SBR Top 7 Guitarists of 2025

Maori thrashers, Alien Weaponry, live and die by the groove. They can thank singer and axeman, Lewis de Jong, whose rapid finger dexterity and imaginative scale fills add the extra magic to his heavy palm-muted rhythms and crunchy riffing. His primary tuning is drop B, and his favourite technique is to chug on his strings and find the circular movements that can spice things up. Though not a shredder, De Jong is an imaginative riff beast.

Read the original SBR review of Te Rā by Alien Weaponry here.

Dutch sci-fi thrashers, Cryptosis, added choral keyboard choirs and atmospheric black metal dimensions to their repertoire for their sophomore album. Anchored in dissonance and clanging arpeggios yet rooted in the fast single-note drilling of thrash metal, Laurens Houvast approaches his instrument in the mind of an experimenter looking for new textures and timbres to extract in the places that are still fertile for discovery. Voivod and Coroner were the pioneers of this sound, but Cryptosis are building their own universe on album number two.

Read the original SBR review of Celestial Death by Cryptosis here.

Voidceremony’s cerebral prog death record this year had enough jazz in it to qualify for the SBR Top 7 Avant-Garde Metal Albums of 2025. At the centre of operations is Garrett Johnson (aka “Wandering Mind”) who must’ve spent the last two years obsessing over the unnatural rhythms and impossible finger shapes like a classical composer on the verge of insanity. Often leading while the bass and drums play away from him, Garret Johnson is a modern Chuck Schuldiner with the chops of a jazz six-stinger and the noise mongering abilities of Gorguts,

Read the original SBR review of Abditum by Voidceremony here.

We had to include Paul Waggoner as the man who plays the most genres on his instrument in a single album. His tasty funk phrasing and vintage rock soloing complement his metallic hardcore riffing and finger-running patterns, but it’s his interaction with bass virtuoso, Dan Briggs, that provides the real highlight on the latest album fr0m Between the Buried and Me. There’s no need for overdubs with so many retro keyboards and bass grooves in the mix, which allows Waggoner to tuck in and express himself with the freedom of a veteran prog player. You’ll even hear some country twanging underneath the whirlpool of different styles.

Read the original SBR review of The Blue Nowhere by Between the Buried and Me here.

Many people have tried to marry the vicious tremolo riffing of black metal with the dream pop beauty of shoegaze, but nobody does it better than Dawn of Ouroboros. That’s because their guitarist, Tony Thomas, does not neglect the crunchy metal aspects of the music and explores the ethereal melodies through a painstaking process of trial and error before he’s ready to record. The duality in his playing is as impressive as his tonality, where he often frets the jazz chords you’d expect to hear in clean mode in the harshest of distortion.

Read the original SBR review of Bioluminescence by Dawn of Ouroboros here.

The most sensual guitarist with a pitch-altering whammy bar, there’s nobody like Scott Carstairs in death metal. Fallujah produced another esoteric prog classic this year full of coquettish pitch bends and phrasing that can be best described as erotic mysticism. Light some candles, relax in the bath, and let the Mandelbrot patterns write symmetry in the pupils of your eyes. You can then follow the instruction of a song title from their new album: “Step Through the Portal and Breathe.”

Read the original SBR review of Xenotaph by Fallujah here.

Haken guitarist, Charlie Griffiths, indulged his thrash and death metal fantasies on his new Tiktaalika album and arranged it into a prog odyssey with every minute detail worked out, including the vocal lines, before he started recording it. A paean to the golden age of thrash metal, Gods of Pangaea is a masterpiece of thoughtful soloing and sharp riffing with the trademark progressive elements that define his work in Haken. With guest vocals from Tommy Giles Rogers (Between the Buried and Me), Rody Walker (Protest the Hero), and Daniël de Jongh (Textures), Tiktaalika is more than just a project for musicians to appreciate, but the guitar work is sublime.

Read the original SBR review of Gods of Pangaea by Tiktaalika here.