Watch Tosin Abasi cover Radiohead's Paranoid Android on classical guitar

It's not exactly a state secret that Tosin Abasi's guitar-playing talents extend far beyond the technically meticulous prog-metal for which he is best known.

Still though, this decade-old video of Abasi – with the help of Matthew Hemerlein – tackling Radiohead's Paranoid Android on a classical guitar is something to behold.

A Behringer in hand, Abasi puts a classical spin on Thom Yorke's ominous main acoustic riff. 

Not content with just rhythm work though, Abasi grabs a pick halfway through for some some nimble lead lines that beautifully re-contextualize Jonny Greenwood's climactic, searing electric guitar solo in the song's middle.

Sadly, the video – which you can check out above – seems to fade out before the duo are finished, but it still captures a terrific cover that has a unique, baroque beauty while staying true to the original's haunting spirit.

In more recent Abasi news, Animals as Leaders returned in September with Monomyth, an intricate, unrelenting epic that served as the group's first new material in five years. 

Monomyth is part fever dream, part ritual. Its imagery represents man's ceaseless attempts to translate transcendent ideas into movement,” Abasi said of the song, a playthrough of which he released in November. “The conflation of struggle with meaning,” he continued. “Pain with significance. The ultimate failure of distilling perceived patterns in the world into knowledge."

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Jackson Maxwell

Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.