The four members of the Italian rock band Maneskin grew up gigging around Rome. But when they flew into Los Angeles for their first sold-out gig at the Roxy in early November, there was one local site of Saturnalian bad behaviour they just had to visit. “The Rainbow Bar!” bassist Victoria De Angelis shouted when asked about which local rock ’n’ roll haunts the band had to see on its first trip to the US west coast. “I grew up on metal and glam rock, so we were all sitting on the couch in there, like, ‘This is where Lemmy and Motley Crue used to hang out’.” Maneskin are a band of almost unnervingly lithe twenty-somethings who can squeeze into ’70s David Bowie bodysuits (or, as is often the case at photo shoots, squeeze out of them). They emerged victorious at 2021’s Eurovision Song Contest – a competition that, decades earlier, gave the world Abba and Celine Dion; last week, Maneskin helped ring in 2022 on ABC television’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest . Maneskin are an anomaly in a rap- and pop-driven era: a guitar/bass/drums combo indebted to Queen and T Rex that perform largely in Italian and whose breakout US single was a cover of the Four Seasons’ hit Beggin’ .” Even their first scandal – a stray Eurovision camera angle capturing what looked like cocaine at their table, which the band denied having and the European Broadcasting Union cleared them of – seemed charmingly retro. After a year when they made genuine inroads into the Hot 100, where Beggin’ cracked the top 15, Maneskin – Danish for Moonlight – could reasonably claim to be the biggest new rock band of 2021. They topped US rock and alternative radio charts; Beggin’ has more than 800 million plays on Spotify, and I Wanna Be Your Slave tops half a billion too. Like BTS and Stray Kids’ traditional sounds? Check out this alt K-pop band “They’re one of our three biggest hits of the year, if not the biggest,” said Lisa Worden, programme director of Alt 98.7 in Los Angeles and vice-president of rock and alternative music at iHeartMedia. “It’s so unusual to have a rock band with streams of that magnitude. To have a song like Beggin’ that gets launched on pop and rises in alt and rock, it’s been a while since we’ve had that across formats,” she said. Mesh tops, low-cut leather pants and eyeliner for everyone – should TV sets near Sunset Strip hotel windows start getting nervous again? “The fact that there’s a band in the top of the charts playing just three instruments, it’s something that hasn’t happened for so long,” De Angelis said. “But we didn’t expect it to happen in such a short amount of time.” A couple of days after their Roxy show, the foursome – bassist De Angelis, singer Damiano David, guitarist Thomas Raggi and drummer Ethan Torchio, all between 20 and 22 – were smoking cigarettes for breakfast on the roof of the Mondrian in West Hollywood. De Angelis is the chattiest in English; Raggi and Torchio were more laid-back, while frontman David was mostly content to quietly smoulder on the rooftop lounge couch. They almost didn’t make it onstage. After the band’s US TV debut on The Tonight Show , Torchio came down with the flu just as they landed in LA. The fact that we won [the Eurovision Song Contest] was kind of strange because we’re not very mainstream for that kind of competition Damiano David, singer Another wave of Covid-19 had them fearing the worst as they prepared for a packed Roxy crowd. The band would have had to cancel if everyone hadn’t tested negative, which they did. “It wasn’t too bad. It’s getting better,” Torchio said, still a little wobbly from the show. But they pulled it together for one of the last pre-Omicron blowouts on the Sunset Strip. “We were playing songs in Italian from the record that we didn’t think were very known here,” De Angelis said. “But everyone knew the words, even if it was harder for them to sing.” Maneskin hit US shores fully formed and tightly honed. The band’s members have played together since 2016 and already put out two well-received records in Italy before March’s Teatro d’ira: Vol. I , released before their May Eurovision win. “It’s a completely different thing when you play on television because it’s so important to be precise,” De Angelis said. “You can’t get anything wrong because you’ll see it through the television. At a gig, it’s not that important to be perfect.” From American Idol to Olivia Rodrigo, TV fame can be a leg up the pop charts, but Maneskin were already wary of their biggest win defining them out of the gate “We were pretty far from that concept,” David said of Eurovision. “The fact that we won was kind of strange because we’re not very mainstream for that kind of competition, but we knew we already had a catalogue.” That catalogue is packed with zippy, bombastic yet endearingly analogue tracks like Eurovision winner Zitti e buoni , which has a Strokes-like cool in the verses and a Zeppelin-size wail in the chorus. MAMMAMIA makes a strong case for a mid-’00s dance-punk revival, and the band turns Beggin’ , a Four Seasons song twice as old as the band members, into a 2021 pop-rock single. “We meet young people that are like, ‘I’m 10 years old, I’ve never heard stuff like this, now I want to buy a drum kit,’” Raggi said. Oldies resurface on TikTok all the time today, but era-hopping covers are part of the band’s appeal. “When we make a cover, we don’t really think about the original structure or the original instrumental. We try to rebuild it,” De Angelis said. How Mirror rose to be Canto-pop stars and fashion icons in 2021 “I bet a good portion of my audience didn’t even realise it was a Four Seasons cover,” Worden agreed. She booked the band for iHeartRadio’s ALTer Ego rock festival at the Forum in Inglewood on January 15. “It’s important to give them a chance to be more than a single,” she said. “They deserve to have more of their music exposed. I saw them at the Roxy and they’re a force. I think people will walk away with a new respect for them.” Maneskin have an even bigger show this year in their hometown at the Circo Massimo, a huge public park that was once the site of Ancient Roman chariot racing and public spectacles. “It’s gonna be our biggest crowd ever, so it’s gonna be very emotional,” David said. “It’s like the biggest place where you can play in Rome.” As Italy continues to endure Covid-19, he added: “I think it’ll be very good for the country too.”