The month’s best guitar music – a hand-picked selection of the finest fretwork on wax

With their 2022 debut album, Cardinal Black showed the world how the budding guitar hero in their ranks could thrive in a band environment. Here, Chris Buck explains how its follow-up has taken his playing and songwriting to the next level

SEEMINGLY OUT OF nowhere, the Darkness swooped out of Suffolk, England, and onto the international music scene in 2003 with their high-voltage debut, Permission to Land. At a time when hipster bands i

WHEN TY SEGALL and collaborator Matt Yoka started writing the lyrics to the former’s new and 17th solo album, Possession, the pair set off to present a series of “quintessentially American stories.” T

U.S. Girls ★★★★ Scratch It 4AD. CD/DL/LP ...

Amid the mayhem of his European tour, Joe takes time out to give us a guided tour around his 2025 live gear, delivers the lowdown on some of his more storied guitars, and tells us why his mighty multi-amp rig has to run at breaking point in order to make the earth move and those riffs resonate…