Rodrigo y Gabriela – "Our music can be experimental”

Rodrigo y Gabriela are breaking new ground - but for one half of the duo, going electric means less shredding...

- By Jenna Scaramanga

Two decades ago, Rodrigo y Gabriela made a name for themselves as innovators of the nuevo Spanish guitar sound. Coming from a shared background in heavy metal, they could thrash as hard as Hetfield, shred as fast as Vai, and yet – somehow – they could take these ferocious chops and meld them with the traditional rhythms and flavours of the folk music they grew up hearing in and around their native Mexico City to create something beautiful, progressive and unique. They brought their instrumental fury to vast festival stages. They made nylon-string guitars cool.

Now, 17 years, six studio albums and one Grammy later, their impulse to break new sonic ground remains as strong as ever – as illustrated in their new album In Between Thoughts... A New World. Gabriela Quintero’s turbo-charged percussive techniques still provide the backbone of the duo’s signature sound, but this time around, Rodrigo Sánchez has downed his custom Yamaha NTX Series and gone electric.

Speaking from their studio in Ixtapa, Mexico, Rodrigo describes the new album as “a natural progression” from 2019’s Mettavolution. “I wanted to play electric guitar,” he says, “and I’d been doing that on the little part of the Mettavolution tour that we got to do before it was shut down, because some of the songs on the album were recorded with a Jaguar. But, for this sound, when Gab and I were just sitting and suddenly writing a song, it was because I had my electric with me.”