10 Best Hard Rock Guitar Riffs From The 2010s
9. Out Of The Black - Royal Blood (2014)
So, technically Royal Blood use a bass guitar and not a lead, but they treat the bass like a lead, so damn it, this qualifies.
When Royal Blood burst onto the British music scene in the early 2010s with their gut busting heavy bass driven sound, people were ready to lap up what they had to offer. Arctic Monkeys had released the massive album AM a year earlier, and the reverberations of it were still being felt. Royal Blood picked up were the Monkeys left off, plugging right into that riff driven rock sound and turning everything up to 11.
Indeed, Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders was spotted throughout 2013 sporting a Royal Blood T-shirt, which no doubt added to the bands surge in popularity, but really their music did all the heavy lifting for itself.
As is often the case with great rock riffs, simple is generally better, and Royal Blood kept it simple with their debut single Out of the Black. With singer Matt Swan's bass guitar having just the right amount of effects pumping through it to imbue their sound with a hard rock energy, festival goers around the UK were helpless to resist the allure of rock.