,” where bitterness and emotional injury crash into each other. It’s confrontational music, but the aggression sounds less like victory than armor.
That’s one of Cello’s most interesting qualities as a writer: he doesn’t seem particularly concerned with making the narrator likable.
He wants him recognizable.
The album’s middle section widens the psychological lens. “Full Moon” and “Cravings” explore desire through darker, more sensory imagery, while “So Long” sits naturally within an album fascinated by attachment and separation. Cello’s music moves freely across genre boundaries, incorporating elements of alternative music, atmospheric pop, melodic rap, spoken-word expression and confessional singer-songwriter traditions rather than pledging allegiance to one lane.
Then Singing to Serpents turns toward something bigger.
“Pray” and “Faith” introduce spirituality without transforming the album into an exercise in easy redemption. Cello treats belief as something negotiated rather than possessed. “Faith,” the album’s longest song after closer “Sleeping,” feels especially important because its search for strength doesn’t erase insecurity. Faith here isn’t certainty; it’s the decision to keep searching while certainty remains unavailable.
That refusal to manufacture resolution gives Singing to Serpents much of its power.
Cello, born Marcello Valletta, came to recording with experience as an actor and published poet, and those disciplines are evident throughout the album. He understands performance, but he also understands language. His songs frequently feel like internal monologues that happened to find rhythm, melody and production around them.
His neurodivergence adds another dimension to that creative perspective. Cello has spoken openly about autism and ADHD, and Singing to Serpents often feels attuned to repetition, fixation, sensory intensity and the rapid collision of competing emotions. But reducing the record to a statement about neurodivergence would undersell it. The strength of Cello’s writing is that intensely individual experiences become recognizable to listeners whose lives may look nothing like his.
By closing track “Sleeping,” the album feels exhausted in the most appropriate way. After the bravado, desire, resentment, spiritual questioning and emotional bargaining that precede it, Cello doesn’t deliver a Hollywood ending. Instead, the record comes down from its own internal storm.
That makes the title Singing to Serpents particularly apt. The serpents might be temptation, anxiety, relationships, ego, doubt or the darker voices inside one’s own head. Cello doesn’t pretend to defeat them.
He communicates with them.
In a contemporary landscape where songs are increasingly optimized for instantaneous hooks and frictionless consumption, Singing to Serpents takes another route. It asks listeners to sit with contradiction and discomfort. It doesn’t present Cello as healed, victorious or perfectly self-aware. It presents an artist actively processing his experience.
And that’s what ultimately distinguishes the album. Singing to Serpents isn’t compelling because Cello has figured everything out. It’s compelling because he lets us hear him trying.
