Hermanos Gutiérrez Turn Toward the Andes on New Album Los Ojos del Condor

For Hermanos Gutiérrez, geography has always doubled as narrative. The Ecuadorian-Swiss duo’s previous records moved from coastal Ecuador to the Mexican desert to the American West, with 2024’s Sonido Cósmico reaching outward. Their next album, Los Ojos del Condor (out September 25), turns toward the Andes—the range that runs through their mother’s native Ecuador—and toward something less linear: memory.

Recorded in Nashville with producer Dan Auerbach, who also worked on El Bueno y el Malo and Sonido Cósmico, the instrumental album refuses a single vantage point. Alejandro Gutiérrez says the brothers grew up between cultures and sometimes feel like neither one nor the other. That tension—familiar and foreign at once—sits inside the music. Estevan describes the Andes as both calm and dangerous, a contradiction the duo treat as material rather than obstacle. Song titles suggest place and movement, but the absence of lyrics leaves room for individual readings. “Whoever listens to it can have their own version,” Estevan says.

The result is less a postcard than a conversation with the past, built around guitars and atmosphere rather than explanation.