by Landon Ungerman
salvatore! didn’t set out to write Clover. He just got ghosted.
If “we had a good thing going—what happened?” were an album, it’d be this. The upcoming artist from Thornton, CO, had seemingly met his match heading into summer, until it came to a sudden end — no goodbye, no explanation. Blocked on everything.
“It seemed like it was going so well. Everything just switched in an instant.”
If you listen closely, the new album from salvatore! — his artist name and also, fittingly, a spin on his middle name — doesn’t just walk you through the fallout. It makes you sit with it. It starts in that spark of excitement when you think maybe you’ve found something real, walks straight into the confusion and despair when it disappears, and ultimately climbs out toward a quiet, chosen kind of peace.
“There’s no filter. It’s me, one and the same. And I think that shows in the music, because it’s open. It’s vulnerable.”
He recorded ‘Clover’ between February and June of 2025 in his childhood bedroom, teaching himself to mix, master, and write from scratch. “I get home from work every day, and within the hour I’m at my computer. Mixing. Writing. Recording. It’s pretty much daily.” He laughs, “The stuff on Spotify from 2023? Not good. The mixing is garbage. But now? Now I’m learning.”
There’s a version of this story where salvatore! gets blocked and just shrugs it off. Deletes her contact. Maybe writes a bitter punchline in his notes app. But instead, he took the situation for what it was — and processed it through song.
“I thought about an old song I never finished,” he says. “It was called ‘Regret Knowing Me’ — you know, like, ‘you did me dirty, and someday I’ll be something and you’ll remember knowing me.’” Now that there was some real life behind that old idea, salvatore! allowed it to blossom into ten tracks of pure expression.
“Hold On,” one of the album’s standout tracks, was written after the breakup but placed near the beginning. It captures the moment when you’re still clinging to what you thought it was, even after you know better. “I wanted to build the arc of the album that way,” he says. “Start from that fragile hope, then show what happens when it crumbles.”
A bit later in the album, you can hear the young artist overcome a barrier in himself. “Get Back Up Again” was written the same day she cut things off. You can hear it in his voice.
“It’s raw,” he says, “but it’s hopeful. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever made.” The song marks a pivot—not away from the pain, but toward something lighter, something functional. The next track, “Set Me Free,” leans into a bouncier, more electronic space. “It’s the one I’m most excited to do live,” he says. “It’s like, yeah, this sucks, but I’m moving.”
Every detail — down to the title and cover — points back to the idea that how we work through strong emotions and react to new experiences is ultimately a decision, regardless of who or what caused them.
salvatore! breaks down how he landed on the name of the album, ‘Clover’: “I used to call her ‘Clo,’” he says. “I remember telling her she was my four-leaf clover, like, ‘Finally I got some good luck.’” It sounds cheesy, he admits — but the metaphor stuck. Some things are only meant to be for so long, and all that’s left to do is process the letdown of that luck running out.
The cover art depicts salvatore! lying peacefully in the sun, with a clover resting softly on his face. It feels like a breath. The album asks you to sit still. To listen. To grow with it.
If you’re lucky, you’ll hear it that way. Listen to the new album Clover by salvatore!, out July 4th.
