Two years ago, when Bar Italia began to chafe at its mysterious reputation, they used a courtroom sketch for their cover of “Jelsy,” one of their strongest singles to date. Every time I listen again The idiotstheir second album, this is precisely where I imagine them: stone-faced in a witness stand, saying: Yes, your honor, we are normal people.. For a time, their laid-back alt-rock was fueled by their icy mystique, a residual coldness from World Music (Dean Blunt’s label, which they abandoned for Matador in 2023) that stuck to them like frost on a leather jacket. Soon the fog became suffocating. “I’d rather be known as boring than mysterious right now,” singer and guitarist Jezmi Fehmi said an interviewer. “It was fine for a while, but it got to the point where everything written about us is prefaced with the word ‘mysterious.'”
Considering his past, this was a bold bet. When Bar Italia first came out, spectrality centered not only its vibe, but also its sound: heterogeneous, bedroom and melancholic, like files recovered from a dug up iPod. There was a perverse pleasure in following this scruffy, semi-anonymous band, whose music was intrinsically about distance: it sounded far away and felt far away too. In 2023, a new record contract was achieved Tracey Denim and The idiotstwo albums caught between the origins of bedroom pop and the aspirations of alternative rock. Two years later, some like it hot makes a bolder statement than both: clean, well-blended power chord music. The problem, and what makes this evolution so disappointing, is that this new sound is the absolute middle ground of rock in 2025. Fehmi has gotten his wish: Bar Italia is no longer mysterious, but something much worse: monotonous.
In a contradictory way, this new album does angle towards an evolution, even if the one achieved is sterile. some like it hot It is named after the classic 1950s love triangle movie, in which two former gangsters compete for the affections of a beautiful singer. At its scruffiest, Bar Italia is something similar: two whiny male vocalists and a dainty female lead, playing off each other like vaudeville caricatures. Is this necessarily a defect? To your credit, I acknowledge Hot as an attempt to smooth things over, including this strange showmanship: toning down the hysteria, sharpening the production, swapping out my turn vocals for harmonies. But I miss the erratic contours of their previous sound, which didn’t always work, but felt wonderfully unnerving and a little bit tormented when it did. It’s true that “haunted” and “haunting” sound very similar to other terms they now reject: “enigmatic,” “mysterious,” “grim,” and so on. Conceptually, its resistance to mysticism is commendable. Musically, it simply means that instead of fascinating twists like “bibs”, we get gusts of sand wannabes like “Fundraising”, which sounds like you trained an LLM at Oasis and asked him to generate a Bar Italia song.
