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Hello there, and welcome to Guitar World Editors’ Picks – our 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 from the month of March, and put them under the microscope to wax lyrical on the playing, tones, and songwriting that have set our six-string senses a-tingling.
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Michael Astley-Brown – Editor-in-Chief
March has been a great month for extraordinary guitar playing. It kicked off with the unlikely combo of samba and shred in SatchVai’s Dancing, which finds the two sparring partners kicking their heels with smoking modal licks. It shouldn’t work but it kinda does. Or at least I want to keep listening until it clicks in my brain.
Jack Gardiner’s long-awaited debut album finally arrived this month, and with it perhaps the highest-profile collaboration on the record: the Matteo Mancuso-guesting The Snow Job. Gardiner sought to test Mancuso with the most synth-heavy ’80s composition he could muster, but the Italian shred stallion did not falter for one second, matching his Liverpudlian counterpart lick for lick. This is breathtaking stuff, folks.
Then, just as March came to an end, Plini popped his head up from down under to announce his third album, An Unnameable Desire.
This is as far from a widdle-fest as you can get while still carrying the virtuoso tag – the album’s title track lives up to the Aussie wunderkind’s desire to “play the bare minimum amount of guitar that I can while also being a guitarist”. It’s all big, wide-open ambient spaces, crunching rhythm riffs that spit and chug, while leads are kept to longing, shimmering bends.
Matt Parker – Deputy Editor
The big news for me this month is that Duane Betts has signed to the legendary Sun label and accompanied the announcement with the suitably beaming first single, Down To Houston. It’s a thoroughly vintage rocker, full of whip-smart playing and soaring, colorful slide work punctuated by Betts’ own Stones-y lead licks. If you’re looking for a musical shot of Vitamin D as the winter finally gives way to spring, well, line this up on the, er… musical bar.
In contrast, the rest of my standouts this month are essentially creatures of darkness. Northern Irish duo Chalk’s latest single, Longer, is a brooding, industrial slog with a sledgehammer riff. At the risk of being reductive, it sounds like the kind of thing that grows on warehouse walls in the gaps between NIN and Fontaines DC – but you can dance to it.
I’m also pleased to see Sub Pop-signed French heavy psych-rock/metal types SLIFT make their return. They’re a group that have forged something that is theirs alone, sweeping from psych-drone territory into Tool-like mechanical riffage, hardcore vocals, and full-on space rock jams. A Storm Of Wings is the first sample of the forthcoming album Fantasia (which is shaping up to be a lot less boring than the disappointing Disney film of the same name).
Finally, one of GW’s own, Dan Bradley, has a new album on the way (Tranquil Void, due June 5) with his group, Urzah. First single Infernal Star I is a barreling rager that channels the majestic blood and thunder of Mastodon and adds a serrated edge of post-hardcore. Turns out some of us do actually know what we’re doing here…
Jackson Maxwell – Operations Editor
Oh, rejoice, for spring has arrived. New York City has come alive with the fading away of a brutal winter, and with it my playlists have become altogether more upbeat, less emo (not the genre. Okay, some of the genre). Case in point is the prevalence of bossa nova – a genre I’ve been trying to get into more (my recent viewing of the terrific, Oscar-nominated Brazilian film The Secret Agent gave this exploration a hefty push) – in my ears of late.
Few are doing more with the genre than my fellow Brooklynite Mei Semones. Her dazzling new collaboration with singer/songwriter John Roseboro (the two previously teamed up to cover the bossa nova standard Waters of March) finds Semones dropping her usual PRS for a nylon-string, and putting on an absolute clinic. Be absolutely sure to stay for the whole ride – the jaw-dropping lick she closes the tune with is worth the price of admission alone.
Elsewhere, I was delighted by the return of Modest Mouse, a band I’ve adored since I was… 11? 12? Look How Far… shows that even decades of chart-topping albums and five-figure crowds have thankfully not tamed Isaac Brock’s eccentricities. Those who came for the man’s trademark freak-funk riffage won’t be disappointed, but the amount of left-field guitar textures (ping-ponging skronk, random fuzz interjections) he also manages to squeezes into this sub-two-minute track is incredible.
Finally, I must give a shout to Iceage, who deliver post-punk par excellence on new single, Star. Interlocking chordal work that’ll be candy to the ears of any Strokes or Interpol aficionado, and Thin Lizzy-by-way-of-the-gutter dual leads at one point – it’s all glorious.
Matt Owen – News Editor
I have just finished writing a piece on how a blues guitar hero revolutionized my playing when he showed me how to hold a guitar pick, and it forced me to take a trip down memory lane and re-listen to some of the blues cats that first inspired me to pick up the instrument. As chance would have it, it’d line up nicely with a new single from Kirk Fletcher – another hero of mine who this month released Cold Cold Feeling with Erica Baier.
Anyone looking to level up their chops or pinch a few new box-breaking licks need to have Fletcher on regular rotation. His ability to keep the pentatonic scale sounding fresh – and the ways in which he manages to play in subtle fusion flavors to make them even more interesting – is a marvel to behold. Cold Cold Feeling is a swashbuckling 12 bar blues that gives him ample room to strut his stuff as sole accompaniment, merging rhythm and lead, and it’s as tasteful as it gets.
Outside the blues realm, I’ve been spinning Bleachers’ new single dirty wedding dress. The Jack Antonoff-fronted group is poised to release a new record, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I loved Antonoff’s work on The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language, and think he’s a stellar songwriter in his own right. Oh, and his Gretsch signature guitar is my favorite signature of recent years. That helps.
I’d like to give honorable mention to the grunge-y, rough and ready riffs of MOULD’s Lists – which are anthemic, crushing, brutal, and relentless all at the same time – as well as the pristine cleans of The Aces Can’t Wait – for me, the highlight of their excellent new Gold Star Baby: After Hours deluxe release. Modern pop guitar music doesn’t get better than this.
Janelle Borg – Staff Writer
I’m one of those people who obsesses over albums I really, really gravitate toward (sue me). The last ones were Rosalía’s Lux and Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos – and now, genre-blending maestro Raye is joining that holy trinity with her cinematic new album, This Album May Contain Hope.
While I’m highlighting the soulful slice of heartbreak that is Goodbye Henry because (a) it’s a collaboration with “The Last of the Great Soul Singers,” Al Green, and (b) it features the tasteful, jazz-inflected musings of guitarist Paul Murray alongside Liv Thompson’s phat, soul-through-and-through bassline, the entire 17-song record is worth a listen from top to bottom. And while it may feel maximalist to some, it’s definitely a breath of fresh air in an era that prioritizes 30-second hooks over fully realized songs.
Rant aside, another standout track this month comes by way of the French multi-hyphenate artist Jehnny Beth, whose visceral show I recently had the pleasure of witnessing live. Featuring prolific Faith No More and Mr. Bungle lead vocalist Mike Patton, Look At Me continues in the same industrial vein as her 2025 album, You Heartbreaker, You, with guitars that spice up the palette with grunge and noise textures.
And before I bid farewell, my third pick is Dune by Atabasca, a trio I just discovered this morning. It’s a dreamlike, four-minute instrumental piece that interweaves soothing, meditative guitars with a nostalgia-laden melody passed back and forth between a whistle (very much à la Scorpions’ Wind of Change) and the bass. Definitely a band to slot somewhere alongside the likes of Khruangbin, Imarhan, and Altın Gün in your playlists.
