SXSW Music Spotlight: Hermanos Gutiérrez

Hermanos Gutiérrez (Photo by Larry Niehues)

Close your eyes while listening to any track from Hermanos Gutiérrez and you’re immediately transported to the lonesome highway of your choice: windows down, beads of sweat percolating on your brow, a spaghetti Western sunset ever on the horizon. The brothers’ nomadic guitar instrumentals occupy the imagined interstate connecting Khruangbin, Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Friends of Dean Martinez.

It’s not what you’d necessarily expect from two guys from Switzerland.

“Our father is Swiss, but our mother’s from Ecuador,” explains Estevan Gutiérrez, the elder half of the duo. “We were always on journeys. We went a lot to Ecuador. That’s what started this need of travel.”

Three years ago, the two felt a calling to New Mexico, so they booked a flight to Denver and drove down, soaking up the scenery. “We fell in love with the whole landscape and the whole energy that you can feel in New Mexico, the plateaus and the wideness. It felt like that’s where our music comes from.”

Starting with 2017’s 8 Años, Hermanos Gutiérrez self-released four albums in four years, each one more engrossing than the last. To hear Gutiérrez tell it, the Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach needed to see only a few seconds of their first music video before arranging for the brothers to record at his Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville for last year’s El Bueno y el Malo. And typical for Auerbach – who has a long history of minting rising stars (see Yola, Aaron Frazer, and Early James) – he found his way onto one of the tracks, the album highlight “Tres Hermanos,” which was renamed in his honor.

“He was so respectful of our music,” Gutiérrez recalls. “He didn’t want to change the essence of Hermanos Gutiérrez – he just wanted to lift it up and expand it.”

Wed 15, 9pm, Stubb’s
Fri 17, 3pm, Convention Center