Kiran Leonard was 16 when the music press decided he was a story. Born in Saddleworth near Manchester, son of a folk musician father and community midwife mother, he uploaded Bowler Hat Soup to Bandcamp in 2012 and the machinery found him — a label, a publicist, a radio plugger, a manager-assembled band. He hadn't even gigged. The apparatus arrived before he'd had time to figure out what he actually wanted from it. The problem wasn't ingratitude. Leonard worked with good people and, by his own account, was sheltered from much of the business. The problem was context. Increasingly enamoured by fuck-the-industry totems like Steve Albini, he started tanking commitments because music was the one domain he controlled. He made four albums in that period. Then he moved to London, ditched the entire team in one move — 'total scorched earth,' he calls it — and promptly discovered he had no idea how to operate without them. No manager. No gigs. A city he found genuinely alienating. The recovery was gradual and community-driven. Leonard found his footing in London partly by booking more shows and partly through friendship with Caroline, the post-rock collective who sit at the centre of Britain's most vital experimental music scene. That connection changed how he understood what his work could be — a series of different investigations rather than a personal brand to maintain. The dissonance he'd felt playing teenage songs in his early twenties, that gap between 15 and 18 that he describes as 'really massive,' stopped haunting him once he stopped trying to outrun it. What's emerged since is a genuinely varied body of work that doesn't resolve into a single identity. Real Home (2024) is ramshackle pop that touches country, menacing prog, and Jonathan Richman-esque romanticism. Small Brown Bed/With You Waltz is a live-take surrealist record made at DIY venues like the Golden Lion in Todmorden and Delicious Clam in Sheffield with his collective No Tailgate. Making Friends, released earlier this year as Or Sobre Blau — his duo with Catalan guitarist Andreu G Serra — is a heady second album mixing ambient guitar primitivism, oddball samples, and scratched-up found sound. He's also contributed to acclaimed records by Eli Winter, Caroline, and My New Band Believe. The through-line, if there is one, is physical. Leonard describes his creative drive now as 'a very physical thing' — he's after sounds that conjure full-body sensations. He mentions a conversation about Caroline's song Total Euphoria: someone told him they didn't know how often they felt total euphoria. His response: 'I feel it quite a lot.' That's not a pose. The music he's been making backs it up. The pomposity and adolescent over-the-top-ness he's shed weren't stylistic choices — they were armor he no longer needs. He tours the UK, Europe, and US into January 2027, including dates as Or Sobre Blau.
