Slash’s upcoming record 4 – his fifth solo album and fourth collaborative LP with Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators – is set to arrive early next year, and when it drops it will be the top hat-toting electric guitar titan’s first studio effort in four years.
Despite the lengthy wait for new Slash material, however, Kennedy has revealed that – in spite of a heavily interrupted writing process – the recording for 4 in fact went remarkably quickly, admitting that the majority of the album was tracked in less than a week.
Speaking to Meltdown on Detroit’s WRIF radio station about the album, Kennedy commented on the record’s breezy studio process, saying (transcribed by Blabbermouth), “I think the writing process was pretty similar [to previous albums].
“Obviously,” he added, “because we couldn’t get in the same room together during the writing process, given the state of the world, we were exchanging a lot more files.
“I think the difference with this record to previous records was the way that it was recorded – the way it was documented was more live,” Kennedy continued.
The Conspirators frontman previously spoke of the album’s live-oriented approach while in conversation with Anne Erickson of Audio Ink Radio, during which he teased that the then-unnamed album would hark back to an “old-school” style of recording.
“The guys set up almost like they were playing a show,” Kennedy continued to Meltdown. “They were all in the same room together and just rocking out live. And I was in a vocal booth. So a lot of what you hear on these tracks are just five guys playing at the same time.
“A lot of times with modern recordings, you start out and you get the drums, you get the bass and you get the guitars, and this was just a very fast… I think the majority of the album was recorded in about five days.
“That’s unheard of. I don’t remember the last time we made a record where the majority of it was done that quickly.”
Our first taste of 4 – the first album to be released on Gibson Records – has already arrived in the form of The River Is Rising, with Slash recently teasing that the record might just be the group’s best effort yet.
“I think the record itself is probably the best one we've done so far,” Slash said. “We're showing no signs of slowing down.”
4 is available to preorder now ahead of its release on February 11.
