Amaral
Who is Amaral?
Amaral is the duo formed by Eva Amaral (Zaragoza, August 4, 1972) and guitarist Juan Aguirre. Eva, who had studied sculpture at the Zaragoza School of Arts before turning to music and had played in bands such as Bandera Blanca and Acid Rain, met Juan Aguirre in 1993 at a recording studio while laying down a demo. Juan came from the group Días de Vino y Rosas, and it was his idea to name the project after Eva’s surname.
Career
The duo started out playing bars in Zaragoza before moving to Madrid in 1997, where they signed with Virgin Records. Their self-titled debut, “Amaral” (1998), sold around 80,000 copies, a figure they kept surpassing with each release: “Una pequeña parte del mundo” (2000, 100,000 copies) and, above all, “Estrella de mar” (2002), which reached two million copies sold and made them one of the most popular Spanish acts of their time. That same year, Lenny Kravitz picked them to open for him on several dates.
They followed up with “Pájaros en la cabeza” (2005, 900,000 copies), the DVD “El origen del Big Bang” (2005), “Gato Negro, Dragón Rojo” (2008, more than 200,000 copies) and “Hacia lo salvaje” (2011). Altogether, their catalogue had sold more than 3.6 million copies by 2011, built on a sound that blends pop, rock and folk. In 2008 they covered Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” as a promotional song for Zaragoza’s International Expo, and in 2002 they took part in charity initiatives tied to the Prestige oil spill disaster.