LA NIÑA: singing with ghosts

What language do the dead speak? The songs of LA NIÑA offer us a glimpse. “I’m writing songs from another time and space. Like ghosts, the dead from the past of my history,” says the 34-year-old Neapolitan artist, whose real name is Carola Moccia.

LA NIÑA has just wrapped up an incredible year after the release of her critically acclaimed second album, FURÈSTA. The record glides between choral melodies rooted in Italian medieval traditions, dancefloor-ready beats and frame drum experimentation, while her voice – soaring, operatic and ethereal – seems to slip between centuries. This sense of being connected to the past is emphasised in her lyricism – she sings in Napolitano, a Romance language that dates back to the 5th century.

“I feel like I’m writing songs with ghosts when I write in Napolitano. The moment I switch to Napolitano, the sound of my soul changes. Something changes in me. Something which is not possible to explain. It’s magic,” says Moccia. “Language shapes art and also shapes your feelings.”

Moccia grew up at the foot of Mount Vesuvius in the Naples adjacent city of San Giorgio a Cremano. Her father a musician, her mother an artist, she began playing guitar and composing at an early age. But her relationship with sound has always been tied to thinking as much as feeling – she studied philosophy and history, both of which influenced the path her music has taken.

Performing at La Triennale di Milano, Milan, in 2025 (photo: Daniel Harper)

Moccia’s hunger for knowledge led her to reading authors from the 16th and 17th centuries, when Naples was an independent kingdom. This process informed the identity she wanted to spotlight on FURÈSTA, which hints at Naples’ long history as a transnational trading route intrinsically tied to the Middle East and North Africa. Take ‘SANGHE’, for example, a bilingual (Napolitano and Arabic) collaboration with experimental Egyptian artist Abdullah Miniawy.

“Right now, I’m reading Populorum Progressio from Pope Paul VI and Pensiero Meridiano [by Franco Cassano]”, she says, offering a few of her current reads, the first being an encyclical letter written to Catholic bishops in the 1960s, and the latter an Italian philosopher’s writings on southern Italy and global ‘souths’. It sounds like complex reading material, but to Moccia it’s what drives her reflective creativity. “That’s everything that moves my work.”

This can be seen in her intimate lyrical approach, in which she explores emotions ranging from personal heartbreak to women’s rights. It was a song on the latter topic that really allowed FURÈSTA to catch fire – ‘Figlia d’ ’a Tempesta’ has become an anthem across Italy. With heavy drums and a cathartic, ritualistic chorus, Moccia responds to the relentless reality of violence against women that reached fever pitch after the brutal murder of Italian student Giulia Cecchettin by her ex-boyfriend in 2023. ‘This worthless woman now wants everything / And she has a rage that never rests / She gave her life, and they took it from her a million times’, sings Moccia.

It’s a song that goes straight for the throat in terms of its message and condemnation of the treatment of women in society. “I was just listening to the world,” she says. “Women being killed every day, without real support from institutions, from education, from culture.” When the song is performed live, the audience often raise their hands to sing the chorus: ‘Femmena ‘e nie, femmena ‘e nie, femmena ‘e niente’ (Woman and no… woman and no… woman and nothing).

Moccia believes the song’s power – why it is felt so deeply in her live performance – comes from the fact that it spares judgement. “’Figlia d’ ‘a Tempesta’ is not saying ‘you are the bad guy’, I’m just listing things that happen every day, telling people what’s going on, feeling the rage together.”

Despite the urgency and rage present across the record, FURÈSTA closes on a hopeful note. The final track, ‘Pica Pica’, arrives like a dream – delicate, open-ended, quietly optimistic – as the sound of magpies from Moccia’s own garden flutter and chirp. “I dreamt that song and I woke up and I immediately went to record it. These are the birds bringing me with them and telling me you’re not going to die today. You’re going to live.” Within that dream, there is a sense that, once again, Moccia has conversed with the ghosts, yet has made peace with the spirits around her. “Death itself is not an enemy. The problem is the pain that comes with it – I think death is quite the opposite. It’s just a friend. So that song is just pure hope.”

Moccia wrote, performed and produced FURÈSTA, her second album as LA NIÑA, alongside Alfredo Maddaluno, a fellow Neapolitan with whom she has been collaborating on various projects since the early 2010s. On the album, they utilise regional instruments such as the chitarra battente (a 10-string, 5-course guitar) and the tammorra (frame drum) alongside synths, harpsichord and layers upon layers of vocals. The tammorra, such an iconic instrument in Neapolitan folk music, also features on the album cover, with Moccia’s scowling face overlaid on top of it. “I’m not smiling, because there’s nothing to laugh about nowadays,” says Moccia, with the bluntness that informs her observant lyricism. And even though she’s not laughing, she relishes a sense of connection. “I feel so connected with my people. This album made it possible to finally come together and see our faces and speak to people that are feeling things the way I do.”

As happened consistently through our conversation, she returns to a feeling of the otherworld. “It’s to do with magic – when you find the key, when you become a child, then you learn. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what I was looking for while writing this album, it was this deep level of connection.”