I’m not sure how bar italia became one of the buzziest bands in the world. But somewhere along the line, it happened. The Dean Blunt-adjacent trio materialized at the forefront of a sphere of aloof projects (think untitled (halo), Joanne Robertson and mark william lewis) in 2020. Made up of spotlight-sharing singers Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, the London band’s grimy spin on alt-rock evokes a bootlegged Silversun Pickups rehearsal captured on gnarled tape. bar italia wandered onto the scene with minimal fanfare, but they had an easy time finding a voracious, uber-trendy audience. Shortly after their Matador-issued debut, Tracey Denim, hit shelves in May, the act was selling out back-to-back shows at some of the hottest venues in New York City and Los Angeles. I was in the crowd for bar italia’s jam-packed set at vaunted Ridgewood, Queens venue TV Eye, and was surprised by how many people I saw singing along to oblique tracks, like “Horsey Girl Rider” and “Mariana Trenchrock,” just mere days after they had come out.
For as much as I enjoyed Tracey Denim, the ceaseless hype that surrounded it also hurt my relationship with the album a bit. While it clocked in at under 45 minutes, it felt like a long listen—a blur of songs, which were often most memorable when digested individually. And, for as good as the band’s formula is, only a few tracks on Tracey Denim challenged its boundaries. Before they got huge, bar italia seemed like a legitimately baffling gem from an inexplicable corner of the UK underground. But something about the band’s immediate ascent left a strange taste in my mouth. Aside from looking cool and having an admirably lackadaisical approach to their craft, what actually made bar italia’s familiar slacker rock so noteworthy?
Less than six months after Tracey Denim briefly dominated indie rock discourse, bar italia have returned with their second full-length, The Twits. It was recorded over two months, as the band worked in a makeshift studio on an island off the coast of Spain. Although it’s still pretty off-kilter, the record finds the band pushing into comparably ambitious terrain. The album kicks off with distorted electric guitars on “my little tony,” which flaunts the scrappiness of a high school garage band practice. “worlds greatest emoter” is similarly rollicking, driven by uptempo rhythms and edgy, filtered vocals. Meanwhile, “Real house wibes (desperate house vibes)” and “Hi fiver” are trebly and blown-out—like they were recorded on a busted 8-track. If the most impassioned cuts on Tracey Denim called to mind a young King Krule, The Twits is more indebted to a metallic strain of ‘90s shoegaze.
The Twits shines brightest in its simplistic moments, which conceal bar italia’s most creative ideas yet. “Jelsy” puts a twee spin on surf rock, thanks to gritty acoustic chords and hand claps. “Shoo” drenches stripped-down folk songwriting in layers of feedback, while “glory hunter” is soaring and kaleidoscopic. “sounds like you had to be there” finds Cristante’s vocals at their most dynamic, breathing compassionate life into the otherwise yellowed song. “Brush w Faith” offers a snapshot of bar italia’s musicianship at its most refined, driven by intricate fretwork. With the dissonance stripped back, bar italia’s music makes me want to put on combat boots and tiny glasses, before heading off to drink cheap wine in the back of an arthouse theater.
The Twits isn’t perfect. To a casual listener, the record might come across as too cohesive; the band offer so little thematic context for their music that it starts to feel like some weird joke not even the bandmates fully grasp; and when writing this review, I consistently found myself having to eliminate comparisons to other artists: For all the detached eccentricity that makes bar italia unique, their material frequently feels like it’s emulating music that came before it. But, for the most part, bar italia have nonchalantly leveled up on The Twits. The noisy songs are louder, the edginess is more precise and, when bar italia tone down the bite, genuine creativity bubbles from the calm. I’ve spent the last few months trying to figure out what has allowed this understated, lo-fi band to become so canonically cool. I think I’ve finally figured it out: Once you learn to accept bar italia’s frustrating normalcy, the cheeky brilliance quickly reveals itself.
Ted Davis is a culture writer, editor and musician from Northern Virginia, currently based in Los Angeles. He is the Music Editor for Merry-Go-Round Magazine. On top of Paste, his work has appeared in Pitchfork, FLOOD Magazine, Aquarium Drunkard, The Alternative, Post-Trash, and a slew of other podcasts, local blogs and zines. You can find Ted on Twitter at @tddvsss.
