TikTok’s favorite London-based Bar Italia just released their new album, The Twits.
Discover—Or Don’t—Bar Italia: Starting a Project
With an aura of mystery surrounding their art, the group has had their fans and the entire music community of TikTok in a chokehold for a while. The group is, however, ready to embrace a new vision of themselves, saying that silence was down to the fact “we had nothing to talk about,” said Jezmi Tarik Fehmi to The Guardian. “What’s interesting about hearing a band’s origin story when that was last week?” Fehmi added, “I’d rather be known as boring than mysterious right now.”
“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.’”
Jezmi Tarik Fehmi to The Guardian
The trio casually started working together in late 2019, later officially founding the group in 2020. As the pandemic started, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, Sam Fenton and Nina Cristante joined forces to make “catchy, good songs,” says Cristante.
“We were not interested in making experimental, challenging music,” said Cristante to The Guardian. Cristante and Fenton both discussed how they didn’t want to “use the term guitar music.” However, they did “want to use guitars.” Thus, when finding their sound, they acknowledged they “wanted to use guitars,” but “wouldn’t call it guitar music.”
The name came right after, offered by Cristante, who in 2007 moved to the UK from her native Rome. Bar Italia is in fact a reference to the Soho Café, popular with the post-club crowd. However, the name Bar Italia still hasn’t received full approval by the entire group, with Fehmi not being completely satisfied.
Success Across the Pond
Despite their London base, the group quickly gained their biggest support across the Atlantic, in the US.
“We got hold of our Spotify details a year or so ago, and that’s when we were like: ‘Oh sh*t, it’s like double in America what it is anywhere else,’” said Fenton, adding that, in the US, “they always like British bands.”
Fehmi corrected the bandmate: “It’s famously hard for a British band to break America. I’ve just finished watching the Busted documentary about them trying to break America – they’d had three No 1s and they couldn’t get a gig!”
The Twits
If you know Bar Italia, you know what to expect from the band’s second studio album, The Twits. Registered in 8 weeks, the release mixes creativity, dark vibes and “British” with a distinctive soul that makes their sound unique.
Rising from the ashes of the post-punk influences, the group found inspiration in Blur (13 and Blur) and Graham Coxon’s guitar, as well as the dark tones of The Velvet Underground and the smooth, swaying melodies of Slowdive.
Listen to The Twits here!
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