I always have a hard time explaining what attracts me to bar italia, the trio of Londoners Nina Cristante, Sam Fenton, and Jezmi Fehmi. After all, they can’t really sing and at times sound like they don’t care much about making music. At first, it sounds like they are adding nothing new to their tried-and-true template of ’90s slacker rock pastiche. But then they’ll land on a perfect riff, or they’ll weave their vocals together in a freakily fresh way, like triplets who share a single angsty mind. It’s a blurry morass of lovesick languor conveyed through aching croaks and shy melodies.
I’ve been dipping into the new album by Double Virgo, the duo of Fenton and Fehmi, which they began before linking up with Cristante and launching bar italia just before the pandemic. Shakedown leaves the attic and lets the light run over their guitars, with streaks of brightness and a rhythmic tightness that ditches the glorious sloppiness of bar italia’s earlier music. I keep coming back for the little moments: the rollicking cascade of “Vis a Vis,” the call-and-response cheers on “bemused,” the way the two playfully stumble over each other on “Role Play.”
When bar italia ended their media embargo and did a flurry of interviews last year, many tried to crack the band—unravel their cult appeal, dissect their intentions. The result was some dissing of modern British bands (“I cannot honestly say I like anyone’s music. I don’t even like our music,” Fehmi told Crack), but mostly fluff: Yeah, we’re three friends and we’re making music. They defibrillated guitar music when people were pronouncing it dead; they did indie sleaze without the obvious and garish commercial lameness. They curated mystique, they gave loner malaise the faded glamour of a black-and-white film.
I’ve been digging a bunch of bands who rose in the wake of or alongside bar italia, who deploy guitars in weird ways and whose core inspirations fuse some combo of the Cure, Dean Blunt, and a ’90s dartboard of clangor and jangle (Blur, Pavement, trip-hop, shoegaze). The styles seem to appeal to people like me, whose primary lane isn’t guitar-centric music but for whom the alt-rock triggers something nostalgic and poignant (the image of myself at the age of 2 joyously zooming around my family’s home to the Libertines). There’s a textural hookiness that feels indebted to weird dance music. It’s less “jamming out in your dad’s muggy garage,” more art school kids with good taste, and without being didactic or overly conceptual.
While the most unimaginative tunes drift limply between slacker rock and dream pop tropes, the rawest songs feel mic’d up to a naked id—a tangle of hurt emotions and unanswered questions, a consciousness dreamily descending into nothingness, so all that’s left are haunted chords that hit like they’ve been xeroxed from decades ago. L.A. band untitled (halo) has struggled to beat the bar italia simulacra allegations, but they’ve also trickled out some earworm guitar lines and made the only “brainrot” lyric that doesn’t make me want to impale my cranium on a dagger. There’s the Crying Nudes, who are directly involved with Dean Blunt, spawning on his World Music label soon after bar italia’s acrimonious departure. The wispy wing-flutter of the vocalist, Fine Glindvad, brushes against every guitar stroke like she’s delicately turning over a pearl.
The ache in this music sometimes feels like a lazy placeholder for explicit emotion feeling, but it can tug on your heartstrings. Some music by mark william lewis, a mysterious Londoner in the World Music orbit, scans like the indie flipside of the hushed ASMR strain of bedroom pop. Just a guitar, drums, sometimes a harmonica too, and a man speak-singing through a cloud of reverb about car crashes and relationship implosions, it’s lowkey and lovely, quietly devastating.
Some of this music overlaps with what Nina Protocol recently dubbed “cloud rock,” or styles wavering in a fuzzy zone between digital and analogue, indie guitar filtered through a cracked producer’s brain. I keep slipping back under the hypnagogic spell of Terra Infirma, the debut by New York artist deer park, who’s also produced beats for rappers like fakemink. Tracks like “The Whole Truth” feel like watching the sediment of a genre erode in real-time, the gentle glimmer of a guitar deforming and reshaping under the weight of reverb and drones. Pitch-shifted declarations stamp the haze on “Fess Up” like fluoro text overlaid on an impressionist painting. A fried fog surrounds the ambient rock of NYC band Chanel Beads, whose fragmented writing feels as in-between as the song structures: constantly groping toward something unresolved.
I was startled when I saw Chanel Beads perform last year at TV Eye and found people bouncing to the dazed-out music; a man in the pit chanted while waving around and swigging from a handle of tequila like he was at a house party. There was this same semi-incongruity earlier this year at the Brooklyn bar Honey’s, when Montez Press Radio threw a show that included Deer park and NYC band the Furniture Group, whose slanted acoustics rattled across the cavernous din of the room, packed with a buzzing crowd and wooden barrels like we were in some kind of industrial tank storage facility.
I’ve never seen bar italia live, but there was a brief moment where I became obsessed with watching clips of them, especially low bitrate, slipshod quality ones, which somehow felt truer to their oldschool-fetishizing, self-effacing ethos. I was sometimes struck by how alive the music became, a gale-force squall of noise where Cristante gallops around the stage and Fenton’s necklace whips against his chest as he strums. Performing the fragmented verses makes it feel less like they’re wistfully idling over the end times and more like an optimistic call to arms, to escape the sad-sack panopticon of the internet and start living in real-life. They just released their first song in a year, “Cowbella,” four minutes of small new musical ideas but still the same old bar italia blues, the gray void of unspecified lovers, social anomie, empty days ticking off into the abyss. But the sound is less hermetic, more emotionally forward, rooted in the physical now.
There are many rock scenes alive and thriving right now, like the “Windmill” cluster of theatrical acts like black midi and Black Country, New Road, but what I’m describing is more like an amorphous vibe. It captures something about the 2020s, the dooming and the yearning and the desire to get away from the scroll: Jaded music nerds retreating from the info-blitz to a state of adolescent fooling around with friends, songs that feel like you’re rendezvousing on a shadowy street corner after a night out. If vapid “main character music” has become emblematic of the algo-driven streaming era, this alt-rock is more like secondary character music, full of bit parts and extras—no one excessively straining to be heard or make sense or impress a message on the listener. It’s actively passive, willfully losing itself in its own noise.