Your votes have been counted and the editors have had their say. Yes, GW’s best riffs of 2023 have been determined – and what does this tell us about rhythm guitar in the 21st century? Well, the riff is not dying out, for starters.
Looking at the top 10 it maybe tells us that even if the riff has evolved over the years it is still the lifeblood of rock/metal composition, and in an era of accelerating change we can still count on some constants – that James Hetfield’s right-hand will remain as reliable as quartz crystal timepiece, that repetition is next to godliness, and that the best riffs are almost always the simple ones.
