Tracey Denim, the third full-length album from bar italia, is the kind of indie rock event the music world won’t instantaneously comprehend upon its arrival. Advance singles “Nurse!” and “punkt’ winked back at the brooding, focused noise churn of late-era Sonic Youth or a gothic version of blur, but as a whole, Tracey Denim more so appreciates the contributions from the ‘80s and ‘90s alternative scenes while reconfiguring them onto the same collapsed timeline in odd shapes. Peculiarity is where the trio of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton’s story started after all, being one of the only guitar bands on Dean Blunt’s World Music label amid a landscape of vaporwave and hip-hop signees, and that they’ve found a more fitting home with indie rock giant Matador Records for its release and still manage to sound like an outlier against its catalog of influences speaks volumes of their uncanny nature. Mostly, this has to do with their presence in the room. Cristiante’s voice moves with mystique into the ether, sometimes like smoke and in others, dourly ghostlike, while Fehmi’s is more so a slacker reinterpretation of Robert Smith’s morbid adore. Their sound follows an undeterminable path, curving around dim-lit corners of post-punk (”changer,”) sticky, grungy slowcore (”Horsey Girl Rider,”) gliding amalgamations of shoegaze and trip-hop (“Missus Morality,”) and dream-pop particlizing right before you (”maddington”.) The touchstones from the past are there in bar italia’s every steps, but at the same time, there’s an art of vanishing into it all. Consider it a séance of indie rock spirits moving through them…

Highlights: “Nurse!”, “F.O.B.”, “maddington”

bar italia’s Tracey Denim is available now on Matador Records.

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