10 Greatest Rock Bands With Two Guitar Players

Towards the end of the '90s, a lot of what was happening in the guitar community started to look fairly stale. The entire appeal of rock and roll was about making something that sounded fresh, and even some of the newer post grunge bands seemed to be mining the same tired tropes that Nirvana made so popular back in the early days. Radiohead may have started off in the same circles, but what they've done with the guitar ever since still sounds like the future of rock and roll.

While most rock bands tend to have their roots more in blues a lot of the time, the tone bending solos of Jonny Greenwood almost seems more in line with classical music or straight up avant garde half the time, looking to make abrasive sounds on tracks like Paranoid Android or putting in different exotic scales on a song like Just. For all of Jonny's pushes to move rock forward though, Ed O'Brien always remained the rock and roll spirit of the band, taking the textures that he loved from players like Andy Summers of the Police and making something that was a lot more pretty than your average rock and roll on something like No Surprises.

Even when the whole band seemed to swap in their instruments for electronic sounds on records like Kid A and In Rainbows, you could always hear the guitar fighting its way back into the mix, like Jonny getting dirty on a song like I Might Be Wrong or Ed using his guitar almost like a synthesizer on its own in tracks like Treefingers. Some of the biggest names in rock this decade may have been going down roads rock and roll had already been, but the music of Ed and Jonny seems more in line with where rock and roll is going.