10 Greatest Rock Bands With Two Guitar Players

All good rock and roll tends to come out of the garage circuit. Unless you're a band like Coldplay who's meant to sound pretty at every turn, there's nothing like going into a garage space and cranking up your amplifier until everything starts distorting around you. Most bands like to spend the rest of their career chasing that sort of high, but The Strokes found out pretty quickly that you never really needed to leave the garage.

Across both Is This It and Room on Fire, Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi have always used their guitar parts to compliment each other, with most of us wondering who the actual lead guitar player is supposed to be. Outside of some of the more power pop tunes that they started with like Someday and 12:51, the magic behind their playing has always been trying to capture a feeling in the studio, like Nick's unstoppable parody of Tom Petty on Last Nite or Albert going in between different phrases to create the sound of chaos on the chorus on Reptilia.

Even when the band decided to move beyond their garage rock roots, the modern incarnation of the band still has that kind of telepathic playing instilled into them on a song like The Adults Are Talking, which is practically a masterclass of Albert and Nick speaking to each other just using their guitars. The Strokes may seem to disappear for years at a time, but all that downtime seems to be spent just honing their craft for the next go round.