Animals as Leaders

Tosin Abasi succeeds where any number of prior (and future) guitar shredders failed: his fleet fingers coax actual emotions out of his eight strings (and the bass guitar, too!). Taking the work of past masters like Satriani, Hendrix, and Sharrock and fusing it with the staccato post-Meshuggah prog variant called “djent” allowed him to forge new branches in the evolutionary tree. Aided by Misha Mansoor’s digital flourishes, Abasi’s compositional skill makes dizzying technical achievements like “Tempting Time” and “Inamorata” feel like they come from his heart, not sheet music.