Hello there, and a very warm welcome to Guitar World editors’ picks – our comprehensive monthly guide to the guitar tracks that have captured the attentions of our editors over the past four weeks or so.
With the aid of our Spotify playlist below, we’ve rounded up all our favorite new releases this month, and put them under the microscope to wax lyrical on the playing, tones, and songwriting that have set our six-string senses a-tingling.
Over to our EIC MAB to kick things off…
Michael Astley-Brown – Editor-in-Chief
First of all, I really should apologize for the sheer length of this month’s playlist. But I’m not gonna. There is simply too much guitar gold out there right now, and that is officially A Good Thing. Accordingly, I’ve got a lot to write about.
For starters, metalcore and nu metal are in rude health. We’ve got Spiritbox’s Mike Stringer volunteering some of his most blood-curdling, pick-scrapingest riffs yet on Soft Spine, with spooky leads that channel Fredrik Thordendal.
Similarly, Tetrarch’s Diamond Rowe and Josh Fore are going full Root/Thomson on Live Not Fantasize, with Rowe busting out leads both glitchy and tapped. Then you’ve got Linkin Park – yes, Linkin Park – dropping Mesa/Boogie power chords like it’s 2003. What a time to be alive.
The album that’s been dominating my play history this month, however, is the latest masterpiece from Missouri indie-post-emo-hardcore-math outfit Foxing.
Their fifth, self-titled effort finds them taking their soft/INCREDIBLY LOUD dynamic to its absolute zenith, as Eric Hudson and Conor Murphy overload amps, mixing desks, microphones and their very souls to produce an album that is as varied as it is cathartic. Hell 99 goes hard, a powder keg of fuzz and angst, followed by the inevitable comedown.
And, lastly, I’d like to pen a quick elegy for Jane’s Addiction, who released a new single just days after the band imploded mid-gig in a blur of fists and swearing earlier this month. Although the group have yet to officially announce their disbandment, it sounds extremely unlikely they will ever return.
Which is a damn shame, because True Love is up there with the best material the alt-rock trailblazers have produced since 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual. A sweet, haunting ode to loves past and present, it finds Dave Navarro embracing his post-punk influences on its waterfalls of arpeggiated chords and cascading tonal overdubs, while his aching solos are closer to Gilmour than Hendrix. Goodnight, JA.
Jackson Maxwell – Associate Editor
I am, according to Liam Gallagher, a moth. Such was the characterization of the always-colorful Oasis frontman of those more excited by the first new single from the Cure in 16 years than Oasis’s headlines-dominating reunion. Don’t get me wrong, the prospect of downing a dozen Stellas and air-guitaring the Live Forever solo sounds like a blast, but you’ll always find me wearing black, so priorities are priorities.
Clocking in at just under 7 minutes, Alone is exactly how one would hope the festival-headlining era of the Cure would make their return. You wouldn’t expect Robert Smith and Reeves Gabrels to shred up a storm, but they’re nonetheless locked right in to one another, playing the perfect textural counterparts to Simon Gallup’s melodic but distorted march of a bass line.
Much more limber is Issa, the new single from Malian ensemble Songhoy Blues. Highlighted by an absolutely dynamite acoustic solo at around the halfway mark that weaves dazzling, rapid-fire phrases around the tune’s melody and infectious rhythm, Issa’s impossible not to like.
Also of note this month is Day of Reckoning, a politically charged call to arms from Warren Haynes featuring plenty of the singeing Les Paul licks that’ve made him a legend, and Franz Ferdinand’s Audacious, a delectable bit of nervy, Television-indebted twin-guitar work that’ll have you remembering downloading The Strokes’ Is This It on Napster.
Matt Parker – Features Editor
This month I have convinced myself that Amyl and the Sniffers are the best actual rock band in the world at the moment.
Yeah, they’re not the best players, not the most commercial, not the most experimental... yadda yadda. But in terms of a visceral, actually-exciting and still recognisably-rock band that feel unpredictable, honest to a fault, brashly themselves, able to eat club gigs for breakfast – and who are very much not a bunch of millenial dads with boutique pedals and curly moustaches – well, no one can top them right now.
They only seem to be getting better, too. Their new album, Cartoon Darkness, is out late October and Big Dreams marks a left-turn with a rare ballad. It’s a jangling antidote to the doldrums of dead-end jobs and the squeeze of the cost of living crisis and is, like everything they do, full of heart and guts. The solo from Dec Martens – all pedal tones and wrangled arpeggios – comes in like Angus Young tackling Mike Campbell licks, but is decidedly un-reverential about it.
This comes off the back of Chewing Gum, which had a brilliantly needling Stooges-style solo – and a video, in which the one-woman perpetual motion machine that is vocalist Amy Taylor levitates amid the lead work. Cartoon Darkness looks like another stomp-up for the Australian quartet – and they deserve it, too.
On the topic of millennial dads – and, being one, I say this with love – Cursive had a fine post-hardcore pedigree back in the early ’00s, but their new album Devourer – their first in over a decade – is packed with the sort of vitality, earworm hooks and textural heroics that makes you think you can have it all. Bloodbather is their excellent newbie and one of the moodier, er, cuts…
Finally, I reserve a mention for UK duo Divorce who’s recent single All My Freaks (produced by Wolf Alice/Manchester Orchestra maestro Catherine Marks) zips along on a bed of kaleidoscopic, skittish guitar tones and has a sort of anti-solo that just meanders off into the ether. I think it was last seen floating next to a Chinese ‘weather’ balloon somewhere over the Northwest Territories.
Matt Owen – Senior Staff Writer
We’ve been spoiled rotten with returning music icons and big-name releases from some of the hottest names in guitar this month – and while such numbers will understandably get the monthly headlines, there were also a number of indie releases this September that are, of course, worth a mention.
Sloan Struble – the songwriter/guitarist/producer extraordinaire who goes by the name Dayglow – is one such example. His new self-titled record represents the latest evolution of his sugar-coated bedroom pop sound, and eschews the heavier pop-leaning production of album no. 2 in favor of the riffs that carried Dayglow’s debut effort.
This rejuvenated approach is evident from opening indie thrasher Mindless Creatures and slinky lick-lead Old Friends, New Face, but What People Really Do is the highlight, with an earworm-worthy Should I Stay or Should I Go vibe and a deliciously furry fuzz solo that flashes Struble’s underrated guitar prowess.
My ‘Month of Riffs’ found further gratification in Soccer Mommy’s Driver – the latest preview of her own upcoming record, which also boils down the songwriter’s sound down to the bare essentials: pounding drums, fuzzy basslines and a grizzly guitar progression. And the same goes for Towa Bird, who follows the same frantic-fuzz-riff-recipe on Rat Race. What more could you need?
Having said that, it’s not all been indie fuzz fretboard throwdowns: Larkin Poe have been equally liberal with the lashings of gritty guitars on the swampy, swashbuckling blues belter If God Is A Women, which finds Rebecca and Megan Lovell unleash on bone-shaking slides and progressions.
And, for when I’ve been craving something to calm me down, Bon Iver’s S P E Y S I D E has done just the trick. It’s another example of an artist returning to their roots, with Bon Iver – aka Justin Vernon – locking away his vocoders and synths for just an acoustic guitar. It reeks of For Emma, Forever Ago era Bon Iver, and I’m so here for it.
