The 25 Greatest Indie Rock Guitarists

By Daniel Margolis

Playing guitar in an indie rock band is a unique challenge. On the one hand, the principles that make for fundamentally sound, exciting guitar playing are basically set in stone – it’s a job role that rewards ego and skill. On the other hand, the entire sound of the genre dictates not audibly trying too hard – tapping is not going to work. Meanwhile, the contrarian nature of the entire enterprise demands some level of innovation, and detuning your guitar and strumming it on the headstock or behind the bridge isn’t enough. Furthermore, if you get too professional-sounding you’ll end up signed to a major, screw up your whole sound and alienate your fan base. It’s a balance, and not an easy one. So here we salute the 25 best indie rock guitarists ever.

One of the many strange gems on the SST label roster in the ‘80s, Husker Du was supposedly a punk band, but singer, guitarist Bob Mould stretched them way beyond the borders of Saint Paul. Part of this was his thoughtful, relatable songwriting but just as essential was his guitar playing; it was more jangly and crammed full of hooks than his contemporaries’ work. He also made frequent use of the decidedly un-punk Roland Jazz Chorus amp, the built-in analog chorus effect of which gave his playing an otherworldly yet still abrasive sheen. By the band’s second album—the landmark Zen Arcade—he’d progressed to backward-masking his guitar on “Standing By The Sea” and experimented with feedback and searching solos on tracks like “Reoccurring Dreams."

Though she is now a part of grrrl rock band Wild Flag, the perfect visual representation of Mary Timony’s guitar playing comes in the early video for her former group Helium’s “XXX.” As a very whammy-bar-warped guitar solo plays, Timony stands on an escalator and struggles with the broken strings of a goldtop Gibson Les Paul. It’s an exaggeration, sure, but a lot of her playing has this same gone, woozy quality. Backed in Helium by muscular bass guitar from Ash Bowie, she spread wandering melodies and loose, angular riffs across the Boston-based band’s two albums and three EPs for Matador—even the misleadingly titled No Guitars.

Louisville's Slint followed a formula common to bands of its era—in that its songs started quietly and then got dynamically louder. It’s a trick date-stamped to a certain time period, sure, but it can be argued that no band made you feel you’d travelled as far from a song’s unassuming intro to a high-volume climax as Slint, and a lot of this is owed to the work of guitarist Dave Pajo. He never made it as simple as a chord progression and one well-timed step on a distortion pedal. From the outset of any Slint song, he starts upping the tension immediately with shifting melodies and textures; once you think you know the riff to one of the Kentucky band's songs, it switches up. “Good Morning, Captain,” off the band’s second and final album for Touch and Go, Spiderland, is a master class in the whole soft, loud gesture. The song begins with a seasick groove that builds to such tension that when a distorted chord finally arrives, it washes over the listener like a wave, then immediately disappears.

He was obviously the whole point of the White Stripes, even if Meg was the coolest thing about the Detroit-based band. The first thing that jumps out on any White Stripes album is Jack’s yelping lead vocals and the second is his guitar playing; an always confident mixture of pounding rhythms and sliding leads. At their best, the White Stripes recalled the best of British invasion rock like the early Stones and the Yardbirds but so what, right? A million bands do that. The difference is that White had actually done his homework, going straight to the source to learn the songs and handiwork of the likes of Robert Johnson, Son House and Blind Willie McTell. One imagines no other band that went on to play the MTV Video Music Awards began this century touring a cover of the traditional blues “Boll Weevil” that it never released on record.

In the ‘90s there was no shortage of bands touring college towns hawking some sort of modern update of surf rock and rockabilly. Long-term this gimmick proved unsustainable, but one band hailing from this movement has demonstrated remarkable staying power; Man or Astro-man? On its initial albums for Estrus Records, the band mixed dark surf instrumental jams—anchored by Brian Causey, aka Star Crunch, whose guitar playing veers between tight control of a melody line and barreling abuse of his reverb coils—with clever vocal samples from old movies.

MOA? claimed very sincerely to be from outer space (they’re actually from Alabama), dressed like astronauts and decorated the stage with devices like tesla coils. As the decade progressed, they signed to Touch & Go and got a little more serious as a post-rock influence crept into their material. They haven’t released much music in the last dozen years but still tour, slaying audiences at club shows and festival appearances. A lot of their longevity stems from the irrepressible charisma of bassist Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard but just as much is owed to Causey beating out stuttering guitar lines on his Univox Hi-Flier.

Listening to the Pixies today, it’s hard to figure why they were so widely praised as such a tuneful band, what with Frank Black screaming and snarling like a beast all the time, hitting a melody only when Kim Deal forcefully drags him over to the chorus. Their secret is Black and Joey Santiago’s ongoing guitar duel, which sees them stacking hooks on top of each other. Check Surfer Rosa’s “Broken Face” for a prime example of this; the two ram together crashing chords and a wailing bent note on what passes for the verse before meeting up for a footrace of a riff on the chorus. Over four albums for British indie 4AD (the band itself was from Boston), the Pixies expanded on this dynamic, learning to slow down and take the edge off just enough to score a hit like “Here Comes Your Man,” but even that sports layers upon layers of guitar.

St. Vincent's frontwoman Annie Clark started playing guitar when she was 12 years old. She honed her skills in the high school jazz band and continued studying for three years at Berklee College of Music before dropping out. She's got the technical skills, but that's not what makes her such a special talent. For Annie, the guitar is just a tool she uses to express herself, and her creative vision is what sets her apart. What Annie does best is a mix between whimsical and abrasive—songs like "Dilettante" have Annie transforming her guitar into a peace-disturbing weapon, giving an interesting edge to counter those sweet vocals of hers.

London, England’s Stereolab were led by a guitarist, but listening to them you’d never guess that. Over ten albums for independent labels (though often backed by Elektra), Gane generally makes his guitar playing just one element in Stereolab’s wash of droning keyboards, bass, motorik drums and girls singing in perfect harmony or describing their progressive politics in French. Not that anyone can blame him; after devising a formula this awesome, few sensible musicians would be looking for an opportunity to cut a gnarly solo. In instances where Gane’s guitar is the focal point of a song, it generally recalls the Velvets at their most languid, like on “Avant Garde M.O.R.” off The Groop Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, or Neu! at its noisiest, like on “Jenny Ondioline” off Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements.

The thing about playing guitar in Guided By Voices is you’re going to be doing it more or less constantly, since Robert Pollard writes dozens of songs a day and doesn’t really have any way to accompany himself other than a surrounding rock band. Mitch Mitchell and Tobin Sprout—not the only men to ever play guitar in GBV but surely the most definitive—play as if they know all too well that quantity is the dominant property here. No song sounds like they’re trying too hard, and that’s a big part of the band’s appeal; the casual performance of just another GBV song invites the listener in to define it on his or her own terms. Of course Mitchell and Sprout occasionally rise to a big rock moment like Alien Lanes’ “Motor Away,” but even this is over almost as soon as it begins.

The division of guitar duties in Chapel Hill's Archers Of Loaf looks pretty standard on paper; one Eric plays rhythm, the other lead. Singer, guitarist Eric Bachmann anchors his songs with alternately trudging and barreling chords while Eric Johnson fingers stay in the upper register of the fretboard the entire song, but not because he’s slathering everything with Claptonesque leads. Johnson uses the guitar the way a lot of people use keyboards; finding phrases and triads for each passage of a song that keep the listener hooked—this little trick is central to the band’s sound. Over four albums for Merge the formula evolved—the two would circle each other a bit more slowly or wander off at times (see Vee Vee opener “Step Into The Light”)—but the basic idea remained.

The word that comes to mind listening to Steve Albini play guitar is control. First off, you know that due to his legendary skill as an engineer and just a gearhead, his guitar sounds exactly the way he wants it to, both live and on record. Second, Albini doesn’t merely play a note, he places it precisely where he means to. Listen to “A Minute” off the Chicago-based Shellac’s At Action Park for a demonstration of this. Riding on top of the band with a characteristically abrasive guitar tone, Albini whips the trio into a marshaled charge, then narrows its focus to a one-note distillation of the song’s riff that repeatedly hits twice, then once, then stops on a dime. You can tell he spent his formative years jamming with a drum machine in Big Black.

Jon Spencer may take the lion’s share of the credit (and therefore the blame, but that’s another matter) for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but if the band began and ended with his calculatedly cartoonish antics it never would have gotten off the ground. His two partners in crime—drummer Russell Simins and guitarist Judah Bauer—were what made the NYC-based JSBX a marquee act, particularly Bauer. Here we had a young guitarist who’d seemingly absorbed every note Keith Richards played in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and could effortlessly spit it all back out on a battered Telecaster, playing like a man well beyond his years. Yet he didn’t sound studied and therefore stiff but rather telepathic in how he assisted Spencer in gluing the band together over 10 albums for a range of independent labels.

Neil Hagerty had his work cut out for him in Royal Trux, as the San Francisco-based band was officially comprised of only him and his girlfriend, Jennifer Herrema, who just sang. Luckily, Hagerty was up for the job; over nine albums for Drag City and two for Virgin, he piles sublime guitar over haphazard bass and drums borrowed from wherever. His style is basically a classic rock radio-worthy skill-set—calling to mind a pre-fusion Jeff Beck—employed while falling-down-off-the-stage fucked up on heroin. He is the guy, after all, who convinced Pussy Galore to record a full-album cover of Exile On Main Street and release it on cassette-only.

For good or ill, they devised a great deal of how indie rock guitar playing sounds and is executed. If you were an indie rock band in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, you had to make a conscious effort not to sound like Sonic Youth. They were pioneers in so many signifiers of indie guitar; alternate tunings, heavily altered guitars, intentional dissonance, ending songs with a noise jam, etc. In fact, the NYC-based band is so known for Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo’s methods that it’s difficult to get past all this and just listen to the music, which was frequently exceptional. Over its first half-dozen albums for a variety of indie labels, the band grew from a no-wave soundalike to a brilliant band capable of conveying dense fright on Bad Moon Rising and airy atmospherics on Evol—all with the same beat-up guitars, bass and drums. After its landmark Daydream Nation—which saw Moore and Renaldo attempting every kind of riff they could think of (see “Eliminator Jr.” for evidence of this taken to its furthest conclusion) – the band carried on with another nine albums for Geffen and a (hopefully) final album for Matador.

A lot of bands in the ‘90s sounded like Sonic Youth, but Chapel Hill, N.C.’s Polvo was one of the few to meet that criticism with a joke. In their 1994 song “Every Holy Shroud,” they sang, “Well I know what it sounds like. I hope they care. And now we just brought a sitar so be prepared.” Two lines batted away any comparisons and articulated what made them so unique; experimentation with Eastern scales, textures and instruments that would have sounded contrived coming from lesser bands. Over five albums (three on Merge and two on Touch & Go), Polvo’s two frontmen and guitarists Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski built most of their songs around shimmering chords and stream-of-consciousness riffs; whistling Polvo on the bus would make someone look pretty strange. They sound as if someone stared into space and imagined the strangest guitar-based song possible and then the band tackled – and generally nailed – the unenviable task of performing it.

He pulled off one of the most impressive conversions in the history of independent rock. Tim Green started his career contributing to the razor-sharp yet still rather garagey guitar riffs and jags of the politically charged, D.C.-based The Nation Of Ulysses, which put out two albums on Dischord before folding in 1992. See “Diptheria” off 13-Point Program To Destroy America for an excellent demonstration of guitars used to depict creeping death. As his bandmates reconfigured themselves as Cupid Car Club, then the Make-Up, both of which basically honed the formula established in NOU, Green joined the San Francisco-based band the Champs to play very different music—basically the most progressive, instrumental, alternative metal around in the late ‘90s. Their 1997 album III is one of the best of the decade; any 30 seconds of its dense and complex aesthetic is enough to serve as the basis of an entire song by any other band.

Their obnoxious sense of humor tends to overshadow it, but Dean and Gene Ween—of the Pennsylvania-based Ween—are accomplished musicians, particularly Dean, a.k.a. Mickey Melchiondo. In a 2007 interview with The Onion A.V. Club, Dean outlined the difference between the two (now former) partners’ approaches to their instruments: “I’m definitely more of a guitar player, whereas Aaron writes songs on a guitar, but it’s a means to an end with him.” This is borne out by Ween live, as Melchiondo shreds on every song that calls for it and brilliantly anchors the band on the rest.

Further, give Dean credit for possessing the range to play every genre the band has experimented with—pop, rock, punk, country, reggae, salsa … really anything—over 10 albums; with indie releases early and late in their career sandwiching a five-album run for Electra. A prime example of Dean in action is “Buckingham Green,” an epic number that name-checks Fleetwood Mac’s two guitarists and archly mixes a dirge-like rhythm guitar with stately Spanish leads before blasting off into a blistering, well-composed solo. It’s proof that Melchiondo understands exactly what makes classic rock indulgence fun and how to reshape it to suit Ween’s ends.

All three of San Pedro, Calif.’s Minutemen were master musicians but the band’s strongest element was singer and guitarist D. Boon. Over four albums and six EPs for SST, using punk as a template, Boon demonstrates everything he could possibly think to do with six strings. At times he closely mirrors Mike Watt’s dexterous basslines while accentuating them with crashing chords before tossing in a brief, meandering solo. At others he leaves Watt in the dust: Check out how on Double Nickels On The Dime’s “West Germany,” he gives drummer George Hurley three seconds to establish a groove before sprinting headlong into the song with a furious, complex riff, leaving Watt struggling to catch up and meet him on the same note at the start of the verse. Then on the same album there’s “Cohesion”; a beautifully fingerpicked, quiet, instrumental, acoustic number from Boon alone. He was capable of anything. Tragically D. Boon died in a car wreck in 1985.

Lou Barlow may not solo as wildly as his former employer (no, where he really bested J Mascis was in writing self-probing lyrics), but he matches him step for step in composing guitar parts that serve a song. Check the dynamite, chordal hook that jumps out of the speakers as soon as you put on the first track of Sebadoh III, “The Freed Pig,” and follows Barlow’s vocals as a sympathetic partner until devolving into a big blast toward the song’s end. Over three albums for Homestead and four more for Sub Pop, Massachusetts-based Sebadoh balanced such lo-fi pop symphonies against quieter acoustic songs that were no less layered and complex; see “Kath,” also on Sebadoh III, as a perfect example. He definitely has a soft side, yet Barlow always knows when to proclaim the coffee break’s over and get back to smashing his head on the punk rock.

Probably indie rock’s premier guitar god, J Mascis excels at grabbing all of the best classic rock guitar signifiers and making them his own. It makes his band’s name, Dinosaur Jr., pretty perfect—too bad it was arrived at accidentally (the original Dinosaur sued). Over the Massachusetts-based band’s first three albums for indie labels and a half-dozen more for majors and independents, Mascis reclaims the best gestures of rock’s past; wah’ed rhythm parts, wailing solos, blaring chords, massive riffs, punishing volume, the works—all of it spun into a final product that sounds irresistibly modern and underground. And just like the best rock bands always have, Dinosaur Jr. went through an acrimonious split that proved a springboard for an equally great band when Lou Barlow left to form Sebadoh in 1988.

When Pavement toured in 2010, Stephen Malkmus switched guitars between every song; alternating between a goldtop Gibson Les Paul with soapbar pickups and a black Fender Stratocaster with a tortoise-shell pickguard. In the 1999 concert footage on the Pavement DVD Slow Century, Malkmus can be seen employing the same technique; before almost every single song he switches from one guitar to the other. Exactly why he does this is perhaps best left between him and his guitar tech, but one suspects it’s just so he can have a freshly tuned guitar on every song, which is just so Malkmus. What’s more indie rock than not bothering to tune your guitar and finally delegating the entire enterprise as soon as you can afford to?

Over three early EPs for Drag City and five albums for Matador with Pavement, Malkmus applied this same devil-may-care approach to his performances in general. Pavement’s first drummer Gary Young once complained that Malkmus was a much better guitar player than was reflected on the California band’s records, as if he was intentionally slumming in his approach to his instrument. It clearly served his songs; just about every Pavement song is a classic and it’s difficult to imagine them working so well if Malkmus had spread flashy axe work all over them.

Kurt Cobain knew. He borrowed from a wide range of influences but the slowest, sludgiest Nirvana songs are totally Melvins. Guitarist Buzz Osborne and Cobain were childhood friends and the association got the Washington-based Melvins signed to major label Atlantic Records for three albums (the rest of the band’s 20 releases have been on independent labels). This was fortunate, as it brought King Buzzo’s unhinged vocals, uncompromisingly dense song structures and punishing guitar playing to a wider audience. Almost always playing a Gibson Les Paul, the man is a menace at any tempo; he can play twisting riffs but really just needs a couple long bent notes to construct a great hook. Osborne rarely solos and when he does it’s more as an accent to a song; you’re not going to hear any typical metal wankery on a Melvins record. He may have accidentally invented grunge but don’t hold that against him.

Most people would point to David Yow as the most terrifying aspect of Chicago’s the Jesus Lizard, but the real monster here is guitarist Duane Denison. Throughout the band’s first four albums for Touch and Go, Denison is consistently terrifying. First off, he’s a riff monster; check out the way he slams into “Boilermaker” with a two-note riff that then goes berserk on the chorus as if he’s trying to outrun Yow. Second, he doesn’t so much strum chords as slice them; see the killer central figure in “Puss” as an example. That same song provides a prime example of what qualifies as a solo from Denison; two minutes in, he simply plays an interlocking four-note pattern for 17 seconds, and the cool, calculated result serves the song better than the best pentatonic licks ever could.

Like a lot of indie greats, the Meat Puppets started as a hardcore band and quickly evolved away from that, in their case under the direction of their brilliantly weird singer, guitarist Curt Kirkwood. Thurston Moore once described the band’s earliest days to Goldmine as such: “They would come out and play a hundred songs, each one shorter than the last. Singing this Mickey Mouse gobbledy-gook. Then they’d break into a 20-minute Grateful Dead thing. The audience just did not know what to think of these guys.”

Curt, accompanied by his brother Cris on bass and drummer Derrick Bostrom, explored this dichotomy over seven albums for SST before moving to the majors. The Phoenix band were plenty punk, but augmented this with twisting country instrumental pieces like Meat Puppets II’s “Magic Toy Missing” and “Aurora Borealis,” both of which demonstrated that Curt was a deft fingerpicker. Or witness how he makes “Plateau” explode at 1:41 into a soundscape that matches the gone grandeur of any Neil Young denouement. These are deceptively simple songs; when Kurt Cobain covered three of them with Nirvana on Unplugged, he needed Curt and Cris’ help him to do it. Live, Kirkwood’s guitar hero status is on full display, as most of the Puppets’ songs become a platform for him to stretch out into long, warped solos

Greg Ginn is a fucking genius. He invented West Coast punk and hardcore and, with SST, pioneered the independent rock record label in the face of overwhelming opposition by police and even fans themselves, as well as a complete lack of income or resources. But never mind all that; Ginn was an undeniable guitar player over a half-dozen albums and countless EPs with Black Flag. He built the band’s debut album, Damaged, on nothing but killer riffs from the ground up, so even if it was dismissed as “an anti-parent record,” it was tuneful enough to worm its way into the head of every kid who heard it—and eventually plenty of adults as well. Say what you will about “TV Party,” but it’s inspired many bar sing-a-longs in its day; an honor not a lot of punk songs can claim. Ginn’s solos, meanwhile, are a thing of wonder; he doesn’t get hung up on the pentatonic scale, or really any scale, instead taking a page from free jazz musicians and just staring in the void and letting whatever he can channel shoot out his strings (the results are either brilliant or shit, depending on who you ask). By Flag’s second album, My War, Ginn was pretty much done with conventional punk rock and spent the entire second side slowing the tempo way down to record some of the most disturbingly sludgy music ever committed to record, creating an early grudge signpost in the process.