When Bar Italia first arrived back in 2020, they were an act shrouded in mystery. Esoteric, quirky and quietly enigmatic, they emerged from London’s post-punk scene to almost immediate acclaim.
Over the last five years, though, the three members of Bar Italia have discovered one of the greatest unspoken truths of music: bands generally start off not very good and improve through playing shows, spending time together, discovering what works and what doesn’t, and finding their voice. No band, no matter how hyped, emerges fully formed as this otherworldly genius being. Instead, the really smart ones grow and develop, and that’s exactly what Bar Italia have done, culminating in their glorious fifth album ‘Some Like it Hot’: a record where everything falls into place and they become a fully functioning dynamic rock band as opposed to whispered cult stars lurking in the shadows.
“Our band has been split between writing and touring, and those have been fairly separate experiences, but they have informed each other. It’s been an extreme amount of touring and playing so many gigs,” says guitarist Sam as he looks back on Bar Italia’s journey. “The steady process of doing all of that and changing within that is interesting. You’re changing as a band and an entity within that by doing the same thing. It’s change within repetition.
“We put that pressure on ourselves quite early on. We got some recognition and following before we played many gigs. If you go back to the beginning, we felt maybe slightly out of our depth in the first few gigs, but we just had to lean into whatever we’re good at in each moment and enjoy the elements. The first gigs were still kind of raw, but our process has always been to find whatever it is that’s good at each stage and improve on that.”
“I don’t think we can avoid humour, even in a dark moment”
It sounds simple, but many bands neither have the patience themselves nor, perhaps more importantly, are afforded the patience by others to be given room to grow and get better by just doing all the things a band should. The most important thing is simply spending time together. You might imagine a band from the dark post-punk milieu of London spending all their time indoors in dank bedsit flats, reading intellectual poetry and watching old sixties movies. Bar Italia perhaps do all of that stuff, but the three members – Sam, Jezmi, and Nina – have shared interests in sports and activities and actually spending time outside.
“I play football whenever I get the chance. That’s a huge hobby of mine. I play it all the time,” says Sam. “I was a winger, but I started playing in midfield. I am fast, but I’m enjoying not running as much and staying in the middle. Speed is my strength.” For Jezmi, his interest is perhaps less physical. “Jezmi is into football, but he really likes to study it,” Nina laughs. “He’s really into podcasts and Chelsea.”
Nina is someone who definitely has a passion for physical activity. “I really like sports as well. I used to be a trainer,” she explains. “I like anything related to connective tissue and fascia. I specialise in a type of movement that’s called myofascial, which takes into consideration the body-wide cobweb. I find it really fascinating as it connects with consciousness and connects the mind and body as one. Anything that does that within movement is what I like to do.”
As Bar Italia became more established and the reality of being a working rock band became more tangible, the ties binding the three friends grew stronger. “The dynamics between the three of us have changed greatly throughout the years,” says Nina. “We started as three friends making music. Sam and Jezmi knew each other already, and I met Sam, and met Jezmi through Sam. It was during COVID, and there wasn’t much else to do, so we were just hanging out for days and days in Jezmi’s room. It became more and more professional and more like a job, not in a negative sense, though. Aside from how we might be internally personally, either we really get on or we’re slightly grown apart because we have some time off, our relationship professionally has changed as we are basically colleagues, and it’s our first income and focus. As part of that, there are now other people involved, like our manager, and the live band is completely different. These are people you go on the road with for so many months. You play on stage, which is such a magical experience. It feels a bit like family or a bit like school.”
If the band are a bit like school, then ‘Some Like It Hot’ is their graduation. It has all the idiosyncrasies that defined the band in the early days, but on an altogether bigger scale. This is a big rock record. “I wanted it to be like that!” exclaims Nina. The album was an evolution of all the work the band had been putting into actually being a band.
“It wasn’t a premeditated attempt to make it a big deal; it was a natural progression from what we’d been going through touring,” says Sam. “It was the longest break we’d ever had from writing music since we started the band, before we started writing this one. We didn’t even conceive of how long we’d spend not writing. I don’t know if that’s specifically what benefited it, but we came into that recording with a real zeal. We were raring to go.”
“The thing that makes it this big, more epic rock album rather than being alt or niche, etc, is the fact that we’ve played live so much,” says Nina. “We were working with specific people like our live drummer, Liam, who opened up a whole other world when it comes to the dynamics and melody. You can hear it in the drum sounds.”
“We were definitely listening to a lot of rock music on the road,” adds Sam. “Even when we started out touring, we were listening to alt-rock or things that were a little bit left-field, then we started playing it in the van and immediately hated it. There was something about playing music in the van and listening to it collectively that somehow destroyed the meaning. We all started drifting away into our headphones and our own music. It seemed like on a general level we’ve been listening to more classic rock.”
‘Some Like It Hot’ is characterised by its brevity and its sharpness. The punky thrash songs like ‘Lioness’ or ‘Cowbella’ are whip-smart and immediately direct, while album highlight ‘Rooster’ is sky-scraping rock anthemics delivered with a nod and a wink and a blinding grin on their faces. It’s the sound of a band finding new ways to express themselves.
“We were always trying to be expressive, but that’s something you need to learn,” says Sam. “It’s more a case of learning how to do that and let loose and access those emotions and those musical ideas and make room in the songs for them to come through. The generic rockiness that you might feel listening to it comes from more concise musical arrangements than before. I have memories of trying to sound heavy in the past by just throwing whatever chord I felt like into it and not thinking about the composition. It can weaken the effect of the music to do that. Even the quieter songs are among the most powerful on the album and hit you the hardest. The compositions feel more easily communicated on a melodic level.”
Those quieter songs provide the discombobulating counterpoint to the album’s potent attack. Whimsical, woozy folk tinged songs like ‘Plastered’ or the alt-country’ Marble Arch’. “‘Marble Arch’ has this swingy vibe,” enthuses Nina. “A country vibe as well. There are elements of country in the contradiction between how swingy and easy-going the melody is and how dark the vocal content is. There’s melancholy that comes out when you put those two things together. It’s got a real inner city feel.”
There’s a wonderful playfulness and naivety to Bar Italia’s music. Sometimes it’s silly, sometimes it’s clever and witty, and sometimes it’s just plain mad, but that’s what makes such a compelling package as the band have expanded their visual aesthetic and identity alongside making their music bigger and more expansive. For example, the video for the single ‘Fundraiser’ stars actual British comedy legend Matt ‘Super Hans’ King. Humour and how to deploy it, whether surreally or in-your-face, is part of the Bar Italia experience.
“A lot of people do mention humour and we’ve always been recognised for that,” responds Sam. “There’s obviously something playful and fun in that, but it’s something we’d do even if we weren’t having fun. We’ve all had hard times in the process of recording this album. I don’t think the whole thing was as fun or as loose as it has been in the past, but even if you’re struggling while making something, I don’t think we can avoid some of that humour even in a dark moment. We all have quite dark senses of humour. It’s so natural to us that we can’t avoid it.”
“I don’t have a memory of this album being hard. I kind of forget it when it’s done,” laughs Nina, skewering Sam’s nuanced and considered take. Typical Bar Italia, a mass of contradictions.
When the band think back to the arty post-punk indie underground where they started, they recall it with different emotions. “I feel more connected to the underground where we were coming up than a revival of indie sleaze. That’s my own personal wish, maybe,” admits Nina. “I didn’t grow up going to loads of gigs. I definitely feel an affiliation with that more than any sort of revival. I find that very short-lived. It’s nice not to be in a certain bracket.”
For Sam, he sees the band as more interested now in universal connection than niche alt siloes. “More than ever, I’m drawn to stuff that is basically good and inspiring,” he says. “I don’t care whether something is underground or not, but I do care about how successful music seems to be exposed to this effect that does drain it of an edge or a vibe sometimes. If you’re just fixated on being part of an underground thing, then you’re limiting what you can do and how you can make people feel. I’m just really interested in music that can make me feel and is affecting.”
Reflecting further on their time as an unknown baby band trying to work out what they were doing in the London underground punk scene, with people feverishly latching on to any new act with one song and barely any shows, Sam sees it as a product of a different generation.
“I feel interested in our past, but the outside perception of the scene we came up in is always a little bit compressed,” he says. “People look back and think of a scene like it was one buzzing thing, but instead it’s like islands that interconnect every now and then, but are independently floating around in the same city.
“Our generation is so warped by the internet that I talk to my dad, and certain venues like the Three Kings, where you would just go, and every band you wanted to see would come through. There are times when we’re drawn to play at a certain venue, like The 100 Club, because it’s got this legacy, but these days it often doesn’t feel the same. That world doesn’t seem to exist in the same way, but the energy that was flowing through that world still exists in people and the search for something inspiring and cool. I’m more interested in that search than the format. The format is always going to change, and our generation is so different.”
Bar Italia’s generation is different, but in 2025, we need a band like them who can be silly and stupid and intellectual and thoughtful, piercingly loud or hypnotically quiet, often all in the one song. On ‘Some Like It Hot’, they have fully realised all that brilliant potential on their best record yet.
Bar Italia’s album ‘Some Like It Hot’ is out now.
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