At its core, every Hermanos Gutierrez album is a journey. To the Ecuadorian coast, the Mexican desert, the American West. Their previous work, 2024’s Sonido Cósmico, was meant to take listeners to outer space. So it’s no surprise that their newest album Los Ojos del Condor, which comes out on September 25, sets its sights on another landscape: the Andes, the vast mountain range that runs along the western edge of South America, including their mother’s native Ecuador.
This time around, however, the journey itself takes us not only through space, but time itself. Raised by an Ecuadorian mother and a Swiss father, the brothers move back and forth between past and present, using the Andes to revisit childhood memories and family history from the perspective of who they are today.
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“Our musical history has always been about Ecuador, this heritage, these roots,” Alejandro tells Consequence. “But we always loved that foreigner perspective as well, discovering a culture you aren’t part of. We just love how our dad, a Swiss guy, really had this admiration for South America and the culture.”
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That tension between familiarity and foreignness sits at the heart of Los Ojos del Condor, a self-described “love letter to South America.” Listening to the album, you get a sense of the complexity behind exploring your own identity, the realization that you can be from many places and from no place at the same time. Or as Alejandro puts it simply: “Because we grew up in both cultures, sometimes we don’t feel like either/or.”
That sense of tension extends to the landscape itself, which the brothers describe as contradictory by nature: peaceful and intimidating, beautiful yet dangerous. “I feel like the Andes have a little bit of everything,” Estevan explains. “There are calm, beautiful, sunny days, but the next day can bring an incredible storm. They’re so massive, so impressive. It’s this enormous miracle of nature.”
Capturing those contrasts in a song is a challenge in and of itself. Doing so by way of an instrumental album seems almost impossible. But rather than an obstacle, the brothers have made a career around making the absence of words their greatest strength. “We give the songs a name, but then we leave it open,” says Estevan. “We don’t limit it to, ‘Okay, this song is about this woman called Maria, it’s about her.’ Whoever listens to it can have their own version, their own feeling. I think that’s very powerful.”
Alejandro echoes his brother’s take: “My approach to melodies in general is the feeling. You hear the nostalgia. When you hear a song like ‘La Danza del Viento,’ you feel the wind. There’s not a lyric for that. It’s a feeling, it’s an emotion.”
Los Ojos del Cóndor was also fertile ground for another kind of exploration, one that had to do with their instruments. Recorded in Nashville with The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who also produced El Bueno y el Malo and Sonido Cósmico, the album finds Estevan playing entirely on the nylon-string guitar his father gave him when he was eight. Alejandro, besides playing his signature slide guitar, took on the challenge of learning the charango, a small 10-string instrument synonymous with Andean music. Its opening chords on “Canto Andino,” the album’s first track, establish the coordinates for the journey ahead.
That metaphorical journey eventually gave way to a physical one, as the brothers travelled to Peru after finishing the recording process for the album. “We can’t write and put a record out without being there,” Alejandro recalls thinking. Armed with analog and Super 8 cameras, they arrived with an open mind, eager to absorb whatever captured their attention. Footage of a condor in flight, for example, can be seen in the video for “Canto Andino.” A picture of two women walking up a hill with two llamas beside them made its way onto the album’s cover.
But it was an unexpected discovery at Machu Picchu that seemed to encapsulate the trip. After asking their tour guide the name of a nearby mountain, the brothers learned it was called Yanantin. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a cool name,’” Alejandro remembers. It wasn’t until later that they discovered the Andean concept behind the word: two different elements complementing each other without being the same. “Our whole music is kind of based on that concept,” he says. “It was a cool realization of how we work creatively. It’s always the other half.”
“Yanantin”, which is the name of the album’s fifth track, seemed to summarize the tension that had already made its way into the new record weeks before. Serendipitous as it may seem, the trip to Peru gave physical form to things they had already imagined long before. Perhaps, even, seven albums ago. “It was a confirmation that it all made sense,” says Estevan.
Looking back, the brothers can clearly distinguish traces of the previous records within this one. “You can hear the elements from El Bueno y el Malo, like the desert sound,” says Estevan. “You can hear the universe, the space sound that we tried to come up with on Sonido Cósmico. And then we also tried to come back to our beginnings, when it was just super basic, two guitars.”
Alejandro takes the idea one step further. “I think we had to write all the previous records to make this one happen the way it sounds,” he says. “Sometimes you’ve got to travel and get back to it. And then we realized, okay, I don’t think we were ready.”
Watch the video for Hermanos Gutierrez’s new single “Los Andes”, directed by Robert Schober, below.
