bar italia return with essential summer banger ‘Cowbella’ and a slew of European and North American tour dates. The run of shows in October and November, including stops in London, Milan, Barcelona, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, will follow a sold-out, small capacity London show previewing new music at 93 Feet East on June 19th. ‘Cowbella’, the first new music from the band since 2024’s The Tw*ts EP, sees a transcendent vocal blunt rotation between members Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton unfolding over a wiry, shapeshifting rocker that culminates in an explosive and chilling skywards coda. It’s a multi-pronged anthem that only bar italia could conjure. The last two years have seen the London trio release two critically acclaimed albums on Matador only several months apart – the poised Tracey Denim and the grand The Twits. They’ve traversed the globe with headline performances from Istanbul to Tokyo, sold-out multi-night stints in New York and Los Angeles, and festivals including Corona Capital, Glastonbury and Coachella. With over 160 shows worldwide across 2023-2024, bar italia became an exhibitionist and muscular five-piece – equally comfortable at festival mosh-pit incitement and moments of pin-drop intimacy. 

Ripped and Torn, the debut album by Chicago three-piece Lifeguard, may or may not take its title from the legendary Scottish punk fanzine of the same name. Or perhaps it references the torn t-shirts that rock writer Lester Bangs claimed the late Pere Ubu founder Peter Laughner died for “in the battle fires of his ripped emotions.” Or maybe it points to the trio’s ferociously destabilising take on melodic post-punk and high velocity hardcore, signposting their debt to the kind of year zero aesthetics that would reignite wild improvisational songforms with muzzy garage Messthetics in a way rarely extrapolated this side of Dredd Foole & The Din. Either way, Lifeguard stake their music on the kind of absolute sincerity of the first wave of garage bands, garage bands that took rock at its word, while simultaneously cutting it up with parallel traditions of freak. The half-chanted, half-sung vocals are hypnotic. Songs aren’t so much explicated as they are exorcised, as though the melodies are plucked straight from the air through the repeat-semaphoring of Asher Case on bass, the machine gun percussion that Isaac Lowenstien plays almost like a lead instrument, and that flame-thrower guitar that Kai Slater sprays all over the ever-circling rhythm section. Indeed, the trio play around an implied centre of gravity with all of the brain-razzing appeal of classic minimalism, taking three-minute hooks into the zone of eternal music by jamming in – and out – of time. And then there are the more experimental pieces – “Music for Three Drums” (which surely references Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians), “Charlie’s Vox” – that reveal the breadth of Lifeguard’s vision, incorporating a kind of collaged DIY music that fully embraces the bastardised avant garde of margin walkers like The Dead C, Chrome, and Swell Maps. But alla this would be mere hubris without the quality of the songs. The title track “Ripped & Torn” suggests yet another take on the title, which is the evisceration of the heart. Here we have a beautifully brokedown garage ballad, with the band coming together to lay emotional waste to a song sung like a transmission from a lonely ghost. “Like You’ll Lose” goes even deeper into combining dreamy automatic vocals with steely fuzz on top of a massive dub/dirge hybrid. “It Will Get Worse” is pure unarmoured pop-punk crush while “Under Your Reach” almost channels the UK DIY of The Television Personalities circa “Part Time Punks” but with a militant interrogation of sonics that would align them more with This Heat. Plus the production, by Randy Randall of No Age, is moody as fuck.  Are they really singing “words like tonality come to me” on “T.L.A.”?! If so, it would suggest that Lifeguard are one of those rare groups who can sing about singing, who can play about playing, and who, despite the amount of references I’m inspired to throw around due to the voracity of their approach, are capable of making a music that points to nothing outside of the interaction of the player’s themselves. And sure, there’s a naivety to even believing you could possibly do that. But perhaps that’s what I have been chasing across this entire piece, the quality of openness that Lifeguard bring to their music. You can tell these three have been playing together since junior high/high school: the music feels youthful, unburdened, true to itself, even as it eats up comparisons. Lifeguard play underground rock like it might just be as serious as your life, but with enough playful ardour to convince you that youth is a quality of music, and not just of age. With a sound that is fully caught up in the battle fires of their own ripped emotions, Lifeguard make me wanna believe, all over again.