“Is rock dead? Yes. Are guitar bands relevant? Not particularly. And I enjoyed the straightforwardness of that… The gods aren’t showing much favour to guitar music, but that makes playing guitar scales at home even more kind of joyful and cool to me.”
Ezra Koenig
As a teenager I grew up on a steady diet of 00s guitar bands, most of them now unlovingly lumped under the label of ‘landfill indie’. Most weeks my pocket money would go on copies of Q, NME and occasionally Total Guitar. Guitar bands were still topping the charts. Reading the review sections of those music magazines, you might have been duped into thinking that nothing of great artistic merit was being created outside of the traditional guitar band set up.
Come 2023, the pendulum has well and truly swung. Poptimism is gospel. No one thinks twice about giving serious critical attention to the latest releases from Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. When Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury in 2008 there was uproar from the curmudgeonly old guard; when Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish were announced as last year’s headliners no one batted an eyelid. Things have moved on, for the better. Guitar-based music still makes up the bulk of what I listen to, but when I find myself most excited by something new and innovative, there is often little or no guitar in earshot.
This all means that guitar music can feel like a dying art form.
With this in mind, I have thrown together a playlist of reasonably contemporary guitar music, hoping to show that there’s life in the old dog yet.
Tom Ronan 