THE NEW WAVE OF CLASSIC ROCK RIFFS FOR DAYS!

SOCAL ROCK ‘N’ ROLL CREW RIVAL SONS HAVE BEEN KICKING out the jams ever since they formed in 2009. So how, after six albums and a decade-plus in existence, did the four-piece find themselves entering 2021 as one of the forerunners of a new surging musical movement New Wave

“This type of sound is finding popularity as a kind of backlash to what we’ve been fed over the last 10 years,” says Rival Sons guitarist Scott Holiday. “Things move in cycles, and new rock ‘n’ roll — not alternative or metal, like a real rock ‘n’ roll sound — has been very hard to find over the last decade.”

Befitting the NWOCR (New Wave of Classic Rock) moniker, Rival Sons — along with other bands included in this budding genre like Greta Van Fleet, the Struts, Dirty Honey, Dorothy and more — perform music that harkens back to the seminal work of icons like Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Cream and others. Like the masters, this new class of performers are creating hard-hitting, swaggering, riff-driven rock ‘n’ roll built around a core vocal-guitar-bass-drum configuration. Unlike these originals, as Holiday points out, the musical and cultural landscape the up-and-comers are entering hasn’t exactly been welcoming.

But the fickle nature of music trends — and rock’s shifting position in pop culture — is nothing new. Since rock ‘n’ roll first reared its dangerous, distorted grooves in the Fifties, the genre’s stature has risen and fallen repeatedly. And “Rock Is Dead” has been proclaimed by many critics, many times over the decades. But, generation after generation, there’s always a fresh class of kids picking up electric guitars and making an exciting racket — and new rock acts continue to fill clubs (in normal times), rise up the ranks and push the form forward.

What makes this current renaissance particularly interesting is that these bands are starting to experience mainstream crossover success and taking over prime cultural real estate that — for the better part of the charts, receiving Grammy nods, earning millions of digital streams, attracting legions of worldwide fans and galvanizing a strong grassroots online community (many of whom congregate on the popular New Wave of Classic Rock Facebook group).