VBO: The American Dreamscape of Franceso Cavalieri

"I love the eighties. My dream growing up was to live in the US."

Francesco Cavalieri says this without irony, which is important, because irony would ruin the whole thing. When he logs into our videoconference, he is wearing the same shades and luxuriant jewelry he wears in the video for Fire Fire, the first single from his new project VBO (Vice Business Only). This is not branding exactly. It is closer to self-mythology. Cavalieri does not merely dream about another world. He dresses for it, sings from it and waits for everyone else to catch up.

As a fellow non-American, I understand Cavalieri’s fascination. Not with America exactly, because actual America is complicated, anxious, violent, broken, beautiful and forever arguing with itself in public. What we grew up with was something else: America as broadcast signal. America as an imported dreamscape. A place of pleasure, opulence, danger, reinvention and impossible self-confidence. A country where you could become whatever version of yourself looked best under neon.

This is not a very metal idea at its core. Metal usually finds romance in the margins, in damage, rejection and the glorious refusal to be normal. VBO is chasing something sleeker than that. It is not metal. Not quite. It is synthwave-influenced rock with hard rock muscle memory, the sound of a Sunset Strip band that somehow avoided the cocaine divorce, discovered good skincare and aged into its own folklore.

As familiar as the whole thing can look at first glance, Fire Fire makes one refreshing adjustment to the old Grand Theft Auto fantasy it's portraying: there are no women in the video. That absence is not accidental. "Doing that would objectify them for the sake of objectifying them, I mean. We sing about love in VBO, but it’s toxic love. Lovers running away together to a life of crime and whatnot. It’s not desire we're singing about."

Before VBO, Cavalieri was, and still is, the frontman of Italian power metal band Wind Rose. On paper, this sounds like a dramatic left turn: from battle-ready metal grandeur to chrome-plated synth rock about toxic love and bad decisions. Cavalieri does not see it that way. To him, VBO is about rekindling an old friendship and ideas that refused to die. "The project concretized itself when my old friend Simone Giusti saw me mix some stuff live on Instagram. He was like 'bro, this shit is good. There are eighties elements, but it’s more aggressive. Somewhere between rock and metal. We could put some good vocals lines on it and make great music."

That is how the project was born. Francesco and Simone are the two creative architects behind VBO, but it’s a full band that also features Claudio Falconici on guitar, Frederico Merenda on keyboards and Angelo Carmignani on drums. The textures and colours of VBO are familiar, but the band’s sound lives in the negative space between its influences. Like the best modern synthwave, it does not simply imitate the past. It creates the sensation of remembering something that may never have happened to you: a car chase from a movie you never saw, a heartbreak from a summer you never lived, a neon sign outside a bar that probably never existed.

"This is VBO, I do this because I want and I can. That’s the vibe", says Cavalieri many times over during the interview. "We got a mix of Italy and America. Everything is more arrogant, everything is more excessive, luxuriant. The music is catchy, but it’s all about the idea of excess."

Cavalieri is not afraid of the stylistic collision between VBO and Wind Rose, maybe because he understands creative risk as something you have to time correctly. "It's a big gamble for sure, but Wind Rose is not touring right now and I had the self-confidence, guidance (the project is managed by Maurizio Iacono from Kataklysm who Francesco credits for a lot of his career success) and time to give to VBO. You have to put the music out there first if you want to grow the audience and now is the time to do so" he says confidently.

This is VBO: How to Create in 2026

What makes VBO enticing is that it does not feel like a music project alone. It is an aesthetic, an allure. An alternate reality Cavalieri and Simone Giusti have built together out of desire, danger and old American dreams that never had to answer for themselves. Hence the mantra: this is VBO.

This is not just cosplay. Or rather, it is cosplay in the way all great rock mythology is cosplay: a deliberate exaggeration that tells the truth by refusing to look normal. For Cavalieri, creating a strong and consistent visual universe is not decorative. It is essential to making a music project succeed in 2026. "Take Céline Dion or anyone who succeeded in, let's say the nineties", says Francesco, riffing on an example I’d given him earlier in the conversation. "You heard their song on the radio, on television, whatever. You were exposed to it. Someone could succeed with their voice alone. With social media, this is no longer the case. People scroll and scroll and you need to give them a reason to stop."

Francesco Cavalieri is a performer first, but he is also a businessman and he seems unusually clear-eyed about the new thing he is preparing to put in front of the world. He knows some Wind Rose fans will not know what to do with VBO, but to him, commitment is not about staying in one lane forever. It is about giving everything to the lane you are in. "There will be some people that complain that it’s not metal. But do you like the song? If you like the song, who cares that style it is. The music I make with VBO is music that has been with me my whole life and this is what I’m doing now. Wind Rose is nto going anywhere. It’s my day job. My business. When I do Wind Rose, I’m 100% into Wind Rose. Now I do VBO, I’m 100% into VBO."

VBO is not for every set of ears or every possible vibe, but it will make instant, almost embarrassing sense to the people it is for. Even synthwave enthusiasts may find it strange, because the music does not have the clean museum-glass quality of retro worship. It feels antiquated by design, like a malfunctioning radio slowly tuning itself back into the eighties. That is not a flaw. That is the mechanism.

You can listen to VBO actively or passively, which is part of its strange charm. You can dance to it in a crowd, or crank the volume while taking a midnight drive on a freeway you are emotionally pretending is in Miami or Los Angeles. There is a smooth, anachronistic, almost overproduced quality to it and I do not mean that as criticism. In this case, the excess is the point.

That does not make VBO bad. It makes it specific. This is music for people willing to believe, for four minutes at a time, that sincerity can wear sunglasses and still mean it. "At the end of the day I'm just being myself. I’m making the music I want to make" says Francesco.

VBO’s self-titled album, Vice Business Only, will be released via Reigning Phoenix Music on July 24th, and the band will be in the US this summer to make you feel the heat.

* Follow me on Instagram , Bluesky and Substack to keep up with new posts *