Willie Peyote

Leinì, Turin, and the long way round into rap

Guglielmo Bruno was born in Turin on 28 August 1985 and grew up in Leinì, on the flat farmland north of the city, in a household where both parents played music. His route into hip hop was indirect: rock and punk came first, and he only moved across in 2004, co-founding the S.O.S. Clique crew before the EP L'erbavoglio appeared in 2008. That grounding in guitar music never left the records, which is part of why his band has always been able to swing from funk into reggae into something close to punk within a single set.

The Turin references were there from the start and stayed. Tôret is the city's small bull-headed street drinking fountain, and using it in the title Sindrome di Tôret — a pun on Tourette's — is a fair summary of the method: a local detail, a joke, and an admission that he cannot stop talking. Educazione sabauda works the same seam, borrowing the adjective for the old House of Savoy and the buttoned-up Piedmontese manners that go with it.

Six albums and a widening frame

The studio run is Non è il mio genere, il genere umano in 2013, Educazione sabauda in 2015, Sindrome di Tôret in 2017, Iodegradabile in 2019, Pornostalgia in 2022 and Anatomia di uno schianto prolungato in 2026. The label history tracks the same climb: ThisPlay Urban from 2014 to 2015, the independent 451 from 2016 to 2018, then Virgin Records under Universal Music Italia from 2019, and EMI from 2024.

What carried him beyond a rap audience was the writing rather than the production. Io non sono razzista ma… remains his most-played song by a wide margin, with 42 documented performances logged on setlist.fm across all his catalogued concerts — a track built entirely on letting a stock excuse hang in the air until it collapses. Mai dire mai (la locura), La tua futura ex moglie and C'era una vodka have stayed in sets for years for similar reasons: they are arguments with punchlines, not hooks with slogans attached.

Two trips to Sanremo

He went to the Festival di Sanremo in 2021 with Mai dire mai (la locura), finished sixth, and took the Mia Martini Critics' Prize — a result that tends to go to whoever the press thinks has written the best song rather than the biggest one. He returned in 2025 with Grazie ma no grazie and placed sixteenth in the main field. The lower placing mattered less than what followed: the title became the banner for a fifteen-date summer run from 5 July to 29 August 2025, taking in Rock in Roma at the Ippodromo delle Capannelle on 8 July and the Beat Festival at Empoli on 29 August, and it put him on festival stages large enough to test how the band scaled up.

Anatomia di uno schianto prolungato

The sixth album landed on 15 May 2026 through Turet and Universal Music Italia, eleven tracks, trailed by the singles Burrasca and Kodak and issued on digital, CD, vinyl with a poster, and signed numbered coloured pressings. Brunori Sas guests on Mi arrendo, with Noemi and Jekesa also featured. The record opens with In cerca di uno schianto and closes on Preferisco non sapere, and takes in Sapore di Marsiglia, Che caldo fa a Testaccio, Come se, Kill Tony and Luigi, the last of these written about his father.

Peyote has been direct about where the title came from. Passing forty, he told an interviewer, made the self-examination almost compulsory: every human body, his included, is heading towards a slow and inexorable fall. The title is deliberately contradictory, he added, built to hold a period in which everything appears to be heading for the end without ever getting there. He also said the album came together fluidly, without overthinking, and that he approached the guest spots without forcing them — no refusal was going to be backfilled with a substitute. On working with Brunori Sas, he credited him with reconciling contemporary writing with the older Italian singer-songwriter tradition.

Reviews picked up the shift rather than the sarcasm. Indie For Bunnies scored it 7.5 out of 10, with Elisa Pavese describing heavily stratified arrangements, prominent bass and an avoidance of both straight rap and mainstream pop, and noting that the record refuses any redemptive posturing and sustains tension instead of releasing it. The closing track, on her reading, concedes that cynicism is no longer enough. Peyote's own summary of the album was blunter: in the end nobody saves themselves alone.

Autumn 2026: a single, and a tour that keeps doubling

The most recent release is Non c'è di che, out digitally on 16 September 2026 through EMI and Universal Music Italia and on radio from 25 September. It is not from the album cycle's opening salvo and, as he pointed out when it appeared, it is not an answer record to Grazie ma no grazie either, despite the title inviting the reading. He described it as carrying end-of-summer nostalgia mixed with the calm that arrives when something finishes and the ending is plainly right. Music Attitude's Noemi Amato heard indie-pop with R&B in the seams — acoustic guitar and warm bass at the front, restrained drums, a chorus that thickens in layers — and read the lyric as an inventory of shared objects rather than a settling of scores.

The single doubles as the countdown to the Club Tour 2026, produced and promoted by Live Nation. Eleven dates are on sale, opening at the Vox Club in Nonantola on 10 October 2026 and running through Fabrique in Milan on 20 October, the Eremo Club at Molfetta on 23 October, Casa della Musica Federico I in Naples on 24 October, Estragon in Bologna on 27 and 28 October, Teatro Cartiere Carrara in Florence on 30 October, Atlantico in Rome on 31 October, Teatro della Concordia at Venaria Reale on 3 and 4 November and Hall in Padua on 7 November. Bologna on 27 October, Venaria Reale on 3 November and Padua on 7 November had already sold out by mid-September, which is what prompted the second nights in Bologna and Venaria; those went on sale at 3pm on 15 September 2026.

On stage

The move back into clubs is a deliberate reversal after a summer of festival fields. Nothing about the room flatters the material — the appeal of Estragon or the Concordia is that the between-song talking, which takes up a substantial share of any Peyote show, actually lands.

The template has been consistent for years. At the Milano Summer Festival on 20 July 2022 he played 26 songs with two encores backed by a five-piece — Luca Romeo on bass, Dario Panza on drums, Daniel Bestonzo on keys, Enrico Allavena on trombone and Damir Nefat — and worked in covers of Ben Harper and Mac Miller alongside Fare schifo, Willie Pooh, Mai dire mai (la locura) and Robespierre, with Fulminacci opening and then joining him. Newsic scored that show 8.5 out of 10 and made a point of what was absent: no video walls, no screens, the production stripped back to the band and the talking. The 2025 summer sets ran to around 25 songs.