A century before pop songwriters discovered the identity crisis, Luigi Pirandello built a whole literature on it — the idea that the self is a set of masks, one per audience, with no bare face underneath. It takes a certain nerve for a debut artist to open her account there. That is exactly where Italian singer-songwriter Giuliana May starts on “Who Am I?” — two minutes and forty-six seconds of cold, nocturnal cinematic pop that treats a philosophy seminar’s worth of questions with a bedroom confession’s intimacy.
Released March 6, 2026, the single pairs raw, close-mic’d vocals with a lush orchestral arrangement — strings and space where a lesser debut would reach for synth presets. The reference points she claims are Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey, with the conceptual world-building of Twenty One Pilots; the literary ones are Pirandello, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Improbably for a debut, both sets hold up.
At a glance
- Artist: Giuliana May — Italian singer-songwriter from the Naples area
- Release: “Who Am I?”, debut single, out March 6, 2026 (2:46)
- Sound: cinematic pop / dark ethereal alt-pop with orchestral, folk and rock influences
- For fans of: Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Twenty One Pilots
- Theme: identity, memory and the “masks” of modern society, after Pirandello, Eliot and Beckett
- Video: on YouTube, filmed by @foxlife.mov and @Ivan_94m
- Press: Happy Mag (Australia), Corriere del Mezzogiorno (Italy), Exibart (Italy); adopted as a teaching resource by Tune Into English
A debut built on Pirandello’s masks
The mask is the most Italian of pop metaphors — Pirandello, the Sicilian Nobel laureate, spent novels like One, No One and One Hundred Thousand dismantling the idea of a single stable self, and Beckett and Eliot each circled the same drain from their own directions. May’s move is to set that inheritance to music that feels contemporary rather than academic: layered strings that swell and recede like a film score, a vocal that stays vulnerable even as the arrangement soars. Australia’s Happy Mag, flagging her in its New Music Radar column this spring, wrote that her debut “explores identity through a cinematic, layered sound.”
Hand-stitched images in the age of AI
What separates this project from most debut-single campaigns is that the visuals are doing conceptual work of their own. Italian art magazine Exibart devoted a feature this August to the collage work visual artist Xander Cicalese (icarvsfilm) has built around May’s music: analog mixed-media pieces in which handwritten verses, paper cut-outs and portrait fragments are literally sewn together with a needle and red cotton thread. Exibart reads the project as a deliberate counter-move to AI image generation — imperfection, physical resistance and irreversible error reclaimed as artistic values. For a song about the instability of the self, images that are visibly stitched together are not decoration; they are the thesis restated in another medium.
The song’s video — shot, per Corriere del Mezzogiorno, in Irpinia, the green hill country east of Naples — extends the same art-house sensibility into moving pictures.
From Naples to English classrooms
May comes to this with more formal training than the average bedroom-pop debutante: a master’s degree in Science of the Show Business and coursework in music production and music branding across SAE Institute, IED Milan, BigRock/H-Farm and the Venice Biennale’s CIMM. Corriere del Mezzogiorno profiled her in its “L’emergente” column as a refined new voice; and in the campaign’s most unexpected turn, the international platform Tune Into English — which teaches English through pop songs — built a worksheet on “Who Am I?”, putting a debut single by an Italian independent artist in front of language learners worldwide. A song about asking who you are, used to teach people new words for the answer.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Giuliana May?
Giuliana May is an Italian singer-songwriter from the Naples area whose sound sits between cinematic pop and dark ethereal alt-pop, blending orchestral, folk and rock influences. She holds a master’s degree in Science of the Show Business and trained in music production and music branding at SAE Institute, IED Milan, BigRock/H-Farm and the Venice Biennale’s CIMM.
When was “Who Am I?” by Giuliana May released?
“Who Am I?” was released on March 6, 2026. It is her debut single, a 2-minute-46-second orchestral alt-pop track, available on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
What is “Who Am I?” about?
The song explores identity, memory and the “masks” people wear in modern society — a theme drawn from the Italian literary tradition of Luigi Pirandello, alongside T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. It pairs raw, intimate vocals with layered orchestral arrangements.
What does Giuliana May sound like?
Her music is aimed at listeners who like Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey, with the conceptual world-building of Twenty One Pilots — moody, nocturnal cinematic pop built on orchestral textures rather than synth presets.
Is there a music video for “Who Am I?”
Yes. The video for “Who Am I?” is on YouTube, filmed by @foxlife.mov and @Ivan_94m; Corriere del Mezzogiorno reported it was shot in Irpinia, the green hill country east of Naples.
Why is “Who Am I?” used to teach English?
The international education platform Tune Into English, which teaches English through pop songs, published a worksheet built on “Who Am I?”, making the track a classroom resource for language learners worldwide.
“Who Am I?” is out now — stream it on Spotify, watch the video on YouTube, and follow Giuliana May on Instagram or via linktr.ee/giulianamay.
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