Guns N’ Roses Are Fully Back — But Slash Can’t Quit His Solo Career
Slash just finished the latest leg of a world tour with Guns N’ Roses, and they’ve got multiple new singles out — a sentence that would have seemed laughably implausible less than a decade ago. Even with hard-rock hell fully frozen over, though, Slash just can’t stop releasing solo material. The guitarist has just released a new single, “The River Is Rising,” with his solo band featuring journeyman vocalist Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators.
In 2018, Slash explained his reasoning for keeping his solo fires burning even now that he’s back in GNR. “I wanna keep that going as something that I have outside of what Guns N’ Roses is doing,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s a little crazy, but it’s way better for me to be fucking busy running around and doing that than for me just to be sitting around.”
“The River Is Rising” will appear on 4, the aptly titled upcoming fourth album from Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. They recorded it live in the studio in Nashville with top country producer Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton).
“There’s two or three songs on the record that were written during the pandemic; everything else was written before. ‘The River is Rising’ was one of the last songs I wrote before we started pre-production, and because it was so fresh and has a certain groove and energy to it, it was the first thing we really attacked,” Slash said in a statement.
Kennedy added: “The lyric ultimately explores how humans can be brainwashed or indoctrinated by some sort of dangerous idea. Once we shot the demo back and forth a few times, I personally felt confident that we had the album opener. To me, it’s an important track.”
The is out Feb. 11 via Gibson Records and is available for preorder in a variety of formats, including as a deluxe 140g vinyl box set that features a mirrored O-card, guitar pick, and an Axe Heaven Custom Limited Edition 4 Slash Les Paul Mini-Guitar, CD softpack, cassette, and photobook. The first 500 orders include a signed 12-inch lithograph. It will also come as a deluxe CD box set, cassette tape and as standard vinyl and CD versions.
Slash and his solo crew will embark on a 2022 North American tour beginning on Feb. 8 at Roseland Theater in Portland, Oregon and wrapping up March 26th at Hard Rock Live in Orlando, Florida. Tickets go on sale October 26th.
