THE SHREDLIST: Best Guitar Solos of 2025
- Josh Kitchen
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
By: Josh Kitchen / December 22, 2025
Face-melting solos, bone-breaking riffs, perfectly timed and meticulously planned chords and fret decisions. (Or at least they’d have you believe they were.) One of the year’s best movies features a real-life blues legend guitar hero. There was a lot of insanely good guitar playing in 2025. Here are some of the best, with insights straight from the players’ mouths.
Goodbye - Tchotchke (Emily Tooraen)
My favorite solo of the year from one of the best albums of the year. Emily Tooraen of Tchotchke is an incredibke player, and on "Goodbye," she gets to shine. Her playing all over Playin' Dumb is exciting, crisp, and perfectly compliments Tchotchke's ode to 60's girl groups and garage rock mentality. Here's Emily on how the solo became what it is:
"The solo for “Goodbye” had several versions in the beginning that were slowly pared down and rebuilt until it found its final form. I kept hearing the first sliding note into E and thought it was a strong point to move up the fretboard from…Eva encouraged me to feature some runs and lean into the emotional gravity of the song, as well.
“Goodbye” makes me tear up the most out of all of the tracks on the album, so my aim was to keep that weight intact while coming up with the solo. During recording, Brian and Michael [D'Addario] used a wah pedal to achieve a unique tone with some angle experimentation…luckily it came together within a few takes! - Emily Tooraen
Bad Miracles - Cory Hanson
Cory Hanson's playing all over I Love People is perfect for a porch hang, a let's have some beers, BBQ, get out the tape deck like it's 1998 and get dad drunk, make him talk about his favorite Jackson Browne records kind of afternoon. The solo on "Bad Miracles" is like its own song, completely structured and full. Here's Hanson on it:
"I think I was standing when I did the solo, it just has that feeling to it. I was playing my Gibson es 345, a really sweet guitar; very bright maple bodied with incredibly dynamic higher output pickups. My strategy with solos is always the same: I attack the guitar with my picking hand, and I bend and wobble around with my fingerboard hand. Usually I start in an upper position on the fretboard, and by the end I inevitably end up below the 15th reaching for... something beyond the fretboard. I resolve somewhere in the middle of the neck. There’s your beginning, middle and end. It’s always nice when a guitar solo tells a story." - Cory Hanson
Bottle - Goon (Kenny Becker)
A beutiful solo built out of improvisation that I'm so glad was captured on the record. Here's Kenny Becker:
"That is one of Claire’s favorites.[Morison at Wild Horizon Sound]. She’s always said that she loves the guitar solo on “Bottle.” I remember being kind of like—not that I tried to downplay it, like, I like it too—but it was this thing that just sort of happened. I was like, “What about this?” Claire always records everything, even when I’m just fucking around. So, it was an early take. And she said, 'that solo’s so sick.'" - Kenny Becker
Bread Butter Tea Sugar - Wolf Alice (Joff Oddie)
Throw Yourself To The Ground - Die Spitz (Ellie Livingston)
Bitter Everyday - Wednesday (MJ Lenderman & Karly Hartzman)
WIZARD - Castle Rat (Franco Vitore and Riley Pinkerton)
Back To You - Djo (Joe Keery)
Nightmare - Jobber (Kate Meizner)
Porcelain - Frankie Cosmos