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You won’t always know when the Guitar World editorial conclave is in session to determine the magazine’s top 20 guitar players of any given year, but as the internet might put it, there will be signs.
The heavy traffic to and from the office, as Grubhub delivery drivers beat a path to the door.
Jake Kiszka & Chris Turpin
The only mistake Jake Kiszka and Chris Turpin made when putting together their transatlantic Greta-Van-Fleet-meets-Ida-Mae rock alliance was by naming it Mirador – Kiszka had misspelled “Marauder” – but even that worked out okay and was conceptually relevant.
“A mirador is basically a vista or a viewpoint suspended on a high place, typically overlooking a body of water,” Kiszka told GW. “That seemed to fit, and it felt symbolic being that Chris is British and he was always looking to the West for influences, whereas I looked East and got my influences from Europe. So that’s how we became Mirador.”
The forces of kismet are keeping the wind in their sails. Or perhaps it is a more ordinary magic, as practiced by the big beasts of rock in the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s as the sonic expansion redrew the boundaries of artistic possibility. Kiszka and Turpin can see such horizons clearly; the sepia vistas of roots and blues to the shimmering silver of psychedelia, riffs, tumult and everything in between.
Turpin says it was “hugely freeing” to be playing in a two-guitar band for the first time; “There was just a natural symbiosis between us, like feathers folding around each other.”
Feels Like Gold opens Mirador’s self-titled debut album as though heaved from the earth, the guitars scratching the soil off themselves as a Headley Grange groove leans forward (BTW, Dave Cobb’s production is on point).
A project such as this deserves special instrumentation. Martin came through with Pre-War style acoustics, one-of-one custom builds complete with the Mirador logo. You’ll also hear Kiszka’s ’61 Les Paul/SG let rip – most notably on Roving Blade, which, with a little help from a ’60s Vox wah and a Fender Princeton, dropped jaws in the control room.
While we’re at it, Jake and his Greta Van Fleet (and literal) brother, Sam Kiszka, made an appearance in the 2025 Dave Cobb-produced Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. They’re part of a fictional band that jams with “Bruce” at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Jake E. Lee
Jake E. Lee is Ozzy Osbourne’s true miracle man. In October 2024, Lee was shot multiple times while walking his beautiful dog, Coco. Recovering from that sort of thing takes time, and getting fit to play again was further complicated by arthritis, which involves “strengthening, stretching and steroid shots” to manage.
“The cartilage is basically gone,” he told Guitar World. “I’ve had to adjust my playing style to where I’m using mostly the elbow on the right hand, trying to use as much elbow movement as I can, while keeping the wrist movement down to a minimum.”
A lighter pick and a set of .07s helped him recover in time to give his former boss the sendoff he deserved at July 5’s Back to the Beginning all-dayer in Birmingham, England. He tore through The Ultimate Sin and Shot in the Dark.
The latter is a little on-the-nose, but you need a sense of humor in this business. This is the man who was playing with the Double O when Ozzy forgot the words to War Pigs and sung Old MacDonald Had a Farm instead, and most importantly, he was the player who brought his A-game when Ozzy needed it most. Twice.
Spiro Dussias
A guitarist whose economy picking has its own laws of physics, people simply can’t compute Spiro Dussias. He’s got people making reaction videos simply to admit a total defeat of comprehension before their heads ultimately explode a la David Cronenberg’s Scanners.
STEM researchers could probably break his technique down better than we could, but luckily Dussias was good enough to explain. He calls it “muted sweep picking.”
“It comes from experimenting with the mechanics of economy picking and what you can do with different angles and muting,” he said. “There’s this notion that economy picking gives you a more fluid or bubbly sound than alternate picking – but I’ve been proving the opposite.”
We all have heard testimonials from Tim Henson and Tosin Abasi, but Dussias’ entire social media presence is filled with bamboozled A-list players in a state of total cranial eruption.
Just listen to Negative. It’s unreal, neo-shred as sci-fi, an arpeggiated code for the mother ship with instructions to beam him back. But can we please keep him a little longer? Henson has something planned for him, and it ain’t a BMX ride around suburbia under the light of the moon.
Tom Morello
It is not for his adventures in hot-wiring the electric guitar with tools he bought in Home Depot, nor for animating a next-gen Tony Iommi riff with a hip-hop beat and then blazing some Whammy squawk over the top.
This year, Tom Morello makes our MVP list because of his powers of convening, serving as musical director for the biggest gig of the year (that didn’t have two Gallagher brothers onstage), and maybe even the biggest metal gig of all time.
Hired by Sharon Osbourne to be Ozzy and Black Sabbath’s head of HR for Back to the Beginning, Morello assembled a bill of A-list hard rock and metal talent for “Metal’s Live Aid,” raising a heap of money for charity.
He also played some guitar, performing Snowblind and Breaking the Law with K.K. Downing and jamming with Aerosmith. Well, it would’ve been rude not to. And let’s not forget the launch of Morello’s Fender ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar.
Marcus King
When Marcus King is at home, he doesn’t touch the guitar all that much and will sooner pick up a ukulele or banjo – or sit behind a piano before picking up the guitar – and you can hear that in his songwriting and his playing.
Ably backed up by six-string lieutenant Drew Smithers on the Marcus King Band’s 2025 studio album, Darling Blue, King’s playing is unimpeachable. It’s never too needy, his feel and note choice immaculate. It’s like the opposite of Larry David; King’s guitar always says the right thing at the right time.
King has spent the year in good company, getting himself sober with the help of his wife, getting Derek Trucks, Charlie Starr, Billy Strings and more to sit in on Darling Blue. He played Gregg Allman’s actual Guild Starfire bass on the sessions.
Since King emerged from South Carolina with his grandfather’s ES-345, Big Red, there’s been this promise that he’d follow in that tradition and become the next giant of Southern rock, pulling soul, R&B, blues and more into his orbit. He’s making good on it and then some.
Kiki Wong
One minute, Kiki Wong was one of among 10,000 guitarists applying for the vacant role in the Smashing Pumpkins, the next she is on the cover of Guitar World alongside Pumpkins king Billy Corgan, looking like she had been there since day one.
Wong is many things. For one, she’s the most metal player in the band. She has a different skill set from James Iha and Corgan. She looks totally different, too. But as Corgan explained, that’s what makes the Pumpkins.
“If you’re looking across the stage at the Pumpkins, James is wearing a suit. I’m wearing a priest’s dress, Jack is wearing the Manchester outfit of a lumberjack shirt and jeans, and Kiki looks like Rob Halford’s cousin,” he said. “And I go, ‘Yeah, this is the band.’”
What Wong is doing musically is extending the Pumpkins’ range. For all the honeyed melodies, the high-concept musical progressivism, they have always embraced audio extremity. Wong’s down picking has given Pumpkins a monster power-up. “We’re heavier with Kiki, which is actually to the benefit of the band live,” Corgan said.
Noel Gallagher
We will have to wait for the full story on how Oasis’ reunion went down, but we’d like to think that, after years of being called a “potato” by his kid brother, Noel Gallagher finally got hungry and popped over to Liam’s for some lasagne. Pasta fixes everything.
Or was it simply inevitable that the fraternal wound would heal and they’d put the band back together to pack out a bunch of stadiums and play for more than a million fans in the U.K. and Ireland alone? And then they hit the U.S.…
Either way, Oasis’ triumphant second act put the spotlight back on Noel, the guitar player, and the Chief did not disappoint, stepping out of the rhythm game to play lead once more, setting the guitar internet ablaze when he pulled out this mystery P90-equipped Les Paul Standard, and later releasing it as a signed Murphy Lab limited-edition model, and then as a regular Gibson USA model.
The word around the campfire is that the world’s second biggest rock reunion of 2025 will reconvene in the not-so-distant future. Clearly, there were no hard feelings that Spinal Tap stepped out of retirement to steal their thunder. More on that soon.
Pat McCrory
There’s always one player on our year-end MVP list whom you’ll be advised to wear a crash helmet and gum-shield when watching them perform live. This year it’s Pat McCrory, the guitarist for hardcore superstars Turnstile, who of late has swapped Les Pauls for a Jackson Soloist, a high-performance upgrade for a band whose live show is worth a bruise or six weeks in bandages. No barrier, just lots of people living in the moment, etc.
Hardcore can be a cloistered medium, attracting a demographic that Thurston Moore has called “cement heads,” but Turnstile’s multimedia full-court press for their audience’s affections combines brains, brawn and soul, and if McCrory’s electrified riffs send you off a wedge monitor in celebration, well, there will be an abundance of similar-minded maniacs to catch you.
Nigel Tufnel
When the news broke like the wind that Spinal Tap was getting the band back together, we had to seek out the British rock institution’s firebrand lead guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, to get the story behind the biggest reunion of the year. We hope you enjoyed it. It wasn’t easy.
Secreted in the north of England, selling cheese and trading guitars, Tufnel was living the quiet life, keeping his chops up in the pub circuit, Brown Sound to go with the warm brown beer.
But for Tufnel and Tap frontman/guitarist David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap II: The End of the Beginning was a serious guitar event, with custom gear coming in from the likes of Ernie Ball Music Man, Collings and Marshall. Joe Satriani made headlines when they showed up with the Ibanez JS-3 signature models he gave them, but proving there is a fine line between stupid and clever, Tufnel’s new Marshall stole the show.
“Marshall has made for me an amplifier, the head, and if you look at the dials, it now goes to infinity,” he told GW. “Just think about that for a moment. Think about infinity – oh, my God, that’s literally infinity.”
Stephen Carpenter
Deftones have forever been about contrasts, light and shade, war and peace, Netflix and chill, and Private Music continues in the tradition, threatening mosh-pit dynamite before Chino Moreno’s barbiturate vocals smooth out the edges, casting us into a fugue state.
They’ve been doing this since the ’90s, but it’s still fresher than just-laundered bedsheets.
Carpenter is principally in charge of building the wall of sound, and this time he has a guitar tone cleaved from analog tube fire as his digital detox finds him reengaging with old-school amplifier worship. My, does it give some of those low-end riffs some physical energy. Sometimes it does us all good to touch grass now and again.
Chris Buck
Not everyone had been paying attention to Chris Buck’s Friday Fretworks on YouTube or the social media and streaming metrics underpinning Cardinal Black’s irresistible rise. When Buck booked a small show in Nashville, the promoter was skeptical – then aghast that tickets sold out in two hours.
Thing is, Buck and Cardinal Black have been doing bigger venues, most notably playing the Royal Albert Hall in 2022, as special guests of Peter Frampton. Cardinal Black’s Midnight at the Valencia is similarly opening doors for their aggressive expansion into larger-capacity venues.
Midnight is a record of smoking-hot tones, the sound of vintage Fender combos being dimed into submission. Buck’s signature pedal from ThorpyFX, Electric Lightning, is a tube overdrive/boost with a 3-band EQ that tells you everything about his tonal proclivities. The Welsh guitarist is in his 30s, yet his heart belongs to the holy ritual of pushing air.
Nuno Bettencourt
Nuno Bettencourt should have lifetime tenure in our end-of-year list. There is no greater box-office rock player alive. But lifetime tenure is officially not a thing. Bettencourt’s on this list because his performance at Back to the Beginning damn-near stole the show – also begging the question why he never joined Ozzy’s band.
“For better or worse, I’ve always had my sights set on – and I’ll never reach it, probably – becoming Randy or Edward or Brian May or Jimmy Page, and the list goes on,” he said. “You have this mission to carve your own path, whatever that is.”
Well, Bettencourt’s path has been carved by string-skipping, percussive harmonics and all kinds of juicy overdriven magic from a rig that’s basically a Marshall and a Rat distortion pedal that’s not even really on. When Extreme returned with Six in 2023, he said he was “out for blood.”
At Back to the Beginning he was collecting heads, ripping through Believer, Sweet Leaf, Changes… Even his warm-up shred in the car ride to the show was essential viewing. And we’re not even getting into his MTV VMAs appearance in September.
Oh, and he formed his own guitar company, Nuno Guitars, launching with two very Bettencourt-esque S-styles, reverse headstocks, a promise to continue with the N4, and carrying a lot of the design DNA from his 35-year-long collab with Washburn.
Mk.gee
Michael Todd Gordon is his name. Mk.gee is his superhero name. The manipulation of sound is his superpower. And the guitar never stood a chance. He was always going to pick it up and bend it, mold it, reshape it, keep it lo-fi and yet somehow at the center of our attention.
Talent can take you places. But musical curiosity is its own kind of talent; it can take you strange places. This year it notably took Mk.gee into the studio with Canadian pop-superstar Justin Bieber to co-write, produce and play on Daisies, the lead single from the first of Bieber’s two new albums, Swag.
First, Eric Clapton declared his love for Mk.gee’s talents, now Bieber. If we catch Mk.gee live and he has a friendship bracelet on, it’ll be an “oh-shit” moment, because we know what’s coming next… Don’t rule it out.
In other news, Mk.gee’s gourmet retro-chic tone also inspired the JHS Pedals 424 Gain Stage, as everybody and their TikToker sought out the analog fuzzy drive magic of the direct-to-Tascam sound. A heroic 2025, sir.
Arianna Powell & Olivia Rodrigo
If the Jackson Soloist is an unorthodox choice for a hardcore player like the aforementioned Pat McCrory, then it is something way out of left field for pop.
But when you think about Arianna Powell’s playing style, and more to the point, her mission (to inculcate a love of all things guitar in an explicitly pop audience and to encourage more young people – especially girls – to pick up the instrument), it makes perfect sense.
It’s a platform for next-level virtuosity, blockbuster shred and, with Olivia Rodrigo the brains of the operation, also a serious player in her own right, the mission is proceeding as planned.
“We all get DMs on Instagram from fans that are stoked and wanting to play,” Powell said. “And I can only hope that inspires them, right? [Olivia] has so many fans who are young girls and young women. It’s important to see that.”
So, yeah, booksmart with a degree in jazz guitar from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and a flair for stunt guitar, Powell is Rodrigo’s ace in the hole. She might be this generation’s Jennifer Batten, which is to say an icon in the making.
Daniela “Dany” Villarreal Vélez
Whatever you do, never let Dany Villerreal of the Warning tune your guitar for you. Lord only knows how it would wind up, but it sure wouldn’t be EADGBE.
Pitch-shifted drop tuning and weird AF alternate tunings are the not-so-secret sauce in the Warning’s competition-grade riffs. She explained to Guitar World how she tuned her baritone Fender Strat, and it still didn’t make sense.
“It is a baritone guitar, but I have it dropped as well,” she said. “So the last string is not in B, it’s all the way down to A. For some reason, I always looked at this guitar as a seven-string guitar without the first string.”
This unorthodoxy is giving the Warning’s riff-rock serious weight. Who could have guessed that a band that shot to fame as teenage sisters covering Enter Sandman would later orbit the almighty riff as adults?
The Mexican rockers grew up in full view of the internet, TV and onstage supporting blue-chip acts such as Muse and Royal Blood. Only now does it feel like they’re approaching critical mass, Villarreal Vélez’s rhythm figures rivaling Jupiter for gravitational pull.
Maya Delilah
Given her bravura take on Slow Dancing in a Burning Room (more than a million views on YouTube), there is a lot of scuttlebutt about Maya Delilah being the quote/unquote “next John Mayer,” and we hope for her bank account that this comes true.
But artistically, she’s doing just fine as Maya Delilah, a twenty-something singer-songwriter from north London, signed to Blue Note, whose debut longplayer, The Long Way Round, bears all the hallmarks of natural, unworked talent (belying the fact that Delilah is a booksmart alumnus of BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology).
Like Marcus King, she’s another artist whose voice is just as strong as his or her guitar playing, but GW has a beat to cover, and on guitar – be it the Strats you’ll have seen her with after her graduation from the Fender Next 2024 program or the bizarro Maton electric she unearthed – she has this fingerstyle approach that’s just… Well, it can be learned but it can’t be taught.
“I think the only thing it feels like it holds me back from is occasional speed,” she said. “But at this time, I feel like I get a lot more feeling when I play with my fingers as well.”
Buddy Guy
For a man who was supposed to be retiring from the road, Buddy Guy has clocked up an impressive amount of shows in 2025. But then the world’s greatest living bluesman is a force of nature, his Damn Right Encore Tour! testament to his physical and artistic momentum.
It’s only when speaking to him that you realize his age, his stories recounting the formative years of Chicago blues, and the before times, growing up in Louisiana, the son of sharecroppers, seeing a first-generation blues guitarist for the first time, and what that did to a young kid. Dress him in dungarees with a polka-dot shirt, hand him a Strat, he’s eternal.
Guy bemoans the lack of airplay for the blues, but like today’s blues artists, he is transcending the traditional routes of promo, taking matters into his own two hands by starring in Ryan Coogler’s box-office hit Sinners alongside the likes of Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Bobby Rush. He also put out a new studio album this year, fittingly titled Ain’t Done with the Blues.
“Muddy Waters and B.B. King – I knew ’em before they passed away,” he said, speaking to Variety, “and they told me, ‘Man, if you outlive me, just try to keep the blues alive.’”
Muireann Bradley
The internet has made cynics of many and skeptics of us all, so when 13-year-old Irish country blues artist Muireann Bradley first put her Blind Blake cover on YouTube, some would’ve harbored the suspicion that this was just one of another online phenomenon, like a German Shepherd driving a speedboat. But they would be getting Bradley all wrong.
This is a player weaned on old-timey country blues. Taught by her father, her musical vocabulary and playing style is drawn from players such as Reverend Gary Davis and Memphis Minnie, and from music that’s over a century old and has been passed from generation to generation like an heirloom. Like Buddy Guy, she’s here to keep the blues alive.
Bradley shoulders that burden lightly, playing in open tunings. Her fingerstyle approach isn’t a million miles away from folk – but as Keb’ Mo’ says, blues and folk are one and the same. Bradley performs on her father’s Waterloo WL-S Deluxe and WL-14 X, modern-day boutique reproductions of the a 1920s Stella and 1930s-style Gibson L-00.
Decca just signed her, remixed and reissued an expanded edition of her debut LP, I Kept These Old Blues, and it features a stellar rendition of “When the Levee Breaks,” which brings it on back to its pre-Led Zep form.
“A lot of people out there don’t seem to be aware that the original was written by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy,” she said.
“I just love Memphis Minnie; she was an amazing guitarist and incredible songwriter. There’s another amazing version of the track by Philadelphia musician Ari Eisinger, which influenced me heavily.” Bradley turns 19(!) this December.
Tim Henson
Polyphia’s sound has always been so difficult and/or dense that it was hard to imagine just how it would play live in physical spaces, where the audience is fewer than for their online presentations and yet orders of magnitude more demanding.
Tim Henson and Scott LePage make “high-information music,” as one-time collaborator and instrumental guitar guru Steve Vai would describe it. And Henson admitted to GW that the awesome spectacle of playing stadium shows and Euro festival slots has made them reconsider how to shape their sound for such occasions.
“It was really like, ‘Oh, we’re playing Playing God to 80,000 people. And I have no idea what this sounds like to the 55,000th person way in the back there!’” Henson said. “It made us realize, like, ‘Hey, we should start composing for it to work in these situations of 80,000-plus people.’ So we’re trying to, obviously, bring more energy by making it heavier.”
Henson’s strategy involves eight-string guitars, baritones and rethinking the instrument from the ground up. “We’re just making new guitars that don’t exist for the sole purpose of writing something really, really cool,” he said.
How that turns out is TBC. Henson, in the meantime, has been in perpetual motion, guesting on the Babymetal record, collaborating with Hans Zimmer on the F1 score (Johnny Marr, Guthrie Govan and now Henson? Zimmer can pick ’em), playing stadium shows with System of a Down, pulling together guests for his solo album and Polyphia’s next LP, the latter to feature SOAD frontman Serj Tankian… And so on. Just how much RAM is left in Henson’s giga-brain?
Hester Chambers & Rhian Teasdale
Watching Wet Leg simply enjoy being in an indie-rock band – and embracing it as the unreal reality that they are living through – is a legal high with no comedown. They are like a 21st-century indie-pop Devo – utterly singular, lo-fi, meta, high-volume and playing altered-states oddball disco for oddball and mainstream audiences alike.
She’s not restricted, not like, ‘Oh, I need to learn these chords so I can make this song.’ She just kind of plays around
Hester Chambers
At the fulcrum is Hester Chambers, assuming the Malcom Young position way in the back, working a Kramer Jersey Star as though it were some incognito choice. Fellow guitarist Rhian Teasdale goes over the top, 100 percent gung-ho in her role as frontwoman, heaving a fluoro-green, see-thru acrylic B.C. Rich Mockingbird.
Famously, Teasdale didn’t play guitar until they formed the band – at the top of a Ferris wheel – and approached it with the musical purpose of a pianist and the naïvety of the novitiate, and that’s how you can make a sound that… Well, how you can make a record like Wet Leg’s sophomore album, Moisturizer?
“She’s got a really beautiful way of playing and writing,” Chambers said. “She’s not restricted, not like, ‘Oh, I need to learn these chords so I can make this song.’ She just kind of plays around.”
