Two years ago, when Bar Italia began to chafe against their mysterious reputation, they used a courtroom sketch for the cover of “Jelsy,” one of their strongest singles to date. Every time I re-listen to The Twits, their sophomore album, this is precisely where I imagine them: stone-faced on a witness stand, saying, Yes, Your Honor, we are normal people. For a while, their slackish alt-rock was buoyed by its icy mystique, a residual coolness from World Music—Dean Blunt’s label, which they ditched for Matador in 2023—that clung to them like frost on a leather jacket. Before long, the fog proved suffocating. “I’d rather be known as boring than mysterious right now,” singer-guitarist Jezmi Fehmi told one interviewer. “It was fine for a while but it’s got to the point where everything that’s written about us is caveated with the word ‘mysterious’.”
Considering their past, this was a daring wager. When Bar Italia first came out, spectrality centered not only their vibe, but their sound: ragtag, bedroomy, and brooding, like recovered files from an excavated iPod. There was perverse pleasure in following this scruffy, semi-anonymous band, whose music was intrinsically about distance—sounding far away, and feeling far away, too. In 2023, a fresh record deal yielded Tracey Denim and The Twits, two albums trapped between bedroom-pop origins and alt-rock aspirations. Two years later, Some Like It Hot stakes a bolder claim than both: clean-cut, well-mixed power-chord music. The problem, and what makes this evolution so underwhelming, is that this new sound is the absolute middle ground of rock in 2025. Fehmi has gotten his wish: No longer are Bar Italia mysterious, but something much worse—monotonous.
Conflictingly, this new album does angle toward an evolution, even if the one it achieves is sterile. Some Like It Hot is named for the classic 1950s love-triangle film, in which two ex-gangsters compete for the affection of a beautiful chanteuse. At their scraggliest, Bar Italia are somewhat similar: two whiny male vocalists and a dainty female lead, playing off one another like vaudeville caricatures. Is this necessarily a defect? To their credit, I recognize Hot as an attempt to smooth things over, including this oddball showmanship—tone down the hysterics, sharpen the production, exchange my-turn-your-turn vocals for harmonies. But I miss the erratic contours of their former sound, which didn’t always work, but felt wonderfully unnerving, and a teeny bit haunted, when it did. Granted, “haunted” and “unnerving” sound a lot like other terms they now disavow: “enigmatic,” “mysterious,” “shadowy,” et cetera. Conceptually, their resistance to mystique is commendable. Musically, it just means that instead of spellbinding whirls like “bibs,” we get arena-aspirant squalls like “Fundraiser,” which sounds like you trained an LLM on Oasis and asked it to generate a Bar Italia song.
Ironically, in its militaristic pursuit of fun, Some Like It Hot often winds up feeling deeply rigid—stripped of the spunk and nuance that once made Bar Italia so enchanting. Never have they abused loud-quiet-loud songcraft so excessively, and never has their best writing landed so flatly because of it. The compelling chord structure of “Rooster” is squashed by its predictable singalong chorus; the sly seduction of “Lioness” is undercut the second the fuzzboxes click on. Fehmi and Sam Fenton are immensely talented guitarists—just listen to their other band. Where did the interplay go? The interlocking lead-rhythm lines? In fits and starts, you can tell that this band does, in fact, have two guitarists who play off each other beautifully: Take the chorus of “Eyepatch,” whose jangly charm is vintage Warehouse, or the angsty “I Like My Own Dust,” whose chord-arpeggio tension is borderline asphyxiating. The cool thing about Bar Italia, in times past, was precisely this—tension that didn’t always lead to release. Conversely, Some Like It Hot is practically all release, which is unearned, because the necessary tension is often undercooked. Midway through “Omni Shambles,” when frontwoman Nina Cristante lets out a jarring shriek, I really wish I believed her.
Lately, the depressive linchpins of many a “World Music playlist (dragon emoji)” have been in better spirits: Ask Mark William Lewis, or Elias Rønnenfelt, or, hell, Fehmi or Fenton or Cristante themselves. This is not a bad thing, nor is it bad that Bar Italia, a band that once scored terminal bedrot, are trading their mini-amps for full stacks. The issue is that in abandoning their characteristic clutter for cruise-control precision, they've undermined their own years-long effort to seem more relatable and human. In one of the most memorable lines from The Twits, Cristante sings, as if to a jury: “You keep saying that I don’t care/If only you could see me now/You would have no doubt.” Two years later? “It’s not that I’m in despair,” Fehmi drawls on “I Like My Own Dust,” and it sounds like it. “It’s just that I don’t care,” he continues, and it sounds like it, too.
