bar italia are the London based three-piece of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton. Their second full-length release of 2023; 'The Twits', follows on from the band's debut for Matador six months earlier. 'The Twits' was recorded by the trio over eight weeks from February 2023 in a makeshift home studio in Mallorca, and was mixed by Marta Salogni. It finds bar italia's economical yet evocative songcraft taking raucous, mystic, unkempt, occasionally sinister, and wholly committed turns. Songs like 'my little tony', with its in-the-red riff and excitable hooks, the cathartic four-on-the-floor of 'world's greatest emoter' and the festival tent psychedelia of 'Hi-fiver' need little in the way of exposition - these are exhilarating rock songs, if wayward and strange. Other moments see the band's increasingly signature, three-act mini-dramas moving into previously uncharted territory. Cristante, Fehmi and Fenton can each manifest a different melody, mood, and cadence - at times overlapping and linear, at others unexpectedly divergent - often within the space of thirty seconds, a tag team rooted in shared language and kinship.
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