It’s the news Guns N’ Roses fans have been waiting 17 years to hear: a new album is on the way. Okay, to be fair, that’s a headline you could have read dozens of times over the past decade-plus. But now guitarist Slash has given a bit more insight into the famously slow-to-record band’s process and it seems like new/old music is definitely on the way.
In a recent interview with Sylvia Alvarado of Las Vegas radio station KOMP 92.3, Slash described what might be a two-fer: a possible collection of older tracks the band has slowly been releasing over the past few years as well as the (very) long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s eternally delayed Chinese Democracy, which itself was the serially delayed sequel to 1991’s double album of original tunes, Use Your Illusion I and II.
Reacting to the recent release of two new songs, “Atlas” and “Nothin’,” which dropped in December, Slash said it was “good to have a couple of songs that we’re promoting and then a tour that’s really a long tour.”
“Atlas” and “Nothin’” were the first new songs from GNR since their 2023 one-off singles “The General” and “Perhaps.”
When Alvarado asked if the singles are the prelude to the first full album from GNR to feature him and fellow OG member bassist Duff McKagan since the Illusion LPs, Slash dropped a double-dose of good news. “We took a bunch of material that [singer] Axl [Rose] had and we sat down and listened to it and we sort of picked out all the different songs that we wanted to do, and what Axl wanted to do, and we just took all of the guitars and bass off and re-did it,” he said of the recent singles.
Slash said getting back in the studio was fun and the sessions were spread out over a long period of time, giving him a chance to really think about what he wanted to play on them.
In a transcript of the interview posted by Blabbermouth, Slash then went deeper, revealing that there might be two new GNR albums in the works. “I think in this instance it’s what we’re doing, because we only re-recorded those songs — like a couple of songs here, a couple of songs there. These were the last two that are left to do, and we actually did them not even back to back,” Slash said of ‘Nothin’” and “Atlas.”
“And then there’s really no more of that sort of old rehash stuff to release,” he said of the vault-clearing. “But I think what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna take all those songs and put them on something and release that as a package. And then the next record that we’re gonna do is gonna be all new original stuff, and that’ll be an actual album.”
Slash also promised that the band will play both of the new/old songs on their upcoming 2026 world tour. The pair of songs were the first music from GNR since 2023’s “The General” and while Rose has not sat for a formal interview in nearly a decade, Slash has kept the new album fire burning over the past few years with periodic teasers of what’s to come.
After saying in 2021 that after five years back in the fold, the refreshed GNR had not started writing new songs together yet, in December of last year, he told Guitar Player magazine, “There’s so much material at this point — it’s a matter of having the discipline to sit down and f—ing get into it. Slash promised at the time that a new LP is “coming,” though he didn’t offer a time frame for release and the band’s label did not respond to requests for comment on a timeline.
“But the thing with Guns is, in my experience, you can never plan ahead. You can never sit down and go, ‘We’re going to take this time, and we’re going to do this.’ Every time we’ve done that, it falls apart,” Slash said.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com ’
