Guns N’ Roses Prepping New Music, Slash Says

Guns N’ Roses hasn’t released a new album with guitarist Slash in almost three decades, but the legendary musician is now working on new music with lead singer Axl Rose. Slash, Rose and Duff McKagan reunited for the 2016-2019 Not in This Lifetime… Tour, which became one of the most successful international concert tours of all time. Everyone remains on good terms, and they will hit the road again for a European tour this summer.

“It’s been great,” Slash recently told Consequence when asked about his reunion with Rose. “We got back together, and it was really sort of like one of those huge question marks, and it was only to do the Coachella festivals, really. And it just snowballed into this tour that’s really been sort of going ever since then.”

They have both had a “blast” doing the shows and put all the negativity from the past behind them. They already released two singles, “Absurd” and “Hard Skool,” with the band’s current lineup. These two songs are just the tip of the iceberg, Slash said. “There is new material coming – everybody’s always asking,” Slash told Consequence. “I would imagine that there will be one or two songs that come out around the time that we hit the road in June.”

Slash, 56, hasn’t put his career outside GNR on hold though. He’s now on tour with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. He also released a new solo album with Kennedy, simply titled 4, in February. In an interview with Louder Sound, Slash said the process of making music with GNR is very different from working with the Conspirators.

“Guns is a completely different process,” he said. “That happens more like collectively sitting around and Guns going: ‘OK, we’re gonna make a record,’ and sort of compiling ideas in that moment. But we haven’t really done that yet. So I just did the Conspirators thing because I’d written all this material for it.”

In the same interview, Slash said he wasn’t sure if “Absurd” or “Hard Skool” would appear on the next GNR album. “There’s new Guns material coming out as we speak, and we’ll probably keep putting it out until the entire record’s worth of stuff is done and then put it out solid,” he said.

GNR released their now-legendary first album Appetite for Destruction in 1987 and released four more albums by 1993. The group’s most recent studio album, Chinese Democracy, was released in 2008 and the only original members of the record are Rose and keyboardist Dizzy Reed. GNR was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.