Bobby Oroza, a singer and songwriter from Finland, stepped forward near the close of the 2010s with a sound rooted in 1960s soul and R&B-tinged pop. Saturated reverb on the vocals and unpolished analog production in "This Love" secured a contract with the American imprint Big Crown, which put out his self-titled debut album in 2019. Teaming again with the Helsinki-based group Cold Diamond & Mink, he delivered the follow-up Get on the Otherside in 2022.
Raised in Helsinki by a musically inclined family of Bolivian and Finnish lineage, Oroza encountered Latin music, Motown, jazz, South American folk, and Nuyorican salsa during childhood gatherings. He took up guitar and drums, then began performing while still in high school. As a teenager he journeyed to Santiago de Cuba to study percussion and singing. After returning he built a career in production and recording, working with several Finnish ensembles, among them Cold Diamond & Mink, the house band for Helsinki’s Timmion Records, a funk label. The track they cut together, "This Love," drew interest from Brooklyn’s Big Crown Records, which issued it as a single in 2018; the full-length debut This Love arrived the following year.
Just as his career gained traction, the COVID-19 pandemic reached Finland in early 2020 and froze the music business. Like many peers, Oroza pieced together income over the next two years, including a construction job that sustained his family. Before he could reconvene with his collaborators he had assembled a set of songs shaped by the era’s hardships and persistence. Backed once more by Cold Diamond & Mink, his sophomore LP Get on the Otherside came out in June 2022.
