Or Sobre Blau - Making Friends

Or Sobre Blau
Making Friends
Stroom
UK/Catalonia/Belgium, 2026
LP

Fans of Or Sobre Blau’s excellent debut, Piri Piri Samplers, are likely to be more surprised than anyone to hear their remarkable sophomore album. Nine years after a no-frills set of uncompromising electric guitar duets, the duo of Kiran Leonard and Andreu G. Serra (AKA Ubaldo) emerge as an honest-to-goodness band. Making Friends moves fluently between styles as varied as post-rock, emo, and acoustic reveries flecked with field recordings and wisps of attenuated chamber music. Voices populate the album, from the maternal phone calls that anchor “Rachel & Antonia,” to snatches of street scenes, to a queasy spoken-word piece by poet Pete Simonelli of Enablers and the lovely bilingual singing of Leonard and Serra themselves. From its title to its patchwork of styles and collaborators, Making Friends feels like an expression and an affirmation of a way of life—a bustling, joyful world of an album.