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Plini’s music is the perfect soundtrack for facing the wondrous Great Outdoors.
The Australian guitar virtuoso spent the early part of 2026 promoting An Unnamable Desire – the third staggering instrumental album to arrive under his mononym – through music videos that paired his djent and jazz-fusion-filled explorations with nature-set scenes of a woman crossing beach and forest vistas.
The visuals are filled with lush flora and awe-inspiring wildlife, kangaroos hopping off towards an untold horizon. Just before that, the Neural team sent him and guitarist John Connearn off on a one-day writing retreat at an idyllic Finnish cabin. The elegant back-and-forth runs they ripple into the resulting Helmi single – which was released on Valentine’s Day – reflected the heart-swelling lakeside view.
And though Plini is just about to head out to catch an Intervals performance in Berlin when Guitar World catches up with him to discuss the new album, he and an interpretive dancer spent the weekend filming a video for An Unnamable Desire’s The Time Will Pass Away at a national park bordering Germany and the Czech Republic.
When asked why he’s been taking in the scenery of late, he suggests that it’s because adventure is around every corner out there.
“You go into a forest and you're like, ‘What am I going to see? What will be out here?’ That's the same thing that I try to put into the music, because you listen to it and you're like, ‘I don't really know what's gonna happen here, but I'm intrigued.’”
On certain levels, An Unnamable Desire still finds Plini expressing the whimsically progressive yet singable guitar style he brought to 2016’s Handmade Cities and 2020’s Impulse Voices, and the new album’s most complex sections run wild with odd-metered arpeggiation and selective picking finesse. But he also points out how the title track doesn’t even have a solo, the guitarist often hanging onto a jazz-jangled chord amid swaggering synth-bass and sensual sax accents.
While minimal at times, Plini also consciously went into the sessions looking to push his abilities to the extreme. For album centerpiece Now & Then, for instance, he drops out of a quixotically djent-stuttered swing groove to perform a looping, selective-and-hybrid-picked quintuplet arpeggio that he admits was super hard to capture cleanly.
“I feel like with the last few records I've done, I've dabbled in some different techniques, or things that were out of my comfort zone, but nothing that wasn't just over the horizon,” he explains, adding that something he really wanted to level up was his metal chops. “There's a couple of tracks that are very fast and right-handy. I felt like I should not just try to write cool songs, but also improve as a guitarist.”
Canyon is one such ripper that works Plini’s rhythm-wrist to the bone, a relentless metalcore pace pushing the tempo as Plini power-chugs past the speed barrier. The blissfully melodic but blast-manic Manala is another certified heater that got him sweatin’.
Just to have the stamina to play 16th notes at 184 BPM… for a proper metal player it’s probably fine, but for me it was like, ‘This is exhausting!’
“Manala was hard to even get up to speed to play for the video, which was mimed,” he says with a laugh. “Just to have the stamina to play 16th notes at 184 BPM… for a proper metal player it’s probably fine, but for me it was like, ‘This is exhausting!’”
Plini began writing Manala back in 2020, initially with the intention to bring a vocalist onto it. He ultimately opted to give the hyper-dense instrumental arrangement some breathing room. It’s the album’s oldest piece of music, and it faced a few other structural changes before arriving in its final form. He adds that the rest of An Unnamable Desire “definitely evolved two-or-three Pokémon stages from when I first [started] it.”
While he’s been getting the hang of playing outdoors – as evidenced by his collab with Connearn – Plini was crafting most of these songs at home in Sydney while recording onto his laptop. Plini cued up tones on his Quad Cortex while mainly running Neural DSP’s John Petrucci and Mateus Asato plugins, though he specifies that he dialed up the Archetype: Gojira X when he wanted to go extra-heavy.
Some of this was later re-amped by Simon Grove, who co-produced the album with Plini, in addition to mixing, engineering and playing bass on the recordings.
Plini played his parts using his signature headless .strandberg*, which was loaded up with Fishmans (“I abused the single-coil bridge pickup sound quite a lot”). The Swedish guitarmakers also loaned him a 7-string, which he plunged down to a low C sharp tuning – Grove routed the nut out to fit a heavier “million gauge” string.
While ultimately performed on guitar, a tension-building section through the record’s closing The Time Will Pass Anyway had also been envisioned using a different thick-stringed instrument.
“I was imagining a cello player in a huge, empty concert hall playing this difficult arpeggio, and it's kind of like what you'd expect to hear in a sci-fi movie,” he says of the vibe, adding of an imagined on-screen scenario, “I feel like it’s something to do with being incredibly alone. Like, you wake up and everyone on the spaceship is dead.’”
On that point, Plini’s name may be at the top of the marquee, but he proudly talks up the cast of collaborators he brought onto An Unnamable Desire. “Because this is the longest that I've spent on an album, it means it's also the longest that anyone else spent on it,” he says regarding the record’s six-year journey, and the tweaks he made along the way with his “really sick band” and a few other guests.
The player pool on An Unnamable Desire features Polish fretboard-blazer Jakub Zytecki, who hit a soaring series of back-to-back runs with Plini on Ciel. Other contributors include drummer Chris Allison, keyboardist Dave Mackay, saxophonist John Waugh, string arranger A.J. Minette, violinist Misha Vayman, cellist Yoshi Masuda and harpist Emily Hopkins.
In between his last two solo albums, Plini also delivered collaborative singles like his Helmi with Connearn, and 2025’s In Captivity track with Animals as Leaders’ Tosin Abasi
Looking toward the future, when Plini’s asked who he desires to collab with next, he says Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and John Petrucci would all be amazing to go toe-to-toe with, even if just for a few bars. Then Plini pauses for a few beats before coming up with another wonderous idea.
“I'd love to do something with John Mayer,” he says, citing how they could connect quite naturally via their mutual friends at Neural. “I think that would be really fun. My idea, John – if you're reading this – would be to write an odd-time signature John Mayer song, and then he can make me do a backing vocal. We’d do a guitar trade. It's still a sweet sort of bluesy, ballady song, but it’s in fives, or something.”
Between their respective approaches to guitar and Plini’s penchant for a picturesque music video, the sight and sound of that team-up should be stunning.
- An Unnameable Desire is out now.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
