Galerna are Mario, Miguel, Carlos, Lucas and Guillermo — but at one point, they also included Pablo and Javier. Most of these young twenty-somethings had already been part, for years, of a close-knit group of friends from Bilbao brought together by surfing and music. From the age of sixteen, and along with the rest of their newly formed crew, the future musicians began to discover the world: nightclubs and concerts in Bilbao, surf trips to Cantabria and Les Landes, nights spent sleeping under the stars on the beaches of Biscay…

For them, Galerna was simply the natural step.
On every trip to Miguel’s grandparents’ old flat in San Vicente de la Barquera, the friends would gather in the “music room,” decorated with an upright piano and Miguel’s father’s old drum kit. There, freezing without heating but happy knowing that the waves would come the next day, they improvised many of Mario’s songs and promised each other that one day they would form a band.

That finally happened years later, in 2021, during the pandemic, when Miguel, Javier and Mario started renting a rehearsal room in a big house above Sopelana beach. There, little by little, they began playing some songs with the intention of recording a demo. With the help of Pablo Idoyaga, that demo quickly took shape, and “Esta Noche es Mía” was born.

The idea behind Galerna has always been, in short:

“Only by building a very specific symbolic world can you address universal issues like love, illness, frustration, family or sexuality.”

The members of McEnroe were struck when they discovered the project and invited Galerna to join them as the opening act for their 20th anniversary tour — a dream come true, considering McEnroe had been the favorite band of several of them since they were 14.

In 2024, they release their first studio album. Viaje a Roma is a sung novel; a literary fiction in musical form, divided into twelve chapters that narrate the adventure of two friends from Bilbao on their road trip from their hometown to the Italian capital.

The story is told through the eyes of a romantic, idealistic protagonist, with Galerna drawing on traits from its own members to shape a complex and melancholic character. Opposite him stands “El Guay,” his travel companion — the complete contrast, whose only motto is to enjoy life and never torment himself over anything.

Is there anything more bilbaíno than comparing their native botxo, their small provincial city, to the ancient capital of Europe? Perhaps this is precisely Galerna’s mission: to give their small coastal world a universal, transcendent meaning, striving among the rest of the artistic landscape to become the center of it all, an atemporal icon.