Some bands carry their debut like a millstone, and some bands carry it like a torch. Hardline has spent the better part of three decades in the second camp — and with Shout, their latest album via Steamhammer/SPV, they’ve made the strongest case yet that the flame Johnny Gioeli and company lit with 1992’s Double Eclipse still has serious heat left in it.
At the center of that effort, as he has been for much of the band’s recent run, is Alessandro Del Vecchio — keyboardist, co-writer, and the kind of sonic architect who tends to shape records from the inside out rather than the top down. In a new interview, Del Vecchio laid out exactly how Shout was built, what it means for Hardline‘s legacy, and why recreating the past was never really the point.
“The key is intention and honesty,” he said. “We didn’t sit down saying, ‘Let’s recreate Double Eclipse.’ That would immediately turn into nostalgia. What we did instead was reconnect with what made that album special in the first place, which is strong songwriting, emotional delivery, and that balance between power and melody.”
That balance — the thing that made Double Eclipse such a benchmark for melodic hard rock — is precisely what Shout chases on its own terms. Del Vecchio, Gioeli, and guitarist Luca Princiotta split the songwriting between them, though “split” may be too clean a word for what sounds like a genuinely fluid process. “There’s no rigid division like ‘you do this, I do that,'” Del Vecchio explained. “Usually one of us brings an idea, a riff, a chorus, sometimes even just a title, and then we build it together.”
Each brings something distinct. Gioeli sets the emotional compass — his voice is so recognizable that it functions almost as a filter, determining what fits and what doesn’t before a note is fully arranged. Princiotta supplies the modern muscle, the riffs and arrangements that keep the record from feeling like a period piece. Del Vecchio handles structure, melody, production direction, and the keyboard work that, on a record like this, can mean the difference between a great song and an anthem. “Songs like ‘Shout’ or ‘Welcome to the Thunder’ are really the result of that combination,” he said. “It’s three different perspectives working toward one goal, and that’s what gives the record its cohesion.”
The production philosophy on Shout followed a similar logic — resist the temptation to chase trends, and focus instead on impact. “Modern doesn’t mean following trends,” Del Vecchio said. “It means sounding relevant and impactful today.” Big guitars, powerful drums, and room left for the vocals and melodies to do their work. The keyboard layers and harmonies that give Hardline its signature anthemic sweep stayed intact — not as nostalgia but as architecture. “You want it to hit hard, but you also want it to lift people,” he said. “That’s always been Hardline.”
Shout also makes room for range. “Candy Love” leans into the band’s lighter, more celebratory instincts — pure 1980s melodic rock without apology — while “Glow,” a track Gioeli has described as rooted in a love of dogs and the weight of loss, operates in a completely different emotional register. Del Vecchio approached the latter less as a ballad and more as a study in restraint. “When you work on a song like that, you don’t think in terms of ‘ballad,'” he said. “You think in terms of emotion. The goal was to create space. Space for the vocals, for the words, for the listener to connect. That means not overplaying, not overproducing, and letting the dynamics breathe.”
Then there’s the album’s cover of the Scorpions‘ “When You Came Into My Life” — a deliberate left-field pick that prioritized emotional depth over the obvious classic-hit grab. “We wanted to pick something that had emotional depth, not just a classic hit,” Del Vecchio said. “That song has a very strong emotional core, and it fits Johnny‘s voice perfectly.” The arrangement was reworked to feel like a Hardline track rather than a tribute act exercise, preserving the melody while reshaping everything around it.
Keyboard-wise, Del Vecchio is characteristically measured about his own role on the record — always conscious of not crowding the guitars and vocals that form the band’s spine. But there are moments where the keys do more than decorate. “Songs like ‘Shout’ itself or ‘Rise Up’ have elements where the keyboards help define the atmosphere and support the identity of the track, not just fill the background,” he said. He also points to “Mother Love” as a track where the keyboard sits closer to the foundation — a song he said grew directly out of a keyboard riff rather than a guitar idea.
Shout arrived April 17, with a European tour following just a week later — and Del Vecchio admits the live context was never far from his mind during the writing process. “When you write songs like ‘Shout’ or ‘Welcome to the Thunder,’ you can already picture the audience reacting, singing along, feeling that energy,” he said. “That definitely influences the way you build the choruses and the arrangements.” But the live test was always secondary to the more fundamental one: does the song work on its own? If it does, the rest follows.
More than 30 years on from Double Eclipse, Del Vecchio sounds less like a man trying to honor a legacy and more like one who’s simply stopped worrying about it. “I’ve been doing this for many years, and I’m at a point where I don’t feel the need to chase anything,” he said. “I just want to make the best music I can, honestly.”
For a genre that gets written off on a near-annual basis, that kind of conviction has a way of cutting through. “If you approach it with passion, attention to detail, and respect for the songwriting,” Del Vecchio said, “it still has a lot to say.”
Shout makes that argument without breaking a sweat.
