WAREWOLF BEST XI:
GUITAR SOLOS OF THE 2020s
Eleven solos from this decade that stopped me cold. Not shred for shred's sake, not nostalgia for an era when solos "mattered.” Just the moments from the 2020s where a guitar said something no other instrument could. Ranked, argued, and playlisted.
Allie Sandt
The Right Time
This is the one that sounds like it shouldn't exist in the 2020s. You get this Steely Dan and early Dire Straits style of playing. Tight, precise, impossibly clean, the kind of controlled, jazz-literate rock guitar work that basically nobody is making anymore. Every note is placed exactly where it needs to be, nothing wasted, nothing showy for its own sake.
That precision is the whole appeal. It's a lost art: the idea that a solo could be about restraint and taste and perfect placement rather than speed or volume. It's truly unlike anything else coming out today.
In a decade of guitar solos, the one that sounds like it was beamed in from the golden age of studio craft, and holds its own against it, earns a spot every time.
Sam Fender
All Is On My Side
Sam Fender gives you that War on Drugs kind of solo: lush, widescreen, and filled to the brim with emotion. This isn't a solo built to impress you with technique. It's built to make you feel something, and it does, immediately.
The guitar work here swells and glows. More texture and atmosphere than fireworks, the kind of playing that wraps around the song and lifts it somewhere bigger. It's the sound of a solo used as an emotional peak rather than a showcase, every bend and sustain carrying real weight.
That's exactly what earns it the spot. Anyone can play fast. Playing something this drenched in feeling, this genuinely moving, is the harder and rarer thing… and Fender nails it.
Portugal. The Man
Dummy (Chrome Sparks Remix)
This is the ambush of the list. It comes out of nowhere. Not for one single second do you think a scorching rock solo is going to rip on this track. It's a remix, it's electronic, it's cruising along in a completely different lane, and then the guitar tears in and blows you away.
That's the entire reason it's here: the shock of it. The best surprises in music are the ones you never see coming, and a face-melting solo detonating in the middle of a Chrome Sparks remix is about as unexpected as it gets.
A great solo makes you feel something. This one makes you do a double-take first, and then feel it. Nothing else on this list pulls that trick.
Aly & AJ
Slow Dancing
A romantic slow burn with real weight. The solo hits harder than you'd ever expect from the setup, and boy, does it work.
There's something almost cinematic in the way it builds. The kind of solo that feels less like a guitar break and more like the emotional climax of a scene. It sneaks up on you. You go in expecting a soft and pretty pop song and you come out having felt something genuinely big, the guitar doing the heavy lifting in the final act.
That gap between expectation and payoff is what earns it the XI. When a solo makes you feel more than the song ever advertised it would, that's the good stuff.
Kaleo
Skinny
A bluesy gut punch. It's tense, raw, and wired with an emotion you feel in your ribcage before you can even name it.
This is guitar playing as pure physical sensation. There's a coiled tension running through the whole thing, a rawness that never gets sanded down or polished into something safe. When the solo hits, it doesn't just decorate the song. It lands, right in the chest, with the kind of weight KALEO have always specialized in.
That gut-level impact is why it's here. Some solos are impressive. This one's felt, and felt hard.
The Warning
MARTIRIO
The solo hits like a final push: big, dramatic, and full of tension. If you really let yourself feel this one, the tears will pour out.
It's the sound of everything the song's been building toward breaking loose at once: a release that's been coiled up the whole track finally let go. The Warning have always understood drama and dynamics, and this solo is them wielding both at full force. It doesn't just cap the song, it detonates it.
An emotional gut-punch of a solo from a band I've covered front to back, and one of the most cathartic moments on this entire list. Dany Villarreal right now is my top guitarist alive.
Quarters of Change
Kiwi
The solo tears through the mix with wild energy and never fully loses control. That's the tightrope, and it's the whole reason it made the XI.
It lives right on the line between control and chaos: unhinged enough to feel dangerous, disciplined enough to never actually fall apart. That's the hardest balance in guitar playing: sounding like you're about to lose the plot while never actually losing it. Too clean and it's boring; too loose and it's a mess. This one threads the needle.
Wild, alive, and always right on the edge without going over. Exactly the kind of high-wire playing this list exists to celebrate.
Wilmot Redd
Goodness In Me
The tone is dirty, the energy's live, and the whole thing just barrels forward. You can hear how much fun this was to play.
That's the magic of it. Some solos are impressive, some are emotional, and some just sound like a blast, and this is the last kind. The grit in the tone, the live-wire looseness, the sheer forward momentum, it all adds up to a solo that's pure joy, the sound of a band cutting loose and loving every second.
Not every great solo has to make you cry or drop your jaw. Sometimes it just has to make you grin, and this one does it from the first note.
The solo doesn't try to steal the show. It just shows up at exactly the right moment and makes you bask in its glory.
That's a rarer instinct than it sounds. Plenty of players treat a solo as their moment to grab the spotlight and wring it dry. This one understands placement. It arrives precisely when the song needs it, does exactly what the song needs, and gets out. A masterclass in taste over ego, and proof that the best solo is sometimes the one that knows its role perfectly.
Wet Denim
Calm
Hands down the best guitar solo on an original song in the last decade. It's got clarity, it's got bite, and it rides a groove that pulls you in and leaves you begging for more. Everything you'd want a solo to be is here at once. Technically clean but never sterile, aggressive but never sloppy, and locked into a pocket so deep you feel it in your body. It doesn't just fit the song, it lifts the whole thing into another gear.
If I had to hand someone one solo to explain what this entire list is about, why guitar solos still matter in the 2020s, this is the one I'd play them. The gold standard of the decade so far.
Saults
What Would It Be
Squeeze House
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
There's no shortage of great covers of this track. It might be the most-covered guitar showcase in rock history, but this one feels otherworldly. The solo doesn't just reinterpret the song. It transforms it.
Where most covers treat that iconic solo as sacred ground to be honored, Squeeze House rebuilds it into something heavier, weirder, and completely their own. It takes one of the most famous guitar moments ever recorded and makes it sound genuinely new. Darker, stranger, and more dangerous than the original ever was. That's an almost impossible thing to pull off with a song this canonized.
Reinventing a legend without disrespecting it is the highest-difficulty move on this list, and Squeeze House stick the landing.