- Top 10 Guitar Solos of 2023
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This year is not like any other. The response to the 2023 greatest guitar solo poll nigh-on overwhelmed the administration at Guitar World. It was a record turnout, and once we collated the votes, and our editors meticulously weighed up each solo’s melodicism, influence and technical prowess, we had a truly formidable top 10 on our hands.
The number one spot will come as no surprise. This was the year that gave us this decade’s Heartbreaker, its Eruption. We might all debate the guitar solo’s place in composition, the form it should take and whether it is even necessary in the first place, but it’s not going anywhere.
The solo will outlive us all, and this top 10 presents documentary evidence that the solo is ever-evolving – that at its best it can tell a story, give us a sense of spectacle, and even offer a window into a player’s soul. And if it sets your head on fire, then all the better.
10. Towa Bird – Boomerang
TikTok’s Towa Bird is just going to have to savor the irony in charting in the top 10 guitar solos of 2023 having already declared on this very website that they are “arrogant”. But then art is all about contradictions and subverting expectations, and if you’re the sort of player who discovered the guitar then mainlined Jimi Hendrix’s recorded output, then how could you deny yourself the pleasure of a few bars on the treble clef to cut loose?
Speaking to Guitar World in June, Bird said Boomerang’s solo had to “feel like a conversation”, and you can hear that in the phrasing – it’s inviting a response. Tone-wise, Boomerang is awesome, and should be a surprise to no one that a TikTok star should make use of plugins to dial in an electric guitar sound.
“Being able to do that in the box is really helpful,” said Bird. “Throwing things into different rooms, playing it on two different guitars and then having two different distortions or fuzzes was just so fun.”
9. Big Wreck – Hangers On
Ian Thornley was never going to wake up one morning and find Mike Varney’s face pressed up against his window with a big fat contract to draft him onto the Shrapnel roster. That’s not his game. But that is not to say that he is not a formidable lead guitar player, whose solos are often essential to his songwriting, an opportunity to say what he wanted to say in verse but perhaps couldn’t find the words.
That’s when you can let the guitar say what you couldn’t, and this solo – teased out, sparse but not minimalist – has an elliptical quality, an air of Peter Green about it. Not that it is blues,
