THE NEW WAVE OF CLASSIC ROCK

OUR GUIDE TO 15 “NEW WAVE OF CLASSIC ROCK” ACTS THAT ASPIRE TO THE GREAT GUITAR HEIGHTS OF THEIR FOREBEARS (OR SIMPLY, 15 KICKASS GUITAR BANDS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT!)

- BRAD ANGLE

SOCAL ROCK ‘N’ ROLL CREW RIVAL SONS HAVE BEEN KICKING out the jams ever since they formed in 2009. So how, after six albums and a decade-plus in existence, did the four-piece find themselves entering 2021 as one of the forerunners of a new, surging musical movement dubbed the “New Wave of Classic Rock”?

“This type of sound is finding popularity as a kind of backlash to what we’ve been fed over the last 10 years,” says Rival Sons guitarist Scott Holiday. “Things move in cycles, and new rock ‘n’ roll — not alternative or metal, like a real rock ‘n’ roll sound — has been very hard to find over the last decade.”

Befitting the NWOCR (New Wave of Classic Rock) moniker, Rival Sons — along with other bands included in this budding genre like Greta Van Fleet, the Struts, Dirty Honey, Dorothy, and more — perform music that harkens back to the seminal work of icons like Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Cream and others. Like the masters, this new class of performers are creating hard-hitting, swaggering, riff-driven rock ‘n’ roll built around a core vocal-guitar-bass-drum configuration. Unlike these originals, as Holiday points out, the musical and cultural landscape the up-and-comers are entering hasn’t exactly been welcoming.