Little Boys are an Italian duo from Bergamo: Elle Bertone on guitar and vocals, and Esse Pirotta on drums. They met on a flight to Japan in the winter of 2020, and Japan has stayed central to the band ever since. Their self-titled debut came out in 2022, a 16-track album recorded entirely on 2-inch magnetic tape. The second album, Ricordati che devi morire (Remember That You Have To Die), followed in 2023 with raw punk-blues tracks and Japanese collaboration elements. This year they released their latest full-length, The Beast of Little Boys.
Osaka is familiar ground for them, with earlier visits that include a split tour with the Japanese producer DURAN. This time they arrive after Tokyo on October 10 and Fukuoka on October 12, following more than fifteen shows across eight cities in Korea. On October 15 they play 扇町para-dice. I spoke with them about the new album, the road, and what keeps bringing them back to Japan.
Follow Little Boys on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/littleboysrockstar/) and YouTube (https://youtube.com/@littleboys6096), or visit their website (https://littleboys.jp/).
1. This is at least your third run through Osaka now. What’s changed about the city, or about how you feel walking into it, since your first shows here?
The first time we came to Osaka, we were trying to understand the city. Now I think we’ve stopped trying, and that’s probably the biggest difference.
Osaka has this very direct, slightly chaotic energy that makes more sense to us every time we come back. At the beginning, everything felt unfamiliar; now there are places, people and memories attached to it, so walking into the city feels less like arriving somewhere new and more like continuing a conversation we started years ago.
We’ve changed too. We’re less interested in controlling what a tour is supposed to become. You arrive, you play, you meet people, something unexpected happens, and that becomes part of the story. Osaka is particularly good at the unexpected.
2. Para-dice is a small room in Ogimachi. What do you look for in a venue when the shows get this intimate?
When a room is that small, there’s nowhere to hide, and that’s exactly what we like about it.
We don’t really look for comfort in a venue. We look for proximity, tension and the feeling that the boundary between the band and the audience can disappear. In a big room, you can create distance. In a small one, every mistake, every reaction, every change in energy is immediately visible.
For a two-piece band, that’s perfect. There are only two of us on stage and no backtracks, so the whole show depends on what happens between us and the people standing a few meters away. If the room feels slightly dangerous, unpredictable and alive, then it’s probably the right room for Little Boys.
3. You’ve played Osaka a few times now, Sengokudaitouryo, the Split Tour with DURAN. Is there one specific memory from an earlier Osaka show that’s stuck with you?
Definitely playing with King Brothers. There was something about their energy that felt immediately familiar to us. We felt very close to them in the way they approach a live show, raw, physical, a little out of control, and that made us feel strangely at home.
Sharing the stage with them was great, but I also remember what happened afterwards just as fondly: sitting down and having dinner together. I love when a band you admire stops being “a band” after the show and simply becomes a group of people around a table.
So yes, if I have to choose one Osaka memory, it’s probably that night: the noise first, dinner afterwards.
4. Is there a food in Osaka you keep going back to every time you’re here?
Esse: I still remember the sashimi we had at an izakaya after Sengokudaitouryo. In my memory, it was honestly the best sashimi I’ve ever eaten, so that’s something I would absolutely go back for.
Elle: Uni. Sea urchin. Give me extremely good uni and I’m happy. I know it’s probably a slightly less romantic answer than takoyaki or okonomiyaki, but apparently my relationship with Osaka has expensive taste.
5. Recording live instead of chasing studio perfection is central to how you work. What does a live take capture that a polished one loses?
A polished take can capture the song perfectly. A live take can capture the moment when the song actually happened.
For us, those are two different things. When we play together, there are tiny accidents, one of us pushes the tempo, the other reacts, a guitar starts feeding back differently than expected, something becomes louder or more aggressive for no rational reason. Technically, some of those things might be imperfections. Musically, they’re often the most interesting part.
If you correct everything, eventually you can end up with a perfect photograph of something that was alive five minutes earlier.
We’d rather keep the pulse, even if it means keeping a few scars with it.
6. As a two piece, how do you decide what gets left out of a song rather than added in?
It’s actually very instinctive. As a two-piece, when something works between us, it usually works immediately. We feel it.
The moment we start saying, “Maybe we should change this,” or “Maybe if we add something here…”, that little friction is usually a sign that something isn’t right. We’ve learned this over the years: we can spend days working on an idea, and eventually we might even make it good, but somehow it’s never as good as the things that arrived naturally in five minutes.
Those are almost always the ideas we eventually throw away.
For us, a song should behave a little like water finding its way to a river. If we immediately have to build something to force it in one direction, we’d rather let it find another way.
7. You’ve said the album The Beast of Little Boys isn’t a search for suffering but for authenticity. When you’re deciding whether a song is finished, what tells you it’s honest rather than just difficult?
I think one of the things I’ve learned is that difficulty is not evidence of depth.
I come from a classical background, I studied harmony and used to compose on piano, so I know how to construct something that theoretically works. But paradoxically, the songs I consider our best are often the ones where I almost forget everything I know and follow instinct instead.
It can be two chords that theoretically shouldn’t belong together, a progression that doesn’t follow the harmonic path you would expect, or something ridiculously simple. If it flows and something happens when you hear it, then it works. I don’t think there are rules for that particular kind of magic.
So when I write, I’m not trying to prove that I can compose something impeccable. I’m trying to write a beautiful song.
The Beatles are probably the most obvious lesson in that. A great song doesn’t need complexity surrounding it to justify its existence. In fact, I think simplicity can be much harder: reaching a lot of people with very few elements requires an incredible clarity about what actually matters and what doesn’t.
That’s probably how I recognize when one of our songs is honest. When there’s nothing left that needs to justify itself. It just works. There’s a kind of magic dust in it, and unfortunately I don’t think music theory has invented a notation for that yet.
8. Between Italy, Japan, and now Korea, do you notice your sound shifting depending on where you’ve just been touring, or does it stay fixed no matter the room?
Actually, our sound doesn’t adapt to the room at all, and that’s almost strange, because as a person I consider myself extremely adaptable.
But when it comes to our music, I deliberately try not to adapt. If I’m bringing you my project, my sound and my personality, I don’t think I should reshape them according to who happens to be standing in front of me. Otherwise, at some point, I’m not really showing you who we are anymore.
Korea was a perfect experiment for this because we played in completely different environments, from tiny underground places to very elegant venues. One of the funniest nights was in this extremely luxurious club where people were sitting at tables eating things like marinated crab, and I remember looking at them before soundcheck thinking, “Oh God. The moment I turn this guitar on, these people are going to run away.”
I was almost embarrassed to soundcheck.
And then it became one of the most fun nights of the tour.
That confirmed something for me: the room can change completely, but we shouldn’t. If a venue invites Little Boys, this is what Little Boys sounds like. We bring the same thing into the basement, the elegant club, Italy, Korea or Japan.
Maybe that’s actually the point of touring for me. You don’t carry a version of yourself designed for every country. You carry your own little world around the planet and see what happens when it collides with somebody else’s.
9. What is next after this Asia run, is there a Europe tour on the calendar once the album is out, or is the focus staying on Asia for now?
There is actually a European tour that I’ve been promising for almost two years now to a band I absolutely love called Voodoo Inferno.
The problem is that every time I start thinking seriously about touring Europe, some new opportunity or strange idea appears and, somehow, it always throws us back into Asia. Maybe it’s destiny. At this point I’ve stopped questioning it!
What I know for sure is that we’ll be in the Philippines in February. When we return from this tour in October, I’d also really like to give Europe some attention and play a few shows there.
But there’s another problem: we have a new album to make. So between recording, Asia and trying to keep my two-year-old promise to Europe, there really isn’t much empty space left in the calendar.
Let’s say Europe is definitely not forgotten. Asia just keeps kidnapping us.
10. Beyond your work with DURAN, has any Japanese band you’ve shared a bill with actually changed how you think about your own songs?
Honestly? No.
I’ve met many Japanese bands that I’ve loved, both musically and as people, but none of them has actually changed the way I think about our own songs. I mean, my father has been trying to convince me to stop doing this for years and even he hasn’t managed to change my mind, so another band probably doesn’t stand much of a chance!
What really changes the way I think about our songs is experience. Travelling, living in different countries, meeting people, and especially watching ourselves play night after night.
When you perform the same song repeatedly in completely different places, you start hearing it differently. Sometimes the song hasn’t changed at all, you have.
So I think the evolution comes much more from that. The countries we pass through change us, and then inevitably we come back to our own songs as slightly different people. And suddenly the same song means something different.
11. Are you fans of Japanese garage bands such as 5678s, Guitar Wolf, Teengenerate? Do you consider Little Boys to be part of the garage rock “scene” in Japan and Europe?
Absolutely. We really like bands like The 5.6.7.8’s, Guitar Wolf and Teengenerate, so there’s definitely a genuine affinity there.
I’m usually a little reluctant to define Little Boys through a genre or a scene, probably like most musicians, I immediately want to escape the box the moment somebody puts me inside one. But with garage rock, I can accept it.
Mostly because we didn’t really decide it ourselves. Other bands, promoters and people from that scene started inviting us into that world, both in Japan and Europe, and at some point you realize that maybe other people can see something about you that you weren’t consciously trying to define.
So yes, if the garage rock scene wants to adopt us, we’re very happy to be adopted.
12. You’re sharing these Japan bills with a pretty wide spread, industrial metal one night, funk and soul the next, Celtic folk-punk another. Did you have any say in who else was on the lineup, or is that entirely down to the promoters and venues booking each date?
We didn’t interfere with the lineups at all. I have this terrible habit of deliberately leaving certain things to chance because I like creating a little chaos around us.
Sometimes it works brilliantly. Sometimes it’s a complete disaster. But that’s exactly why I keep doing it.
If I already knew exactly what kind of bands we were going to play with every night, part of the fun of touring would disappear for me. I’d rather arrive and discover that tonight we’re playing with industrial metal, tomorrow with funk and soul, and the next night with Celtic folk-punk.
It forces Little Boys into situations where we probably wouldn’t put ourselves deliberately, and I find that much more interesting.
So no, we didn’t choose those combinations. We created the conditions for chaos, and then let the promoters do the rest.
13. Looking back on the Korea tour now that it’s behind you, what’s the one show that’s stuck with you the most, and why that one?
The most unexpected one: Club Tarock in Daegu.
There was something fantastic about the whole atmosphere. The people and the musicians we shared the stage with made it a night we didn’t want to end. And the owner deserves a special mention: he’s a really special guy.
The response from the other musicians meant a lot to us. Even the next day, we were still receiving messages saying things like, “I played with giants,” “I’m so happy I shared the stage with you,” or “You were monsters.” Getting that kind of reaction from people who had just played alongside us was pretty overwhelming, in the best possible way.
It was also the one night when I completely abandoned my strict rules about sleep. When you’re on the road for more than two months, you have to protect your energy, so I’m usually very disciplined about going to bed. Apparently, Tarock found the loophole.
That night, I let those rules go and stayed out incredibly late. The concert and everything around it became one of the best memories of the tour.
If we return to Korea, that’s absolutely a place I want to play again.
14. Is there anything from the Korea tour, a habit, a sound, something a crowd did, that you brought with you into these Japan dates?
Definitely the energy of the Korean audiences.
I went to Korea with some skepticism, because from the outside the country is so strongly associated with K-pop that I honestly didn’t know what kind of space there would be for a band like us. Instead, I discovered this incredibly alive audience for rock music. Some of the crowds were absolutely on fire, and you feel that kind of energy physically when you’re playing.
What surprised me even more was realizing that it went beyond the shows. There was a genuine curiosity about our music, about Italy and about what we were doing. We received an amount of attention from Korean radio and press that I really wasn’t expecting, with people wanting to interview us and understand the project.
So I think what I’m bringing from Korea into Japan is mostly that feeling of surprise and gratitude. Korea reminded me not to arrive somewhere thinking I already know what kind of audience is waiting for us.
Sometimes the place you understand the least before arriving is the one that surprises you the most.
15. What are the major differences you’ve found touring Korea, China, and Japan, including any small details you noticed along the way?
Maybe the strangest answer is that, after touring all three countries, I notice the similarities more than the differences.
Of course the places themselves are completely different. Japan has a very particular identity that feels almost like a world of its own, and Korea and China each have their own rhythms, cities and ways of doing things. You notice a thousand little differences while travelling.
But once we start playing, those differences become much less important.
We’ve seen audiences react differently over the years, but I’m not even sure that has to do with the countries anymore. I think a lot of it is us changing, becoming better at what we do, understanding our music more clearly and becoming better at communicating it.
The biggest thing touring Asia has taught me is actually something very simple: places are different, people are much less different than we imagine.
You can be thousands of kilometers away, unable to speak the same language, and somehow everybody understands exactly what is happening when a song connects.
I think that’s probably the most beautiful thing we’ve learned from touring.
16. Ricordati Che Devi Morire is a heavy title to build an album around. What does memento mori mean to you two specifically, not just as a phrase?
For me, memento mori is almost the central idea of how I want to live.
It doesn’t make me think about death as something dark. It makes me think about the fact that time is limited, and therefore I want to experience life at the maximum of my capacity, but also express myself at the maximum of my capacity.
I want to take everything life can give me, and I want to give back everything I’m capable of giving while I’m here.
And I’m realizing that the second part is actually harder.
It’s very easy to become obsessed with collecting experiences, travelling, discovering things, achieving things. Giving everything you have, your ideas, your work, your energy, something meaningful to other people, requires something different. I’m still working on that.
So “remember that you must die” isn’t pessimistic to me at all. It’s almost an instruction: don’t waste the opportunity of being alive.
17. What does Satsugai mean, and why did that particular song need to be in Japanese rather than Italian?
The title is deliberately strong, but “Satsugai” isn’t really about killing another person. For me, it’s about killing a version of yourself, that internal cycle of destruction and rebirth that sometimes has to happen before you can become something else.
The Japanese came about very organically. I wrote the song with a friend who was teaching me Japanese at the time, and I liked the challenge of trying to write in a language that I didn’t completely control.
Actually, I think not having complete control was the most interesting part.
It gave me a strange kind of freedom. I couldn’t rely on all the things I already knew how to do, so I approached the song almost like a child approaches a game: experimenting, making connections, trying things without being afraid of whether the result was “correct.”
And somehow that fits the meaning of the song perfectly. Sometimes you have to temporarily destroy what you already know in order to discover another way of expressing yourself.
18. How much input do you have on the videos with Masahide Tsurumoto? Are you handing him a concept or is he bringing that psychotic, hallucinogenic style to you?
Working with Masahide is interesting because he actually comes with a concept, and then I have a terrible habit of destroying it at the last possible moment.
That’s basically what happened with the video. Masahide had his idea and his vision, and then the day before shooting I came in and completely disrupted it.
The great thing is that he didn’t fight against that. He adapted immediately and somehow absorbed the chaos into what he was already imagining.
So what you see in the final video is probably neither completely his original concept nor mine. It’s the collision between Masahide having a plan and me ruining the plan, and him being talented enough to turn that into something better.
Maybe that psychotic, hallucinogenic feeling comes from exactly that.
19. The video for “Una Rivale” puts a Japanese man at the center of a love triangle with two Italians. Western pop culture has plenty of the reverse pairing, a Western man with an Asian woman, think Bowie’s China Girl or John Waite’s Missing You, going back to Madame Butterfly. But a Western woman paired with an Asian man is much rarer. Was this your attempt to flip the Madame Butterfly trope?
Yes, you saw it perfectly. And I love that you mentioned both Madame Butterfly and Bowie’s “China Girl,” because that reversal is absolutely there.
But the funniest part is how it happened. In the video for “Una Rivale,” the introduction of the Japanese guy into the story was exactly the last-minute change I was talking about in the previous question, the one I suddenly brought to Masahide the day before the shoot and that completely disrupted his original concept.
So we didn’t spend weeks intellectually designing this reversal. It arrived almost instinctively: suddenly there was a Japanese man at the center of a love triangle with two Italians, reversing an image that Western culture has represented in the opposite direction countless times.
And the moment it was there, it felt completely right.
That’s what I find so fascinating about it. Sometimes you can spend weeks constructing a clever concept, and sometimes you introduce one completely improvised element at the last moment and only afterwards realize how many meanings were hiding inside it.
So yes, the Madame Butterfly trope is being flipped, but the element that created that reversal was also the element that almost destroyed Masahide’s original video. Somehow, out of that chaos, “Una Rivale” found its real story.
20. Before you ever played a show in Japan, who was actually listening? How did people find you?
It happened almost entirely through social media, especially Instagram, and honestly, mostly by accident.
We didn’t have some clever strategy to build a Japanese audience. People started finding us, contacting us, sharing the music, and somehow this strange connection with Japan began growing before we had ever played there.
That’s still one of my favorite things about the whole Little Boys story. Something that started on a screen thousands of kilometers away eventually became real people, real venues, tours, friendships and a country we keep returning to.
It felt like this completely unexpected call from across the ocean.
And maybe that’s why our relationship with Japan still feels special to me: we didn’t go looking for it. Somehow, it found us first.
21. Are there Italian bands right now, ones nobody outside Italy has heard of, that you’d want a Japanese or Korean fan to check out?
I would definitely recommend Afterhours. They’re not exactly unknown in Italy, but I think they deserve much more attention outside the country.
What I’ve always loved about them is the writing. Manuel Agnelli has this ability to write lyrics that can feel almost like poetry without losing the violence and immediacy of a rock song. There’s something very Italian in the language, but the emotional impact doesn’t need translation.
If a Japanese or Korean listener wanted to discover one important side of Italian alternative rock, I’d tell them to start there.
22. Do you feel like an Italian band when you’re on stage in Osaka, or does that identity fall away once you’re actually playing?
Honestly, when I’m abroad I don’t even feel particularly Italian.
I almost feel like an empty shell, but I mean that in a positive way. I like arriving somewhere without holding too tightly to an identity, because it leaves space to absorb whatever is around me: people, language, habits, sounds, ways of thinking.
And when we’re actually on stage, nationality becomes even less important. I don’t think, “I’m an Italian musician playing in Osaka.” I’m just there, playing.
Of course Italy is inside us. It shaped our language, our references and probably a thousand things about us that we don’t even notice. But I don’t want nationality to become a border around the project.
Maybe travelling does the opposite for me: the farther I go from home, the less interested I become in defining where I belong.
23. Italian is so central to the sound, so why bring English into the mix at all? What does it let you do that Italian and Japanese don’t?
Honestly, the main thing English gives us is the possibility of communicating with more people.
I’m not particularly in love with the English language, although maybe that’s partly because I still don’t know it as deeply as I know Italian. But travelling around the world has pushed me toward it. It made me want to learn it better because, very simply, if you travel internationally and you can’t speak English, your ability to communicate becomes much smaller.
The same applies to music.
Italian gives me things English never could, because it’s my language. Japanese gives me a completely different kind of challenge and freedom. English has another function: it opens the door wider.
So I don’t use English because I think it makes the music more interesting or more international. I use it because sometimes I want the song to be able to walk into a room where Italian simply wouldn’t get through the door.
24. Has singing in English ever felt like a compromise, watering something down, or has it opened up something you couldn’t get to in Italian?
Actually, English has opened up a new part of my writing, especially in the new songs we’re working on now.
Every language gives you a different way of expressing yourself. And because English still challenges me, it forces me to be more creative. I can’t always take the same path I would naturally take in Italian, so I have to find another one.
Unexpectedly, I’ve also discovered that it can give me a more immediate way of expressing certain feelings. English can be very direct, and sometimes that directness allows me to say something without building too much around it.
So no, at this point I don’t see it as watering anything down. Quite the opposite: it has opened a creative direction that I wasn’t expecting to find.
I want to take as much as I can from every language I encounter. Each one seems to unlock a slightly different version of the person writing the song.
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