Slash Is ‘Confident’ Guns N’ Roses Will Release New Album ‘Down the Road’

Guns N' Roses' first multi-track release with Slash and Duff McKagan since the 1990s — the Hard Skool EP — will be out next week (Feb. 25). Though it features two reworked Chinese Democracy outtakes and two live songs, Slash is "confident" that the band will release a new album "at some point down the road."

The last two years have been a bit confusing for GN'R fans. The very last shows of their massive Not in This Lifetime tour took place in Las Vegas in November of 2019. Months later, in February of 2020, they booked a North American stadium tour, and the accompanying video announcement teased that "the next chapter" was "about to begin."

Then, the pandemic happened.

Once Guns were able to hit the road again in 2021, they performed a "new" song called "Absurd," which they released a few days later, and then "Hard Skool" came out the following month. Both tracks were written by Axl Rose and co. during the Chinese Democracy era of the band, so Slash and McKagan re-recorded the guitar and bass parts for them.

Slash confirmed in January that new Guns material would be coming out soon, and now he's shed a little more light on what their plan is.

“'Hard Skool,' in essence, was a completed song when I was first introduced to it. And Duff and I went in and redid the bass and the guitars. It’s a simple song, so it didn’t take a hell of a lot of thought and analysis," the rocker told Rolling Stone. "I think it was a lot of fun just because it was part and parcel of a bunch of stuff that we were working on that was all sort of new — at least to Duff and I — so we had a good time."

He added that a "bunch of new stuff" is underway, some of which is a bit more complex than "Hard Skool," but was still fun for them to work on.

"I know we’ve got some songs and we’re releasing another one at some point soon, and there’ll be another one after that," he continued. "As far as the record is concerned, that remains to be seen as far as a whole package, but I feel pretty confident that at some point down the road, there will be."

Revisiting Rose's pre-written material was apparently one of the conditions of moving forward as Guns N' Roses, according to another interview the guitarist did with the Wall Street Journal.

“One of the things Axl wanted to get off his chest was a bunch of material he’d recorded,” he explained. "So we thought, ‘Well, that’s a good way to wet our feet.’”

Ultimately, there isn't a definitive answer as to how and when the songs will be released. As Guns N' Roses fans, we know to expect the unexpected, and to perhaps not expect anything at all. As Slash so perfectly put it — "It’s Guns N’ Roses.”