Over the past twenty years, Sardinia has seen the emergence of a deeply original music scene, developed outside the mainstream and driven by sonic exploration. Long portrayed in folkloric or nostalgic terms, the island has become a creative hub where memory and modernity coexist in new expressive forms. The legacy of canto a tenore, ancestral rhythms, dialects, and oral poetics has not merely been preserved, but reimagined through electronics, improvisation, avant-pop, and noise.

In the 2000s, artists like Paolo Angeli and Francesco Medda, known as "Arrogalla", laid the groundwork for this scene. In the following decade, it gained a strong and recognizable identity, largely thanks to Iosonouncane, creator of Die (2015), a watershed album—challenging and conceptual—built like a cyclical suite where the boundaries between songs dissolve. In tracks like Tanca and Stormi, the voice becomes polyphony, archaic and synthetic sounds layer without climax, and the song structure stretches until its contours blur.

Following this path, but with their own distinct languages, artists like Dalila Kayros and Daniela Pes have emerged. The former, with albums such as Transmutations (2018) and especially the recent Khthonie (2025), has carved out a brutal sound that oscillates between industrial electronics and ritual singing: tracks like Sakramonade or Lamia are obsessive explorations where the voice becomes body, scream, possession—evoking feminine and ancestral mythologies.

The latter, with the widely acclaimed Spira (2023) (produced by Iosonouncane), has offered a more intimate, lyrical, and ethereal approach, built on breath, hypnotic repetition, and minimal, liquid electronic sounds. Her voice floats between speech and melody, between ancient Gallurese and an invented language. The long closing track A Te Sola is emblematic of her style, where a minimalist opening evolves into a hypnotic, recursive mantra.

Many artists in this scene share an anti-epic approach: their songs don’t aim to reach a clear conclusion but rather expand through time, evoking rather than narrating. In this way, the tracks become spaces to inhabit—immersive experiences that reject the urgency of consumption and radio-friendly formats. In this refusal, there is also, in a sense, a political gesture: resisting homogenizing logic and instead building a sonic Sardinia that speaks to the world in its own voice and on its own terms.