World famous Mexican guitarists Rodrigo

Entertainment Live: Headlines have given little love to guitar heros in recent years, as streaming tastes favor rap and instruments of the greats are celebrated less onstage and more in museums.

But more than a decade after soaring to global fame Rodrigo y Gabriela the Mexican classical guitar duo that draws inspiration as much from prog and thrash metal as flamenco and folk is still going strong, recently releasing their first studio album in five years, “Mettavolution,” to rave reviews and embarking on a global tour.

Disenchanted by the rock scene in their native Mexico, Rodrigo y Gabriela moved to Europe in the late 1990s, settling in Dublin where they began busking and playing local pubs with their fusion of metal with Latin sounds.

“When we were kids we didn’t know what anxiety was,” said Rodrigo Sanchez backstage before the pair played an intimate show at Manhattan’s McKittrick Hotel, days after rocking New York’s larger Beacon Theatre.

“It wasn’t until literally a few years ago that we started to understand more . . . about the effects of meditation, things that could actually help to deal with these emotions,” the acoustic rocker with hair dyed electric blue told AFP.

Sanchez said the album evokes the pair’s recent “shift in consciousness” both in their mid-forties, the metalheads are now vegan and have turned their interests to Buddhism and spiritual evolution that helped them realize “playing music is not something we just do because we like it.”

For Gabriela Quintero, “Mettavolution” a word the duo coined to fuse elements of meditation and evolution, with “metta” being Sanskrit for compassion is also about processing social anxieties of the contemporary moment, citing climate change, artificial intelligence and nuclear disarmament.

On their latest album the dexterous artists who reinvent the heart-pounding sounds of hard rock for intricate acoustic instrumentals do just that with Pink Floyd’s epic “Echoes” from the psychedelic band’s 1971 album “Meddle.”

Rodrigo y Gabriela are true to the daunting, nearly 20-minute masterpiece while adapting its surreal turns and atmospheric riffs to imbue their own textured sounds, complete with Quintero’s signature percussive knocks on the guitar.

Following their global trek the pair say they’ll keep working on new music but also consider new ways of touring and potentially work on musicals or films.

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