BRAVE NEW WORLD
Classic Rock|June 2023
With a new album that's their heaviest, rockiest yet, Rodrigo y Gabriela are boldly taking metal and rock to where no one has so successfully taken it before
Grant Moon
BRAVE NEW WORLD

Gabriela Quintero happily grabs the Grammy statuette and, giggling and proud, holds it up to the webcam. She and Rodrigo Sanchez won the Best Contemporary Instrumental Album category, for Mettavolution – which features their monolithic duo-guitar version of Pink Floyd’s Echoes – at the January 2020 ceremony. It should have been the start of a globe-trotting year. But the year had other plans.

Today Rodrigo y Gabriela are in their studio and HQ in Ixtapa. The town overlooks the Pacific on Mexico’s west coast, and sits just 15 minutes’ drive from Zihuatanejo, the beachy paradise that Tim Robbins’s character Andy DuFresne escaped to at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. Bandmates since their teens, both Quintero and Sanchez are approaching their fifties now. They were a couple once. Today they’re best friends, and the easy way they share answering questions – giving each other space, occasionally talking over each other with passion – speaks of the pair’s chemistry. It’s like they’re the left and right hand of one guitar player, in sync.

Ixtapa was a welcome refuge when everything went to shit in 2020. “We had a full year ahead of non-stop touring for Mettavolution, all over the place,” Quintero says. “We won the Grammy, spring came, then the Apocalypse! So we came back down here, as we always do in the worst situations. Even when we were busking we’d always come back here and just play. That’s how we process our emotions when things get a little tough. Playing guitar heals us.”

The latest manifestation of that healing is In Between Thoughts… A New World – perhaps R&G’s heaviest, rockiest work yet, with Sanchez favouring electric guitar for much of the record.

この記事は Classic Rock の June 2023 版に掲載されています。

7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。

この記事は Classic Rock の June 2023 版に掲載されています。

7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。

CLASSIC ROCKのその他の記事すべて表示
Joan Armatrading
Classic Rock

Joan Armatrading

The singer-songwriter on her new album, inspirations, being a 'band', what her key was about, meeting Nelson Mandela...

time-read
4 分  |
December 2024
Meat Loaf: I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)
Classic Rock

Meat Loaf: I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)

It was the power ballad to end all power ballads, and 30 years later people still ponder what the it’ is that the singer wouldn't do.

time-read
5 分  |
December 2024
Kris Kristofferson: June 22, 1936 - September 28, 2024
Classic Rock

Kris Kristofferson: June 22, 1936 - September 28, 2024

Kris Kristofferson, the iconic, Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and actor who played a key role in advancing a strand of country music into a more raw and confessional direction now recognised as outlaw country, has died peacefully at his home in Maui, surrounded by family. He was 88 years old.

time-read
3 分  |
December 2024
"I have come a very long way in the last two-and-a-bit years"
Classic Rock

"I have come a very long way in the last two-and-a-bit years"

Back from the brink: the Thunder vocalist who survived major medical trauma returns.

time-read
4 分  |
December 2024
EVER MEET LEMMY?
Classic Rock

EVER MEET LEMMY?

He's heard Lemmy's unreleased solo album, had dinner with Chris Holmes, told Paul McCartney to get a round in, been told gangster Reggie Kray wanted to have a word with him... He is Dogs D'Amour frontman Tyla 7 Pallas, and these are some of his stories.

time-read
7 分  |
December 2024
"LET'S NOT FORGET ABOUT HAVING FUN"
Classic Rock

"LET'S NOT FORGET ABOUT HAVING FUN"

With their ninth studio album In Murmuration, Finnish rockers Von Hertzen Brothers have replaced their erstwhile prog epics for a more honest approach to songwriting reflecting their personal lives.

time-read
10 分  |
December 2024
IN THE BEGINNING
Classic Rock

IN THE BEGINNING

With previously unseen photographs from their early days as featured in the new Queen | Collector's Edition, Sir Brian May talks us through sights of the band in the early seventies.

time-read
8 分  |
December 2024
BASS-IC INSTINCT
Classic Rock

BASS-IC INSTINCT

Plucked from obscurity in 1975 to be in David Bowie's band, then unceremoniously out of the picture five years later, bassist George Murray looks back on his time with the Thin White Duke.

time-read
10+ 分  |
December 2024
High Rollers
Classic Rock

High Rollers

When Ronnie Wood, the Stones and some A-list mates holed up at his house to help with his solo album, it sparked a days-long party, a Rolling Stones hit and the last album by arguably their finest line-up.

time-read
10+ 分  |
December 2024
THE NAME OF THE GAM
Classic Rock

THE NAME OF THE GAM

When ABBA-mad Opeth leader Mikael Akerfeldt met one of their singers, he lost it”. She didn’t sing on their new concept album, but some other, perhaps unlikely, big names did.

time-read
8 分  |
December 2024