On OurHome, Rodrigo y Gabriela Finally Find the Right Moment for Words
Photo credit: Enrique Levya
For most of their career, Rodrigo y Gabriela have shown how much two musicians can communicate without saying anything. Their guitars have carried rhythm, conflict, release, humor, and tenderness across records that freely borrow from metal, classical music, Latin traditions, and rock. On OurHome, the GRAMMY-winning duo preserve that instrumental fluency while making one consequential change: they sing.
That first vocal performance comes on “Somos Como Tú,” the album’s latest single and one of its defining moments. Rodrigo Sánchez delivers the lead vocal, Gabriela Quintero follows with a quicker cadence, and local fans surround them with gang vocals. Hand percussion pushes the song forward, giving its serious subject a sense of collective movement rather than private contemplation.
The song considers migration and displacement from the perspective of shared humanity. Its title, translated as “We Are Like You,” places dignity ahead of division. Sánchez originally wrote the piece while living in Paris in 2015, but the duo struggled for years to find a version that sounded true to their identity. Its eventual appearance on OurHome feels logical because the record repeatedly examines what happens when geography, identity, and belonging stop lining up neatly.
“Somos Como Tú” also changes the way the surrounding instrumentals are heard. Its words provide a direct statement of concerns that appear elsewhere through composition, collaboration, and cultural reference. The song does not suggest that Rodrigo y Gabriela needed vocals all along. It demonstrates that the pair waited until language could contribute something their guitars were not already expressing.
The rest of OurHome is rooted in a creative reset. Following an unproductive period, the death of the duo’s studio cat Pelusa prompted Sánchez to write the title track. That tender instrumental became the album’s emotional starting point. A later encounter with an “OUR HOME” sign outside a public housing tower in Melbourne supplied a title for the larger project and sharpened its focus on inner stability.
Recording at NK Sound Tokyo brought the material closer to Japan, a country with which Rodrigo y Gabriela have maintained a long relationship. Japanese storytelling and philosophy appear throughout the record, although they are incorporated through specific creative encounters rather than used as surface decoration. The duo’s interest in manga leads to two of the album’s clearest examples.
“Monster” takes its inspiration from Naoki Urasawa’s psychological thriller, and Urasawa contributed the song’s official video. “Akatsuki” draws upon Naruto and gains additional intensity from Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi. Her forceful, rhythmically alert playing gives the duo a collaborator who can match the physicality of their guitar work without crowding it.
Contributions from Marty Friedman, Hiyori Okuda, and Yukihiro Atsumi continue that process of opening the duo’s sound. The collaborators are distinct, yet OurHome never loses its central conversation between Sánchez and Quintero. Following the heavier electric textures of In Between Thoughts…A New World, the emphasis on acoustic instrumentation gives their rhythmic exchanges greater space and clarity.
As an album, OurHome succeeds because its experiments remain connected to a focused idea. “Somos Como Tú” may be its most conspicuous first, but the track belongs within a record about finding continuity amid movement and change. The album is out now through ATO Records, with a North American tour beginning September 30. Dates and tickets can be found here.
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