Bar Italia

To consciously draw on rock history and evoke the cool favourite records of music fans’ past is a fine line – it can all too quickly slip into empty pastiche or nostalgic retro posturing. But not so with the British indie band Bar Italia. Nina Cristante, Sam Fenton, and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi channel the spirit of formative ’80s and ’90s legends – The Cure, Pavement, The Fall – through songs steeped in post-punk and shoegaze sounds, yet they stand out with a distinctly contemporary sense of opacity. That may well stem from Bar Italia’s origins in the orbit of the enigmatic avant-garde artist Dean Blunt, from whom they seem to have inherited a taste for artful blurring.

Their current album »Some Like It Hot« (released on the iconic American indie label Matador), named after the eponymous Marilyn Monroe film comedy, stands out precisely because it lets in a little light through the melancholic haze. The guitars feel more muscular, the melodies easier to grasp, and overall the band leans more heavily into arena-ready Britpop influences. While Bar Italia’s core aesthetic was still marked by an inscrutability a few years ago, the band now present themselves with greater confidence – something that becomes especially clear on stage.