Slash has revealed that a new Guns N’ Roses album is an inevitability, and the band has plenty of material ready to go.
The album will be the band's first since 2008’s Chinese Democracy, and Slash’s first with the group since the 1991 double-album, Use Your Illusion, and the ill-fated The Spaghetti Incident? album two years later.
However, the top-hatted electric guitar hero was quick to temper expectations. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming anytime soon.
“There’s so much material at this point – it’s a matter of having the discipline to sit down and fucking get into it,” he says in the new issue of Guitar World. “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 co-founded the band in 1985 and they quickly exploded onto the scene with their debut album Appetite for Destruction, which became one of the best-selling debut albums of all time.
After a tumultuous tenure peppered with extracurricular activities from all those in the band, Slash left in 1996, forming Slash's Snakepit, Velvet Revolver, and Slash ft. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators in the interim. He also released a blues-honouring solo album, The Orgy of the Damned, last year, featuring a wide-ranging cast of guest stars.
He then rejoined GNR in 2016, after the likes of Buckethead, Robin Finck, DJ Ashba, and Richard Fortus all featured during his time away. The latter remains a part of the group.
They’ve toured extensively since – including a recent Saudi Arabia show that was so hot it melted Fortus’ pickups – but this is the first time that new music has been actively discussed.
Slash wants to ensure the band learns from the mistakes of the past rather than forcing the ideas to come.
“It just spontaneously happens through some sort of inspiration that triggers it,” he admits. “So it’s coming. I know it’s coming because everybody is thinking about it. It’ll just happen when it happens.”
Elsewhere, GNR have paid tribute to the late John Sykes with a thunderous cover of a Thin Lizzy classic, and Zakk Wylde has discussed the time he came close to joining the band.
GNR are the cover stars of the latest Guitar World issue. Head to Magazines Direct to pick up a copy.
