10 Greatest Rock Music Guitar Solos Of The 1990s

10. Cherub Rock - Smashing Pumpkins

For their second album, 1993’s Siamese Dream, Smashing Pumpkins needed a big song to cement their status as alternative icons. Luckily, they had some help from an “angelic” source.

Cherub Rock (get it?) was the album’s first single and the band’s first to gain any sort of traction on the American charts. It also landed Billy Corgan and co. a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance, thanks in no small part to its incredible solo.

Corgan, who wrote the track, is completely unleashed here, screeching the guitar to within an inch of its life, mixing glam rock bends with a fuzzier tone more befitting of the age of grunge. The solo was actually recorded on two different tapes and then played back with one running slightly faster than the other, which is how the band achieved such a unique sound with minimal studio trickery.

The song itself is a total belter, an uncomplicated out-and-out rocker that still gets crowds going today, and such a song deserves something as straightforwardly brilliant as this solo. The Pumpkins absolutely smashed it with this one.