THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Twits was recorded over eight weeks from February 2023 in a makeshift home studio in Mallorca, and was mixed by Marta Salogni. It finds Bar Italia’s economical yet evocative songcraft taking raucous, mystic, unkempt, occasionally sinister, and wholly committed turns. Songs like My Little Tony, with its in-the-red riff and excitable hooks, the cathartic four-on-the-floor of World’s Greatest Emoter and the festival tent psychedelia of Hi-Fiver need little in the way of exposition – these are exhilarating rock songs, if wayward and strange.
Other moments see the band’s increasingly signature, three-act mini-dramas moving into previously uncharted territory. Nina Cristante, Jezmi Fehmi and Sam Fenton can each manifest a different melody, mood, and cadence — at times overlapping and linear, at others unexpectedly divergent — often within the space of 30 seconds, a tag team rooted in shared language and kinship. Jelsy, for instance, plays out like a conversation between friends over wistful, buzzing country blues, the alternating voices at points comforting, wry and hopelessly yearning. The sinuous, slow-burning waltz of Twist, meanwhile, stands out in its bare lyricism and seems to invite each bandmember’s individual take on a confessional.”
