By: Rafael Santiago
Miami is a city built on beautiful contradictions. Luxury towers cast shadows over old neighborhoods. Spiritual devotion shares streets with unapologetic excess. The ocean promises tranquility while nightlife runs until sunrise. Everybody seems to be selling a fantasy, but underneath all that glass, neon, and salt air are millions of private lives considerably messier than the postcard.
That makes Miami an unexpectedly appropriate place to encounter Cello’s Singing to Serpents.
Released March 1, the Pittsburgh artist’s nine-song album runs just under half an hour, moving through “Stay Here,” “Elevate,” “Sucks to Be Used,” “Full Moon,” “So Long,” “Cravings,” “Pray,” “Faith” and “Sleeping.” It is a compact record overflowing with decidedly uncompacted emotions: desire, resentment, ego, insecurity, spirituality, and the nagging suspicion that knowing yourself may not necessarily make living with yourself any easier.
Imagine Singing to Serpents beginning around midnight somewhere off Biscayne Boulevard.
“Stay Here” is the first red light.
Cello takes one of popular music’s most familiar requests, don’t leave, and worries it until tenderness starts becoming desperation. Repetition is crucial to his writing. Thoughts don’t merely appear; they circle back, refusing to leave until they’ve extracted something from him. Critics have previously identified that looping, spiraling quality as central to the album’s construction.
In Miami terms, “Stay Here” is what happens after the glamorous part of the evening ends. The restaurant closed. The drinks wore off. Somebody said something they shouldn’t have. Now two people are standing beneath the artificial daylight of a parking garage, deciding whether this relationship survives until morning.
Then comes “Elevate.”
Here Cello finds swagger, but it’s unstable swagger, the sort Miami knows exceedingly well. This is a city where image can become its own economy, where Lamborghinis crawl through South Beach traffic at 12 miles an hour because being seen is half the purpose.
Cello understands performance, too. He has worked as an actor and poet, and those disciplines surface in music that can resemble dramatic monologue as much as conventional songwriting.
On “Sucks to Be Used,” the polish cracks.
Anger arrives, but Cello doesn’t sanitize himself into the innocent party. That’s one of Singing to Serpents’ more compelling qualities. Its narrator can be wounded and arrogant simultaneously. He can crave connection while behaving as though connection terrifies him.
Miami after dark understands that contradiction.
“Full Moon” and “Cravings” practically demand humidity.
These are the songs for 2:30 a.m., when Ocean Drive is still glowing, the causeways stretch like illuminated veins across black water, and desire has begun overruling common sense. Previous assessments of the record have described these songs as atmospheric and dreamlike explorations of desire, and that’s precisely where they function within the album.
But Cello isn’t making uncomplicated seduction music.
Desire here carries teeth.
That’s where the album title becomes useful. Serpents have always made wonderfully ambiguous symbols because they can represent temptation and danger, but also transformation and renewal. Cello’s serpents aren’t monsters waiting to be destroyed. They’re uncomfortable parts of the self demanding acknowledgment.
And Miami, for all its reputation for surface beauty, knows plenty about reinvention.
People come here to become someone else.
Cello spends Singing to Serpents wondering whether that’s even possible.
His music slips between alternative pop, melodic rap, spoken-word instincts, and atmospheric confession rather than committing to one genre. That fluidity suits Miami, whose musical identity has never belonged to a single tradition. Sounds collide here because cultures collide here.
Cello’s collisions happen internally.
The most fascinating transition comes with “Pray” and “Faith.”
Suddenly the album’s questions move upward.
But Cello doesn’t use spirituality as a convenient resolution to everything preceding it. “Faith” is powerful because faith sounds necessary rather than effortless. The record’s romantic insecurity becomes spiritual uncertainty; the need to believe in another person transforms into the need to believe in oneself, and perhaps something beyond oneself.
That feels particularly resonant in Miami, where sacred and secular frequently occupy neighboring blocks. Sunday-morning worship and Saturday-night excess aren’t opposite universes here. Sometimes they’re populated by the same people.
Cello seems to understand that human beings aren’t required to choose one uncomplicated identity.
His openness about being autistic and having ADHD adds another dimension to the record without providing a simplistic explanation for it. Cello’s music frequently emphasizes fixation, repetition, and intense emotional processing, but Singing to Serpents should not be reduced to a diagnosis. His neurodivergence is one part of the perspective through which he creates and communicates. Recent profiles have also connected that experience to his growing interest in autism advocacy.
Finally comes “Sleeping,” the album’s longest track and closing exhale.
In Miami, this is 5:45 a.m.
The clubs haven’t entirely emptied, but the sky over the Atlantic has begun changing color. Sanitation trucks reclaim the streets. Joggers appear along the beach while somebody else is still heading home from last night.
Nothing has necessarily been solved.
That’s important.
Singing to Serpents isn’t one of those records where turmoil conveniently becomes enlightenment before the final chorus. Cello remains complicated. Desire remains dangerous. Faith requires work. Loneliness doesn’t disappear simply because you’ve learned to describe it.
The serpents remain.
Cello simply finds the courage to address them.
And beneath the neon glow of Miami, a city perpetually caught between temptation and reinvention, that doesn’t sound strange at all.
It sounds like something worth singing about.
