Bar Italia are tired of being a mystery. The trio – who have spent their brief existence breathlessly feted as London’s most exciting new band, as well as its most enigmatic – are very much over their early inscrutability. “I’d rather be known as boring than mysterious right now,” says Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, who founded the outfit alongside Sam Fenton and Nina Cristante in 2020. “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’.”
There’s a reason for that: until this spring, the band had provided no names, no photos, no background information at all. In fact, there was just a stream of dissonant yet irresistibly hooky rock released via cult hero Dean Blunt’s World Music label, which led to the kind of hype traditional guitar bands rarely experience nowadays. But as they prepare to release their new album The Twits – mere months after May’s Tracey Denim (they admit to being prolific, but “no one’s Ed Sheeran here, being like: four chords, loop, done – it’s not that quick”) – the trio are ready to break their press moratorium.
