Sound of Vinyl

Five years since their last album, Mexican acoustic rock guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela are ready to embark on the next chapter of their remarkable story, with the release of the most ambitious music of their twenty year career together.

Entitled ‘Mettavolution’, the new album brings together Rod and Gab’s passionate interest in Buddhism, the history of human evolution and the liberation of the potential we have as a species; all expressed through the medium of two acoustic guitars. Three years in the making, the duo vowed to go back to the heart of their music, to feel the same way they did when they first moved from Mexico City to Ireland back in 1999, searching to reconnect with the original intention and (in their own words) “the reason of why we do what we do, to share something we do with all our hearts in order to inspire, even to heal people through music”.

Conceived and composed in their studio in Ixtapa on the Mexican Pacific Coast, then road-tested in South America and the USA in 2017, before more fine tuning and further tweaks on their Australian tour of 2018, a long list of new material has been distilled down to six new Rodrigo y Gabriela compositions and one audacious, jaw-dropping cover version.

A white-hot side one that acknowledges the duo’s thrash-metal roots back in Mexico City gives way to an incredible new arrangement of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, inspiringly reimagined for two acoustic guitars, which takes up the whole of the second half of ‘Mettavolution’. Long-time Floyd fans (the title track of 2009’s ‘11:11’ album was dedicated to the band) Rodrigo y Gabriela lovingly pay homage to the ‘Meddle’ era prog-classic, while at the same time weaving their own golden threads into its timeless textures, to create something exciting, contemporary and unforgettable.

Recorded in Los Angeles with noted producer Dave Sardy, best-known for his work with Oasis, LCD Soundsystem, A Perfect Circle and Fall Out Boy, ‘Mettavolution’ is Rodrigo y Gabriela reborn, reaching for a higher state of consciousness, pushing themselves as writers, interpreters and players, and challenging us the listener to absorb, engage and respond to them.