La Bionda (Music Group)

Get ready for the Oscars with a deep dive into the duo behind the track, La Bionda, and others.The brothers of La Bionda.Angelo Deligio/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,The Oscars are this Sunday, and my personal pick for best picture is Brady Corbet’s gloriously ambitious, utterly unpredictable epic “The Brutalist.” Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, take some wild risks in the movie, and while I don’t think every one of them connects, I’m still awed by the film’s vision and scope. One risk that “The Brutalist” definitely pulls off, though, is the unforgettable, out-of-nowhere song that plays over the closing credits: “One for You, One for Me,” the ecstatic 1978 disco hit by the Italian duo La Bionda.I was certainly not expecting a three-and-a-half-hour drama about an architect who survived the Holocaust to send audiences dancing out of the theater — but the surprising and strangely satisfying La Bionda needle drop is in keeping with the film’s spirit of subverting convention. “It’s quite cheeky,” Fastvold said of the song choice in an interview with USA Today. “I really enjoy leaving the audience with that jolt of energy.”I confess I wasn’t familiar with this song, or La Bionda, before seeing the movie last month, but the first thing I did upon exiting the theater was Google “what is the disco song at the end of ‘The Brutalist’?” The answer led me down a rabbit hole of musical discovery — one that I’m sharing with you on today’s playlist. (I didn’t believe La Bionda could possibly have a song as catchy and transcendently ridiculous as “One for You, One for Me,” and then I heard “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” their retrofuturistic 1980 hit about a sexy alien.)La Bionda were a duo of Sicilian brothers, Carmelo and Michelangelo, who in the late 1970s pioneered a sound that would later come to be called Italo disco: think glistening synths, four-on-the-floor percussion and semi-absurdist lyrics. Italo disco’s production sound and overall sense of theatricality influenced a lot of later new wave artists, and every decade or so a new generation of music fans seems to discover its charms and make it subculturally cool again. But, as Michelangelo clarified in a recent interview with Vulture, he and Carmelo (who died in 2022) weren’t consciously making “Italo disco,” a term he considers an afterthought “to put a label on the shelves.”Regardless of how you classify them, La Bionda are worthy of rediscovery — especially if you like your dance music fun, over-the-top and magnificently gauche. Enjoy this brief introduction to their sound, featuring some of their biggest hits (both as La Bionda and D.D. Sound), alongside music they produced for another Italian pop duo, Righeira.And if you’re looking for something with a bit more grandeur, I highly recommend Daniel Blumberg’s excellent original motion picture soundtrack for “The Brutalist,” which I’ll also be rooting for on Sunday night in the best original score category.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More