Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash has revealed that the band have written precisely zero new songs in the five years since he and bassist Duff McKagan returned to the fold.
To much surprise, the LA hard rock superstars released two ‘new’ singles in 2021, Absurd, originally a Chinese Democracy out-take titled Silkworms, and Hard Skool, another reworked track from the two-decade-long studio sessions which spawned their sixth studio album.
“They both have a lot of history,” Slash says in a new interview with Audacy. “What happened was Axl has all these songs that he recorded at some point along the way.
“And so [Duff McKagan] and I went in and re-did them, basically… Like, I wrote my own kind of parts to what else is going on, and [we] just sort of took the drums and re-did everything else.”
In terms of writing new material for the Los Angeles band, however, the guitarist admits, “we haven’t even gotten to that point of really in earnest sitting down and writing.”
“We’ve been doing a lot of material that’s been sort of sitting around for a while. So that will be a whole focused endeavour unto itself.”
Slash has, however, released a brand new single with his side band, Slash featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators. The River Is Rising, a first taster of the group’s cunningly-titled fourth album, 4, was released on October 22, alongside details of a 28-city US tour for the band in 2022.
G N’R recently thanked fans for supporting them on the latest leg of their seemingly-never ending world tour. They'll return to the road with shows in Australia and New Zealand in November.
