The fourth album by the Tuscan band The Cleopatras is a potpourri that confirms and renews the band's style: a mix of punk 77, garage rock and pop punk, supported this time by a less retro sound, more decisive and compact than in the past. To keep everything together, a strong feminine identity and a rock'n'roll and ironic spirit, where the creative and expressive power of femininity is embodied by some anthems (We Strike and We don't play like men) and by the covers featured in the album, all three by female artists.

An album of no less than 15 tracks, first of all because it was composed in a very long span of time: started in 2019 and ended in 2021, with very different inputs and an evolving context, with long periods of lockdown that have inevitably led the band to write new songs, thus turning the stall into creative energy (the track Life 2020 is an example).
But also because 15 tracks are the bare minimum to bring out all the souls, influences and facets of the band. There is in fact a solid base of punk 77 and garage rock, but there are also incursions into other worlds, such as dream pop (The Unicorn), the most contemporary surf (Laura Palms), new wave (with the adaptation of the theme of the MTV show Daria in a Devo key), pop punk (Cabot Cove) and a more experimental and 'weird' rock (with experiments such as the cover of Yoko Ono Kiss Kiss Kiss and the original Dai Dai Dai).
With "Bikini Grill" the band confirms its influences but the sound is more powerful and solid than in previous years; accomplice of this renewal is the work of Ale "Ovi" Sportelli at the mixer, who took care of recording, mix and mastering in his homonymous studio in Cascina, Pisa, co-producing the album with Cleopatras.

Bikini Grill is an old-fashioned work: instead of proposing different singles over time, as the times of social networks and streaming would impose, the album embodies and represents in a single work all the colors of the band, but also the passions and obsessions of its components. In fact, we find a light-hearted and carefree sphere, with references to the dimension of childhood (from unicorns to afternoons spent at the TV), and an unrestrained rock'n'roll one (Feel the Heat is an ode to life on tour); there is also a self-deprecating dimension (the band jokes about the lack of athletic preparation in (I'm) Fit like Mick Jagger and hypochondria in Travelling Drugstore); but there is also room for more serious issues, such as female empowerment (We Strike) and the well-worn paradigm of 'female' rock opposed to the 'male' one (We don't play like men).

The very title of the album is emblematic of the self-deprecating dimension and the spirit between serious and playful that characterizes The Cleopatras: “Bikini Grill” pays homage to Kathleen Hanna's icons of girl power, but does so in its own way.

The cover artwork, with its fluorescent and acid tones borrowed from the color palettes of the 80s and 90s, is the work of designer Dario Frattaruolo, and depicts a bikini party in which girls of all types, sizes and ethnicities let themselves go to a free and liberating fun. At the helm, a deity-fetish in the guise of a rather odd and stoned unicorn, blesses the party in the name of the uninhibited and authentic frenzy of rock'n'roll. On the back cover, each track is represented by an original illustration, in a collage that could have come out of a 90's stickers store, telling how each track exists on its own but also tied to all the others.


The album is out on Ammonia Records, Tufo Rock Records and Professional Punkers on May 18, 2022 in CD digipack, but is the colored vinyl edition scheduled for release shortly thereafter that represent the real graphic innovation of this work: the cover exists in several different versions, all printed on pearlescent paper. Two absolutely unique and unprecedented peculiarities that make the “Bikini Grill” vinyl edition a true collector's item.