10 October 2026

·italian rap · album review

Rkomi's A MILANO: Eight Tracks, Nineteen Minutes, One City

By Stephen Agorsor

Rkomi's A MILANO landed on 8 October 2026: eight tracks, no title track, and nothing on it that reaches three minutes — the longest cut, FERITA, stops at 2:57. Played end to end it runs about nineteen minutes, less time than plenty of people spend getting into the city it is named after. That brevity is the first thing worth noticing, and it is not incidental: it reads as the record's main formal decision.

What is on the record

The eight titles, in order, with their running times: SOTTERRANEO (Intro) (1:28), A MEZZ'ORA DA MILANO (2:03), CARICA (2:37), CALVAIRATE CALIFORNIA (1:56), CRAZY CRAZY (2:38), DA PALAZZO A PALAZZO (2:48), FERITA (2:57), HAKEEM (2:38).

Three of the eight credit a second artist alongside Rkomi: Khodi on A MEZZ'ORA DA MILANO, Promessa on DA PALAZZO A PALAZZO, and Noyz Narcos on the closer, HAKEEM. Those are the credits as the album page lists them, on a release credited there to Universal Music Italia. What each guest does with the space is a listener's question rather than something I can hand you as fact. Where the second voices sit is legible enough: positions two, six and eight, one guest apiece.

The sequencing is worth a note. The two shortest tracks sit at positions two and four, so the middle of the record is where it moves fastest — and the closer is the longest thing on it, which leaves the last minute of HAKEEM as the one place with room for a thought to run past the length everything else is held to. Nothing is allowed to repeat too long, and at these running times there is no space for a torch song disguised as an outro.

A city as an address, not a subject

A record named for a city invites the obvious question, and read from the titles alone, A MILANO declines to answer it the way the cover suggests. This is not a guided tour with landmarks. The titles read as though Milan functions here as an address rather than a theme — the place you leave and return to, the thing at the end of the line. SOTTERRANEO puts the opening underground, one minute twenty-eight of it, and the word does double duty for a city whose underground is a metro before it is anything else, which makes it a threshold rather than an overture. Then A MEZZ'ORA DA MILANO sets out the distance in the title itself — half an hour from Milan, which is a commute, a relationship, or both.

That framing is my reading, not a claim about intent. What the page shows is a record named for a city and titled in the language the city speaks: A MILANO, A MEZZ'ORA DA MILANO, DA PALAZZO A PALAZZO. The hotels-and-hillsides Italy that outside listeners often get served appears nowhere in those titles.

Where it sits next to the earlier records

The Rkomi records listed alongside this one — Io in Terra, TAXI DRIVER, NO STRESS, Dove gli occhi non arrivano — are the context most listeners bring to it, and the single OSSA ROTTE is the most recent thing before this. Against those, the comparison the page invites is scale rather than sound: eight tracks, nineteen minutes, no title track, a midsection without a second voice. It is the smallest frame of his that the page gives you, and small frames punish filler.

On lengths alone it reads less like an album and more like eight short pieces ordered with the fat trimmed off both ends — a compliment with a caveat attached.

What to notice on the first play

Watch the arithmetic at the front. The first four tracks run 1:28, 2:03, 2:37 and 1:56, so a listener is through most of the first half before the record has room to establish a mood; whether that reads as momentum or as haste is the first judgement the running order puts on you. The shortest track, CALVAIRATE CALIFORNIA, sits at position four rather than in the closing slot. With guests at positions two, six and eight, five tracks are Rkomi alone, including the whole middle run from CARICA to CRAZY CRAZY, and whether one voice across nineteen minutes reads as focus or a shortage of relief is worth carrying into a first play.

And watch the widest moment. FERITA, at 2:57, is the longest thing here and sits second to last, which is where a short record usually keeps the song it wants judged; whether it is that or just the one that ran long is what I will be listening for. Play it twice before deciding: nineteen minutes is over before you have much to compare it to.

Where it gives less than you might want

Nineteen minutes is a discipline that removes the room for a bad idea to be rescued by a good one, or for an album-length mood to build. If you came hoping for the wide-screen version, the running times say this is not it: no track past three minutes, no interlude, no breather.

There is a risk in the evenness, too. Seven of the eight tracks fall between 1:56 and 2:57, so no single length marks the moment the record is built around, and a set this uniform either holds a mood tightly or flattens into one temperature. Nothing on the page tells me which: whether CARICA hands over to CALVAIRATE CALIFORNIA, whether HAKEEM closes something or simply stops. That is what a first full play will have to answer, and what a list of titles and times cannot.

What is not in doubt is the shape of the proposal: a record named for a city, eight tracks and about nineteen minutes, that would rather be nineteen minutes of intent than forty of filler. Start with SOTTERRANEO and FERITA, then take it in one sitting.

Album details — release, tracklist, running times, guest credits — are taken from the album's Apple Music page. Everything else is one listener's impression.