By: Adrian Keller
There is an appealing lack of tidiness to Cello’s Singing to Serpents, an album that behaves as though emotional consistency might itself be a kind of dishonesty. Across nine songs, Cello can be needy, defiant, wounded, lustful, spiritual, suspicious, hopeful and exhausted. Sometimes he manages several of these states before the song has fully established what it wants to be.
That instability is the point.
Singing to Serpents is less interested in documenting events than recording reactions to them. Cello, born Marcello Valletta, writes songs in which the mind often appears to be moving faster than the narrative. Thoughts repeat. Feelings interrupt other feelings. Confidence arrives and is immediately interrogated.
The album opens with “Stay Here,” which takes one of pop music’s oldest sentiments, the plea for someone not to leave, and deprives it of romantic comfort. Repetition gradually changes the meaning. What initially sounds affectionate becomes anxious, then obsessive. Cello understands that saying something repeatedly doesn’t necessarily make it more convincing. Sometimes it merely reveals how badly you need to believe it.
This is characteristic of Singing to Serpents: Cello’s protagonists rarely control their emotions as effectively as they imagine they do.
On “Elevate,” ambition provides temporary armor. It’s a song about upward movement from an artist whose music is constantly pulling inward. The tension is productive. Cello can perform confidence convincingly while allowing enough uncertainty to seep through the edges that you begin wondering who the performance is meant to persuade.
“Sucks to Be Used” abandons some of that ambiguity for bitterness. Yet even here, Cello resists the clean victim-versus-villain mechanics common to breakup songs. Hurt mutates into hostility; vulnerability puts on combat boots.
Then Singing to Serpents gets stranger.
“Full Moon,” “So Long” and “Cravings” occupy the album’s shadowier middle ground, where attraction and danger begin sharing vocabulary. Cello treats desire as something capable of destabilizing the person experiencing it. Love isn’t necessarily salvation. Wanting somebody doesn’t prove they’re good for you. Knowing they’re bad for you doesn’t necessarily diminish the wanting.
Pop music has spent decades profiting from that contradiction. Cello simply declines to make it glamorous.
Genre is similarly unstable. There are traces of alternative pop, hip-hop phrasing, atmospheric rock, singer-songwriter confession, and spoken-word performance throughout the record. Cello’s background as an actor and poet is useful here. He approaches songs as psychological spaces rather than predetermined stylistic exercises.
This makes Singing to Serpents occasionally unruly, but never generic.
Cello is also autistic and has ADHD, and his openness about neurodivergence provides a revealing, but not exhaustive, framework for understanding the record. The repetitions, fixations, and sudden emotional pivots can resemble thought occurring in real time rather than being retroactively organized for a listener.
That’s an important distinction.
There would be something reductive about treating every unconventional choice as evidence of autism or ADHD. Neurodivergence isn’t an interpretive cheat code. But Cello’s willingness to discuss it matters because Singing to Serpents repeatedly concerns itself with the difficulty of translating an internal experience into language somebody else can understand.
Music becomes that translator.
Cello has increasingly connected this aspect of his life with advocacy, including a goal of becoming a certified peer-support professional in the autism field. That gives his openness a purpose extending beyond autobiographical disclosure. He’s not merely identifying himself as neurodivergent; he’s considering what lived experience might offer other people working through similar experiences.
The album’s most intriguing transformation arrives with “Pray” and “Faith.”
After spending much of Singing to Serpents wrestling with other people and himself, Cello introduces another participant into the argument: God.
But spirituality doesn’t clean up the mess.
That’s what makes these songs effective. “Faith” isn’t a declaration from someone safely on the other side of doubt. It treats belief as something requiring effort precisely because doubt remains present. Cello sounds less interested in preaching than negotiating.
Faith, like love elsewhere on this album, becomes a relationship complicated by need.
Finally, “Sleeping” provides something resembling decompression. It doesn’t solve everything preceding it because Singing to Serpents isn’t structured around conquest. The album doesn’t require Cello to emerge cured, enlightened, or emotionally bulletproof.
The title begins to make sense accordingly.
Serpents traditionally arrive loaded with symbolism: danger, temptation, knowledge, transformation. But Cello isn’t slaying serpents.
He’s singing to them.
That may be the record’s smartest metaphor. Modern pop frequently treats pain as narrative machinery: introduce trauma, build toward empowerment, arrive at the victorious final chorus. Singing to Serpents distrusts that efficiency.
Some problems recur.
Some desires remain irrational.
Some questions survive faith.
Some thoughts circle back around.
And Cello keeps singing anyway.
The result isn’t a perfectly orderly album. It is something more interesting: a record whose disorder feels inseparable from its author. Singing to Serpents doesn’t organize Cello’s contradictions into a marketable resolution.
It gives them microphones.
