GABRIELA QUINTERO They didn’t want a girl in the band at first, but they needed a guitar player and I could play. And once I started to play with them, it was good, because they didn’t talk at all—it was pure practicing. My previous bands had been all girls, and everyone was just blah blah blah all the time. [laughs] It was demanding music, because I had to do a lot of solos and I had to be very precise with my plectrum technique to get all those downstroke metal riffs. But I loved that. I loved to practice.
RODRIGO Being a thrash metal band in Mexico City in the early Nineties was totally weird and underground and never going to go anywhere, but by ’97, the Latin rock thing was growing, and at last we got an offer for a record deal. We did a recording then that was the best-quality recording we made, but once that happened, both my brother and the drummer left the band. We hired two new guys, but it just wasn’t the same. So we broke up the band in ’98, and that’s when we switched from metal to what we do now—whatever you want to call that.
GW To an outsider, that style change seems pretty extreme. Did it feel that way to you at the time?
RODRIGO Yeah, it did, but neither of us cared anymore about getting a record deal or anything like that. Gabriela and I shared the same ideas, and we just wanted to get some more life experience. So we started playing and listening to a lot of different kinds of music, and that really opened up our ears. Having two acoustic guitars in our hands all the time was very different, too. When we’d had the band, we always used to have acoustic guitars at home, but that was just to jam around. After we decided not to use the electric instruments anymore, we had to develop different ways to play. All the Latin rhythms that came out of that change came out naturally. We never played Latin rhythms when we were in Mexico. Never, ever.
GW And you didn’t just stop using your electric guitars; you actually got rid of them, right?
RODRIGO That’s true. When we decided to leave Mexico City, we sold all the gear we had—Kramer guitars, Marshall amps, everything—and then we bought two cheap acoustic guitars and off we went.
GABRIELA It was done out of desperation. We needed the money to leave town.
RODRIGO At that point, I was making background music for a television channel, and Gabriela was giving guitar lessons. We were both disappointed about what we were doing. So we were like, “We’ve got to get out of here and do something different.” Our plan was to go to the beach at [Mexican seaside resort] Ixtapa and play in hotels. We did that for about eight months. We already knew we eventually wanted to go to Europe, but we didn’t know where.
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