Slash has teased that a follow-up to his 2010 self-titled solo album is on the way, but it’s going to arrive with a fairly significant twist.
Speaking to Yahoo! Entertainment, the Guns N’ Roses rocker claimed his next solo record will be “more blues-oriented”, and will seemingly depart from the sorts of sounds that have dominated his classic rock repertoire.
Not only that, the Gibson Les Paul champion said the as-yet-unannounced LP will be “sort of similar to my first solo record”, which saw Slash team up with a host of guest vocalists – including Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne and the late Chris Cornell.
Unsurprisingly, few details of the album are currently set in stone, but – aside from its intriguing musical direction – Slash did provide a handful of tidbits: it will feature “a bunch of different singers”, it will “definitely” arrive in 2024, and he’s already recorded a song with Demi Lovato for the release.
“It's been totally under wraps, but it's definitely coming out next year,” Slash said of the album. “There's not really much more to tell you at this point, but [Lovato and I] definitely recorded something.”
His team-up with Lovato has been a mutually beneficial transaction: after Lovato lent her vocals to Slash, the top hat-toting guitarist returned the favor by providing his six-string services on a rock-heavy re-recording of the vocalist’s Sorry Not Sorry.
“I told her, ‘Hey, if you ever need me to put some guitar on something, just let me know and I'll do it!’” he recalled. “And so she hit me back about two weeks, three weeks later, and said she's got this song that she's doing a remake of and asked if I'd put some guitar on that.
“[Guns N’ Roses] did a show in Norway and I had a day off, so I found a cool engineer and studio in Norway and just put the guitars on there. It's amazing how fast it came out.”
As for his forthcoming record, it remains to be seen just how far down the blues rabbit hole Slash intends to go, but he did note his track with Lovato is “a completely different type of song” compared to Sorry Not Sorry – and that it shows how “diverse her voice can be”.
All signs, then, point towards an album that has the potential to be pretty intriguing – and we imagine that intrigue will heighten when the full list of collaborating vocalists is announced.
Slash is the latest electric guitar star to be tapped by Lovato, who kickstarted her rock renaissance last year by recruiting Nita Strauss to her band.
As for Slash himself, his feature on Sorry Not Sorry wasn’t his most surprising output of the month. That mantle goes to his cameo on the Barbie movie soundtrack, which – given it also includes Wolfgang Van Halen – could be a contender for the most surprising guitar soundtrack of the year.
