On their second album of the year, the group create a soundscape that describes their position as part of a dissociative society.

bar italia have hit the ground running after signing with Matador Records in March of 2023, their latest release of The Twits, coming a mere 6 months after the release of previous album ‘Tracey Denim.’ The band, made up of London natives Jazmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, plus Rome transplant Nina Cristante, have produced an album that collects character profiles for an emotive blend of songs. Summoning their eclectic collection of inspirations, they brew a maddening concoction of high-impact guitar tones and rippling, depersonalised voices. 

‘The Twits’ acts like a silken ribbon thread through metal rivets, their holy trinity of voices pinning down the listener into a whirlwind of character confessions. Cristante’s delicate tone is reminiscent of ‘60s continental darlings such as Jane Birkin, contrasted against Fenton’s conversational baritone providing mid-range mania, and Fehmi’s low, rumbling growl. The soundscape they develop on ‘The Twits’ serves like a series of snapshots from a booming party, replete with love triangles, disappointed lovers and exes. All of this is balanced on the bubbling anxiety that creeps up from underneath done-up faces, suggesting this work is a glance into the inner turmoil of the album’s participants.

Songs like ‘Real house wibes (desperate house vibes)’ and ‘Jelsy’ highlight the inner minds at play in a space simmering with raucous energy with lyrics such as “Keep playing with my receiving hand” (‘Real house wibes’) and “I could stop this shit but you would never tell” (‘Jelsy’) depicting a numbness that hides layers of pain under waves of intoxicating guitar. The doubling up of Fenton and Fehmi’s voices on Real house wibes also places distortion on the lyrical balance present, like the blur of a night gone on too long.

There’s sophistication in the pouring out of emotion on this album, which brims with self–reflection, like a mirror held up to London’s dragging youth, reanimating our lost bodies. Songs like ‘sounds like you had to be there’ and ‘Bibs’ represent this in their lyrics: “When people say you’re lost, don’t tell them it’s not true. It’s good to let them think you’re unaware” sung by Cristante with an almost delusional response, “The steps you’re taking are good, the steps you take are for you” sung harmonised over her own voice, acting like a mental mantra of reassurance. Whereas ‘bibs’’ lyrics – “Every time you try to speak your tongue rolls back on your teeth”, and “You feel no one gives you the time” – highlight an anxiety that is kept under wraps by Cristante’s melancholic matter of fact tone.

The album also allocates space for disappointment, such as on ‘que surprise’, ‘Hi fiver’ and ‘twist’, whose sense of dissonance is present in both the lyrics as well as the ear-splitting bursts of noise. Here, notes divert from the expected resolution in the melody by hitting a beguilingly off-putting raspberry note, finally resolving well past our point of expectation, by Fehmi’s dark growling vocalisations.

The duality of female and male voices in ‘The Twits’ adds to the spectrum of sound, providing spectral echoes of a roomful of desires, regrets and self-resolutions into the listeners’ obliging eardrums. The flatness and interplay between voices acts like distorted, depersonalised thoughts in conversation with one another, not out of an exchange of words but an exchange of body language, of unspoken tension received in a mindful communication throughout the album. While some would argue the dissonance of their distinctive vocal personalities falls flat against the high-impact guitar tones woven throughout the album, it could be argued to be their strongest asset, given how they create an effective callousness that leaves the listener impacted with a sense of familiarity.

This album can be understood as a conversation with the past, much like our wider society is, bombarded with reminders of some other decade affixed to our everyday like an emotional leech. There is a level of bravado to the way bar italia refuse to shy away from blending inspirations into a careful cocktail of songs that, in the end, feel like an obvious representation of themselves. While the listener can hear influences from a range of styles –shoegaze, post-punk, trip hop, grunge, goth, folk – ‘The Twits’ feels distinctly like bar italia. This recognisability is an incredible achievement for a band still relatively new to the scene and bodes well for their future.

For an album as raw and exposed as ‘The Twits,’ it doesn’t have a single hair out of place, each song is as potent as the next, up to the last second. ‘The Twits’ fades out with a near screech, distant in the phonetic soundscape, like a camera panning out from the chaos of a party replete with buzzing beating bodies and brains full of anxiety and self-doubt onto a quiet, moon-stricken street. There’s a lot about this album that feels standout, not in an overly conceptual way, but rather as a raw representation of aspects of our city that bubble underneath the brickwork.