Bar Italia at Manchester Academy 2

Bar Italia, one of London’s most hyped bands of the last few years, are playing Manchester Academy 2 on 24 March 2026, returning off the back of their newest record, Some Like It Hot.

Bar Italia emerged a few years ago as signees to Dean Blunt’s World Music label, where they curried niche intrigue among fans of shadowy, lo-fi indie rock. With word-of-mouth buzz growing rapidly, the music press scrambled to figure out what, exactly, this three-piece represented. Were they earnest slackers or tongue-in-cheek provocateurs, or maybe neither?

The trio (Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton) knew better than to give anything away, cultivating an intrigue that led to them signing with indie powerhouse Matador for 2023’s Tracey Denim. Incorporating noughties indie, shoegaze and Britpop, the album was widely acclaimed, particularly for its hypnotic singles ‘Punkt’ and ‘Nurse!’, the latter sounding like a 90s hit you inexplicably missed the first time around.

The Twits followed just five months later, expanding their bookish but brutalist style across a set of slightly unnerving, city-scratched songs – a moment that seemed to solidify their place as one of the UK’s most quietly compelling guitar bands, and one of the hardest-working (160-plus shows in two years will do that).

Their newest album, Some Like It Hot, feels like another pivot: a cleaner, more widescreen version of Bar Italia that still smuggles in their oddball charisma. Where the early records thrived on murk and distance, these songs lean into clarity – lusty rockers, folk-pop detours and fuzzed-up ballads that twist their quirks into big, deliberate choruses.

Cristante moves between honeyed calm (‘Marble Arch’) and something more possessed (‘rooster’), while Fehmi and Fenton volley between brooding lines, megaphone crunch and that drifting, wistful tenor that once made their lo-fi material feel haunted. Even at its glossiest, the band’s three-way dynamic keeps things off-centre: harmonies slip sideways, rhythms tighten then fray, and the mood swings from theatrical swagger to pin-drop intimacy.

If the earlier albums were about mystique, Some Like It Hot is about performance – showmanship, emotion and identity blurring at the edges. Their show at Manchester Academy 2 feels well-timed: a bigger room for a bigger, newly sharpened sound.