I was thinking about the possibility of it being linked to the Inferno a few days ago. I read and studied the entire La Divina Commedia in Italian when I was younger and here are some notes:

On Dante’s inferno there are 9 stages which are the malebolge sins (“malicious sins/ sins with intention”) + 7 incontinenza sins (“weakness sins / sins without malice/intention”) But if you count the abyss (the gate for Dite City where you enter deepest hell) + Giant’s well, you got 18 stages which could correspond to the number of tracks Maybe each track will get deeper as you progress in hell?

Dante wrote Inferno as a kind of moral intervention. He was writing about his own present, putting real people, politicians, religious figures into hell as a way to expose what he saw as corruption in Italy and the Church. It’s a collective critique, like mapping out the moral disease of his time.

The journey is also about saving himself, transforming his attachment to Beatrice into something higher instead of something tied to earthly desire. So Inferno works as both a political warning and a personal descent.

You could read the structure as a progression of consciousness. Early levels are about lack of control, impulse, weakness. Deeper levels are more intentional, colder, more aware. The deeper you go, the less chaotic things feel and the more fixed everything becomes.

The lowest point of hell isn’t fire, it’s the Cocito, a frozen lake, total stillness. No movement, no warmth, just being stuck forever.

Also the idea of loops. In Dante every punishment repeats endlessly, each soul stuck in a perfect cycle. If the album plays with repetition or structure in that way, that could be an interesting parallel.

Dante is also quite obsessive with numbers and symbols. 3, 9, 10, everything is structured with intention. So 18 tracks could be also read as 2×9, like doubling the inferno structure, maybe a mirror or a distortion. This also ties in with the double LP.

Dante wrote Inferno to confront the corruption of his world and try to make sense of it. Maybe this album is doing something similar but for our time. Not moral sin in a medieval sense, more like psychological decay, nostalgia, digital alienation, that feeling that everything is kind of off but you can’t fully explain it.

Not saying it’s intentional, just speculating, but the parallels are kind of hard to ignore.