Innehållsförteckning för June 2025 från Guitar World

ONCE HE FINALLY opens it up to the public, King Diamond’s Saint Lucifer's Hospital 1920 album is going to be insane. It’s been a few years since the Danish occult-metal icon started talking up this much-anticipated project — which will be his eponymous band’s first full-length release since 2007’s Give Me Your Soul… Please. The famously falsetto-flying frontman first teased its storyline around a supernatural asylum when he dropped the “Masquerade of Madness” single in 2019. Though Saint Lucifer's Hospital 1920 has been inching along in the background since then, the launching of King Diamond’s tour last fall showed great promise for the project when the group debuted two brand-new bangers at their opening date in San Antonio — “Spider Lilly,” a phantasmagoric prog-metal slam propelled by a pinch-squealing walkdown…

ON THEIR SECOND full-length, Mourning You, Ontario post-punk quartet Bonnie Trash are purging the darkest depths of their souls and holding a mirror to the most unsettling aspects of the human condition. At the heart of the music is Emmalia Bortolon-Vettor’s heavily fuzzed and delayed guitars, a cavernous cauldron of washy noise and screaming feedback underneath twin sister Sarafina’s infectious, gothic serenades. It all makes for a sonic mass that’s abstract, beautiful and bloodcurdling in equal measure. “I wanted to use a lower tuning and more slide on this album to wail away with a sense of dread,” the guitarist says. “It was all about layering the noise to tell an emotional story, rather than just creating background textures. I took it to a new level of exploration.” This is…

MUSICAL DIFFERENCES” IS Matt Stubbs’ explanation for his recent split with his GA-20 co -founder, co -guitarist and singer Pat Faherty. When pressed for a bit more detail, Stubbs remains mum. “We’ve got to leave it at that,” he says. “There’s powers above me, and it’s been made clear that’s where we’re at — musical differences.” Up till last year, Stubbs was on a rocket ride with the wild and woolly, stripped-down Boston-based trio (two guitars, drums, no bass) he and Faherty formed in 2017 that specialized in a jacked-up version of vintage Chicago electric blues. Their five albums (three studio discs and two live sets) debuted at either Number 1 or Number 2 on Billboard’s Blues Albums charts, racked up a boatload of wins and nominations at the Blues…

BEFORE HOOKING UP with Run-D.M.C., New York City session veteran Eddie Martinez had made his rounds with Blondie, Robert Palmer, Mick Jagger and David Lee Roth (and let’s not forget his contributions to Run-D.M.C.’s self-titled 1984 debut). Still, he says that lending his licks to a hip-hop album, which became King of Rock, was a different animal. “Big ‘rock’ guitar was associated with rap prior to me playing on ‘Rock Box’ and ‘King of Rock,’” Martinez says. “But Larry Smith, who wrote and produced those classics, knew I could get the sounds and vibe because I’d played in rock and punk bands when we were kids.” Martinez suggests that despite the genre shift, his approach didn’t shift all that much. “My objective was to bring authentic, big, crunchy guitars to…

YNGWIE MALMSTEEN WILL be the first to tell you that 1984’s Rising Force wasn’t supposed to be a hit. But it definitely was — and the young Swedish virtuoso’s unexpected success led directly to the recording of a second album, 1985’s Marching Out, and a world tour. Malmsteen describes Marching Out as “quickly thrown together,” which didn’t seem to matter, as it climbed to Number 52 on the Billboard charts. According to the shredder, the lightning-rod success of his two first albums came via his laser focus. “I did my thing,” he says. “Not because people told me to, but because that was what I thought I had to do. I never had other people write my songs. The bottom line is that it’s been a straight line. I always…

ON HIS WAY up the rock ’n’ roll ladder, Billy Duffy — co-founding guitarist of the Cult — wasn’t all that into heavy metal, leaning instead toward glam and proto-punk, genres centered on primal simplicity. “I just wanted to be like the Stooges,” he says today. “Really, why can’t you play four chords over and over again? [Laughs] It’s hypnotic! I’ve always loved early Stooges records for [their] simplicity; they had a kind of hidden hypnotizing quality.” Although they definitely brought more than four chords to the party, Duffy and the rest of the band — singer Ian Astley, bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Nigel Preston — succeeded in bringing a touch of hypnotism to their second album, Love, released in October 1985. Let’s just say its grooving bass lines,…

LOOKING BACK ON the off-the-wall gene-riding journey that was Dinosaur Jr.’s 1985 debut, Dinosaur, bandleader and guitarist J Mascis, in his usual monotone shrug, says, “I was just learning guitar. I picked it up to write songs and start a band, so whatever I was writing… that’s all I could play, pretty much.” Dinosaur, despite its seeming lack of structure and virtuosity, wasn’t without a guiding light — even if Mascis essentially stumbled upon it. “I didn’t know much about guitar tone,” he says. “I remember I had this Yamaha [G-100] solid-state amp because I saw that Bob Mould [Hüsker Dü] had one. I thought, ‘How bad could it be if Bob Mould has one?’ Then the hotshot guitar player at our gig said, ‘Your guitar sounds terrible.’ I had…

IN 1985, GUITARIST Joe Genaro and the rest of the Dead Milkmen — bassist Dave Schulthise, drummer Dean Sabatino and vocalist Rodney Linderman — were young and, let’s just say, not always incredibly serious. After all, the artwork for their debut album, 1985’s Big Lizard in My Backyard, gloriously depicts a giant reptile on the verge of crushing a lawn chair. Comedy rock, indeed — but that doesn’t mean the Milkmen were rudderless. “The main songwriting objective was to come up with catchy, funny songs that engaged and entertained audiences,” says Genaro, aka Joe Jack Talcum. “I was a relatively new guitar player, so from that perspective, it was a matter of keeping things rudimentary.” Unsurprisingly, since we’re talking about the mid Eighties, Genaro gravitated toward what he calls “super-distorted,…

EXTREME METAL, AS Cradle of Filth is classified, is polarizing. It’s easy for instrumentation, such as Donny Burbage and Marek “Ashok” Šmerda’s ripping dual guitars, to get lost in the spectacle. Šmerda admits that with that comes pressure — but there’s plenty of room for bits and bobs that fans might not associate with the extreme metal sphere. “You might be surprised,” he tells Guitar World. “We definitely have outside-the-box influences…” “I’m a very unusual guitar player,” Burbage adds. “I don’t like a lot of modern guitar tones. I like low mids and chunkiness. It comes across as a 5150 sound, but it blends nicely with British amp tones, like a Marshall JCM800 or a plexi. It’s the best of both worlds.” Unsurprisingly, it’s the same for Šmerda. “I find…

NOT COUNTING ITS two founding members — guitarist-frontman Dave Lowery and guitarist-singer Johnny Hickman — 18 various musicians have logged time in Cracker since the band formed in 1990. “It’s called the ‘Steely Dan model,’” Hickman says, “where you have two singer-songwriter guitar players who are the core of the operation. Cracker Incorporated is David and me. We’ve been friends since we were teenagers, and we’ve been writing songs together for 35 years.” He laughs. “Wow, that’s longer than some of our fans have been alive.” Hickman admits that he and Lowery have butted heads over the years, but the two have figured out that the best way to keep the peace is to maintain a safe distance. “David and I live across the country from each other,” he says.…

AS STEVIE RAY Vaughan and Double Trouble entered Dallas Sound Lab to begin recording their third album in March 1985, they were nearing the end of a remarkable two-year run. After years of grinding on the Texas blues circuit with a series of near misses, including almost signing with the Rolling Stones’ record label, the band burst onto the national scene with Texas Flood, released by Epic Records in June 1983. They followed that up less than a year later with Couldn’t Stand the Weather. They had toured the world, played with many of their heroes and had videos in heavy rotation on MTV. It was an incredibly productive 24-month period, but the band was on shakier ground than anyone on the outside could have realized. The frenetic lifestyle made…

HEART’S CAREER WAS somewhat in decline when they signed with Capitol in 1985 after several years with Epic. Although sales of their previous two albums, 1982’s Private Audition and 1983’s Passionworks, would have been welcomed by many acts, by their own high standards, it was clear they needed to turn things around. Guitarist Nancy Wilson and her singing sister, Ann, were in no doubt that a major reboot was needed and eagerly embraced the opportunities that the deal with Capitol presented. We’ll let Nancy take it from here… Heart was your first album for Capitol, and it saw the band undergo a major makeover. Was that part of the conditions on which you signed the deal? I think we’d reached the end of the average lifespan for most rock bands…

BY 1985, SESSION man Paul Jackson Jr. had already appeared on records by Anita Baker, Sheena Easton, Gloria Gaynor, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King and — most notably — Michael Jackson, on a little something called Thriller. So, given his track record, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he got the call to lend his licks — along with master six-stringers Dann Huff, David Williams and Louie Shelton (Mr. “Last Train to Clarksville”) — to an at-the-time relatively unknown Whitney Houston’s self-titled debut album. He definitely had the chops and the mindset to lay back and make his contributions count. Speaking of that mindset… “There are two things you need to know as a session musician,” Jackson Jr. says. “Number one, the customer is always right. Number two, it’s the…

BY 1985, KISS had been through three guitarists in three years. Founding member Ace Frehley quit in ’82, giving way to Vinnie Vincent, who was fired in ’84, leading to Mark St. John, who, due to a rare form of reactive arthritis in his hands, gave way to Bruce Kulick, also in ’84. In Kulick, Kiss had found their man. He had style and chops and wasn’t afraid. He’d played in place of St. John on two songs from 1984’s Animalize — “Lonely Is the Hunter” and “Murder in High-Heels” — and toured in support of Animalize after St. John’s arthritis flared up. But Kiss’s next release, 1985’s Asylum, was his first proper Kiss album. “I really wanted to prove myself worthy of being Kiss’s new guitarist,” he says. “I’d…

THROUGH THE REVISIONIST lens of rock history, Hüsker Dü’s third full-length album, New Day Rising, is often viewed as highly anticipated and groundbreaking. It’s seen as an album that upped the ante on the success of the band’s abrasive, semi-melodic second record, Zen Arcade, by incorporating more open chords and hooks into their scratchy, sloppy hardcore. And in the process, the legend goes, the Minnesota trio fueled their enmity toward one another and their label into their music, creating melody-tinged songs that created the groundwork for angst-fueled alternative rock. While some of this is true, New Day Rising wasn’t created out of pure spite or painstakingly cultivated to reinvent hardcore or create a new breed of pop. It was more like a natural progression of the spontaneous sound of three…

THE HARVEZI HAZZE may look like an ordinary fuzz/distortion box, but anyone familiar with SOMA — the company that invents outlandish and awesome alternative instruments like The Pipe, Enner and Terra — knows that “ordinary” does not exist in SOMA’s vocabulary. Featuring a waveshaper circuit based around a unijunction transistor (whereas typical fuzz devices usually utilize bipolar junction transistors), a component often employed in early synth oscillator circuits for sawtooth waveform generation, the Harvezi Hazze provides a vast universe of distortion and fuzz effects and much more. Build Quality & Usability The Harvezi Hazze is actually more complex than it seems on the surface, featuring a signal chain that goes from an optical compressor with fixed parameters to a dual-mode soft/harsh clipping distortion amplifier to the aforementioned waveshaper and finally…

GUITARIST KEITH STRENG made his CBGB debut with first-wave NYC punks the Fleshtones in 1976, just as the scene was coalescing around young bands like the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, all of which collectively brought a sense of abandon back to rock music. “Everything was new and fresh, and everybody was bringing something to the table; it was exciting and unbroken ground,” Streng says. “That’s what motivated me to become a guitar player, because it wasn’t all about scales and technique. It was just taking it back to what rock ’n’ roll should be — minimal, emotional and simple.” In the heady early days of punk, the Fleshtones injected their garage-rock sound with classic R&B touches like sax and Farfisa organ. But Streng has always been the glue between…

BEFORE SECURING THE gig as a touring guitarist with the Smashing Pumpkins, Kiki Wong had all but given up her dreams of large-scale success with a big-time act. That’s not to say she wasn’t capable; one glance at her millions-strong social media following showed she was certainly up to the task. But an unruly music business and a devotion to family led her elsewhere. Outsiders called Wong a “social media shredder” and a “bedroom guitarist.” Forget that she was riffing heavy on gnarly guitars in front of millions of viewers; to her detractors, it wasn’t enough. “My biggest advice is to accept failure like it is your best friend,” Wong tells Guitar World. “Some of your biggest failures will happen early on when you’re just getting started or when you’re…

AFTER JOE PERRY and Brad Whitford rejoined Aerosmith in 1984 after being away for four and two years, respectively, the Bad Boys from Boston launched their successful Back in the Saddle tour, which spanned the summer of ’84. “It was a pretty tumultuous decade,” Joe Perry says while looking back on Aerosmith’s mid-Eighties reboot. “It always felt like ‘us against them.’ But we really hung together as a band. Nothing was going to break us up, because we [already] went through all the stuff that usually breaks bands up.” Perry recalls the fans being there for Aerosmith, proving that the now-sober rockers had the juice that made them stalwarts of Seventies rock. This led to Aerosmith hooking up with Geffen Records and making their first record as a reunited force,…

AMONG ALL OF Talking Heads’ other talents — from fearless musical invention to killer fashion sense — the New York band had impeccable timing. A decade earlier, in the mid-Seventies, the lineup had formed in time to lead the New Wave scene from the sticky stage of CBGB to the global charts. Now, in June 1985, David Byrne (vocals/guitar), Jerry Harrison (guitar/keys), Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums) would release the most commercial album of their career just as music became a visual commodity, vying for the eyeballs of America’s youth. “I don’t think Little Creatures is the best Talking Heads record,” says Harrison, four decades later. “But I’ll tell ya, one of the reasons it ’s our best-selling record is that it ’s the beginning of MTV.” Certainly,…

CALLING MEGADETH’S DEBUT, 1985’s Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!, a “landmark” album isn’t hyperbole — it’s a fact. It’s a lynchpin of trash metal — and it served as a proper picking of oneself up off the deck for Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine, who had been fired from Metallica in 1983. The story of the Metallica-related chip on Mustaine’s shoulder has been beaten like a dead horse. But former Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland sees it a bit differently. “You know what? Maybe twice in the whole time I’ve known Dave has he ever said anything about Metallica,” he says. If you believe Poland, as far as “the looming specter of Metallica” goes, there’s not much to tell — aside from the fact that several songs from Killing…

WITH THE HUGE success of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” taken from the soundtrack of the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club — and their subsequent album, Once Upon a Time — Simple Minds became a household name in the U.S. in 1985, with four subsequent Top 10 singles pulled from the album, including “Alive and Kicking” and “Sanctify Yourself.” The band — still a household name — have continued to enjoy success around the world since those heady times and are scheduled to tour North America in May and June. Guitarist Charlie Burchill has fond memories of the era. You brought in Jimmy Iovine to produce the album. What was the thinking behind that, and what did he bring to the process? We were really feeling, as a…

THE ORIGINAL GIBSON Victory models (the dual-humbucker MVII and triple-pickup MVX) date back to the early Eighties when Gibson was losing serious market share to Fender and super Strats from upstarts like Charvel, Jackson and Kramer. While it still retained a good chunk of Gibson DNA, the Victory’s offset asymmetrical double cutaway shape and clever pickup switching options made it a strong competitor that got overshadowed by flashier designs. The Victory lasted only a few years during the end of the Norlin era and the relocation from Kalamazoo to Nashville, but over time it has earned status as a sleeper model. Gibson’s recently revived Victory model looks similar to the original MVII, but the new model is more of an update than a replica. As one of Gibson’s more attractive…