Bar Italia: For those who love Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth
Among the new ones London bandsthe Italian Bars have carved out a particular role in a few years: enigmatic, disenchanted, increasingly followed by criticism and public. Formed by Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, they have chosen to move away from the spotlight, with few interviews and a minimal aesthetic that lets only the music speak. And their music, including post-punk, slowcore and indie-rock Lo-fi, has the advantage of always seeing on the point of escaping, of becoming impregnable. “Some Like It Hot ”is a 1959 film with Marilyn MonroeTony Curtis and Jack Lemmon who tells the adventures of a group of rebel musicians. It is fun, sexy, turbulent and timeless with a great talented cast that gives its best. “Some Like It Hot” is also the new album of the London trio Bar Italia, to be released on October 17th For Matador, and some analogies with the film are perhaps not casual. They will also pass from Italy to present it: 22 October 2025 – Santeria, Milan; March 5, 2026 – Milk, Turin; March 6, 2026 – Hacienda, Rome; March 7, 2026 – TPO, Bologna.
The new album pulsates romance, discovery of oneself and ecstasy for sensual rockers, hypnotic folk-pop, ballads from drunk and indefinable moments that surprise you as a ray of sunshine at five in the afternoon. The maturation of the band’s sound, from the first home recordings similar to hand drawn by hand to the brush strokes of “Some like it hot”has been refined thanks to an incessant composition and tours program, which literally spurred them on to go beyond their boundaries. What is striking is the construction of the songs: essential, fragmentary, such as emotional collages that stand on hypnotic repetitions, scarlet guitars and an underground rhythm. The voices of the three alternate and intertwine, creating a dimension almost from intimate conversation, sometimes broken, sometimes choral. In this sense, the comparison with i Velvet Undergroundmade by many, but obviously with all due proportions, it is not entirely risky: The Italian bar inherited that urban and minimal approach, that use of multiple vocal stamps (Lou Reed and Nico on the one hand, Sam Fenton and Nina Cristante on the other) and above all that will to deconstructing traditional form-form.
If the Velvet told the New York Underground of the 60s, The Italian bars seem instead to give voice to a fragmented and post-pandemic London, where the stories are never explained to the end, but remain suspended, enigmatic. Both bands have a “pop” taste which, however, turns into “anti-pop” against the mainstream. With “Tracey Denim “and” The Twits “, both released in 2023 for Matador, have consolidated a formula Which mixes melancholy and immediacy, without ever giving in to the patina of the mainstream indie. The big sound difference between the two projects is that The Velvet were also very noisy and experimental, while the Italian bar are lessas if they spoke from a closed room rather than a fiery stage.
Like the Sonic Youth, another band to which they are often joined, even the Bars Italia play with “unconventional” agreementsdirty sounds and a certain roughness that creates constant tension. In many songs they choose not to “solve” never really, remaining on an unstable thread, Just as Thurson Moore and Lee Ranaldo often did in their guitar textures. Ultimately, the Italian bars like them because they bring something to the foreground that in independent music seemed lost: The sense of “true” band, capable of being dirty, introverted and magnetic at the same time. And they don’t seem to chase any easy consent.
