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.
This story is from the June 2021 edition of Guitar World.
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This story is from the June 2021 edition of Guitar World.
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