The numbers game is typically a Taylor Swift thing, but if you do the math on how long it’s been between new Guns N’ Roses albums, we’re due for a new LP from the hard rock icons any day now. At least according to guitarist Slash, who in the December issue of Guitar Player magazine says that the veteran band is hard at work on their long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s Chinese Democracy.
“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,” said Slash, who teased that a new LP is “coming” without offering any time frame. “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.”
GNR took 17 years between 1991’s Use Your Illusion two-part album and 2008’s Democracy, which singer Axl Rose famously labored over for years with a wide variety of musicians that didn’t include any of the original Guns members. Though they released the covers EP The Spaghetti Incident? in 1992 in between, the drought since Democracy has stretched on for nearly two decades as the semi-reunited band has toured the world several times with a lineup that now (again) includes Slash and original bassist Duff McKagan, as well as longtime keyboardist Dizzy Reed.
In the GW chat, Slash also pulled the curtain back a bit on the band’s workflow with legendarily mercurial singer Rose, saying, “It just spontaneously happens through some sort of inspiration that triggers it. And the next thing you know, it’s off and running,” he said. “So it’s coming. I know it’s coming because everybody is thinking about it. It’ll just happen when it happens.”
At press time spokespeople for Slash and GN’R had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.
Various whispers about a potential new Guns album have bubbled up from time-to-time over the past decade, with McKagan telling Trunk Nation in 2019 that a new album was cooking, saying “Oh, it’s real, but the fun part and the cool part about Guns N’ Roses is we don’t really talk about it, and what happens next just happens.”
In the interminable interim, fans have had to satisfy their appetite for new Guns music with the studio versions of “Absurd” and “Hard Skool” in 2021 and “Perhaps” in 2023 after debuting them live. For now, the band is still rocking around the world on its Because What You Want & What You Get Are Two Completely Different Things tour, with an upcoming show in Medellin, Colombia on Saturday (Oct. 11), followed by a run of South American and Central American shows through Nov. 8.
