On April 29, 2010, Yours Truly released a short film of Delorean performing “Grow” in a Barcelona studio. The piece combined an interview with the performance, and the timing was exact: Subiza, the album containing the song, had arrived only days earlier. Pitchfork identified the in-studio performance and dated its post to April 29, while XLR8R reported that the footage had been shot in Barcelona the previous autumn. The surviving film on Yours Truly’s Vimeo account preserves the original title and publisher.
“Grow” caught Delorean at a revealing point. The band had been operating in one form or another for about a decade, but it was no longer working like the guitar-led group it had once been. Its sound had shifted toward house rhythms, layered sampling and computer-based arrangement without surrendering the momentum of a band. If Delorean was shedding a skin, it was doing so by changing its method rather than erasing its history.
Ten years into an overnight breakthrough
Delorean came from Zarautz, on the Basque coast, and was based in Barcelona by 2010. The lineup was Ekhi Lopetegi on bass and vocals, Unai Lazcano on keyboards, Igor Escudero on drums and Guillermo Astrain on guitar. An El País report from the band’s spring US tour found the quartet in New York, playing several shows while promoting Subiza. It stressed that the apparent breakthrough rested on ten years of work, international touring and a long transition away from the group’s early hardcore and rock footing.
That history matters because the session can otherwise look like a neat illustration of a 2010 trend: indie musicians discovering the textures of club music. Delorean’s route was slower and more particular. A March 2010 MondoSonoro interview traced the sequence through 2004’s Delorean, the Metropolitan Death EP, Into the Plateau and 2009’s Ayrton Senna EP. The last of those releases sharply increased the band’s notice abroad, but it did not create its electronic interests from nothing.
Two kinds of commissioned work helped change the group’s habits. According to the members’ account to MondoSonoro, an assignment to produce short pieces for Basque television forced them to learn computer tools; subsequent remixes made those tools part of their normal musical vocabulary. El País likewise identified the television job and the band’s remix work as turning points. By the time of Subiza, making a remix was no longer an occasional detour from being a band. The logic of remixing—isolating parts, replacing them, passing versions around and rebuilding a track—had entered the band’s own songwriting.
That is the deeper change documented by “Grow.” Delorean still appeared as four musicians, yet the record behind the performance was assembled through a process closer to a shared production studio than to four people capturing a rehearsal-room take.
How Subiza was assembled
The album’s release can be dated without forcing contradictory storefront metadata into a single calendar. Europa Press announced a Spanish release for April 20, and True Panther’s catalogue also dates its digital edition to April 20, 2010. That label page lists nine tracks, with “Grow” in the fourth position after “Stay Close,” “Real Love” and “Endless Sunset.” On April 29, then, the Yours Truly film was not a preview of a distant album. It was a close-up of a newly available record as international attention accelerated.
Contemporary accounts agree that the important innovation was procedural. In MondoSonoro, the band described building Subiza largely with computers and sequencers while setting most conventional instruments aside during recording. One member could upload an idea to a shared server; the other three could then open it, add to it, dismantle it or reorganize it. Authorship became collective through repeated intervention. A Pitchfork review published April 22 similarly reported that the group built rhythms on sequencers and drum machines and accumulated dozens of tracks.
That method explains why Subiza can sound both crowded and continuous. The arrangements carry many discrete decisions—percussion, pianos, processed voices, synthesizers and samples—yet recurring sounds bind the songs together. MondoSonoro’s interview identified the bass sound, vocal treatment, percussion and piano as connective tissue across otherwise distinct tracks. Pitchfork heard a related balance: the build-and-release motion of 1990s house and techno fitted to verse-and-chorus pop writing.
“Grow” is especially useful for hearing the difference between a song’s origin and its finished identity. MondoSonoro reported that the track had initially rested on a Prefab Sprout-derived guitar idea, but Delorean removed the riff from the album version. What remained was not an argument against guitars; it was evidence that the group now treated any instrumental starting point as provisional. A part could generate the song and still disappear once the arrangement found a stronger shape.
The finished track makes patience part of its design. Rather than presenting a riff as the fixed center, it gains force through repetition and addition. Voice, rhythm and texture do not compete for a single foreground so much as gather into a shared lift. That construction places “Grow” squarely inside Subiza while giving the Yours Truly performance an extra charge: the film returns a highly edited, computer-built song to the sight of people making music together.
A band that had learned to think like producers
In 2010, “electronic” and “live” were often treated as opposing explanations. Delorean made the distinction less useful. The group had a drummer, guitarist, keyboardist and bassist-singer, but the members’ own description of the album emphasized files, sequencers, sound libraries and constant revision. The band format supplied continuity and collective judgment; the computer supplied an environment in which no arrangement had to remain fixed.
That setup also grew out of practical experience. Remixes for other artists taught Delorean how to reshape material that arrived with an existing identity. El País reported that the group’s remixing developed its command of tools and its palette of sounds. MondoSonoro named work connected to artists including the Teenagers, Franz Ferdinand, the xx, the Big Pink and Cold Cave. Those credits helped visibility, but their larger artistic effect was internal: Delorean learned to approach its own songs as material that could be revised as freely as someone else’s.
The Yours Truly film condensed that complicated history into a small, accessible form. XLR8R described it as containing a short interview and the band playing “Grow”; Pitchfork called it an in-studio performance. Neither account advertised an elaborate concept. The value was proximity. Viewers could meet the people behind music whose dense layers might otherwise suggest anonymous studio construction.
Yours Truly itself was well suited to that job. A later Wired profile of the video collective described its approach as intimate, documentary-minded and built around reimagined performances rather than conventional promotional clips. The profile specifically noted the Delorean “Grow” film as one of the pieces circulating online during the project’s first year. That context helps explain why this modest session endured: it belonged to an emerging web-video form designed to make process and personality visible.
The release week as a threshold
The final week of April placed several versions of Delorean in public at once. There was the Spanish group with a decade of releases behind it; the touring act playing crowded US rooms; the remixers whose work had circulated beyond Spain; and the studio collective that could turn dozens of digital layers into concise pop. Subiza gathered those identities rather than choosing among them.
Critical attention arrived quickly. Pitchfork’s April 22 review framed the album as an explicit embrace of classic club momentum and praised the way its songs accumulated bright, surging moments. In Spain, MondoSonoro had already presented the record as the result of a newly mastered collective method, while El País reported an international-edition agreement with a Matador subsidiary. These were different vantage points on the same development: Delorean’s wider recognition followed a technical and organizational reinvention.
Seen in that context, “Grow” was more than an aptly named album track. It demonstrated how thoroughly the quartet had absorbed electronic production without dissolving the social structure of a band. The song’s layers were the product of exchange—files passed among four people, parts revised, influences transformed and individual ownership blurred.
The April 29 session preserved the hinge. Delorean had not abandoned rock instruments for a producer’s laptop, nor simply decorated indie pop with dance signifiers. It had learned to make the band itself function as a production system. “Grow” lets that transformation be heard; Yours Truly’s camera made it visible.