Slash Maps Out Guns N' Roses' Writing Year as the Reunion Machine Finally Pauses
Fourteen legs into the longest reunion tour in hard rock history, Guns N' Roses are finally putting the bus in park. Slash told SiriusXM's Trunk Nation this week that 2027 will be a touring-free year for the band, dedicated entirely to writing. "We have so much material," he said, which is either the most reassuring or most ominous sentence a Guns N' Roses fan can read, depending on how many decades you've spent waiting on a follow-up to "Chinese Democracy." Either way, it's a rare admission from a band that has spent nearly a decade proving arena rock still sells tickets by the truckload without needing new songs to do it.
The timing isn't incidental. Slash is also juggling the fifth album from Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators, "Flying Blind," due February 26, 2027 via Gibson Records. In the same Trunk Nation conversation, Slash said most of the record came together "pretty much on the spot in pre-production" — a loose, feel-first approach that's increasingly rare for a guy who's spent his career inside two of the most meticulously mythologized bands in rock. There's something fitting about a player known for off-the-cuff solos admitting the whole album was built the same way. It also means 2027 is shaping up to be a genuinely packed year for Slash across two separate camps, GN'R writing sessions on one side and a Conspirators album cycle on the other.
Duff McKagan and the Ghost of Velvet Revolver
While Slash looks forward, bassist Duff McKagan spent some time looking back this week, reflecting on the Finding Your Summit podcast about the end of Velvet Revolver, the supergroup he, Slash, and Matt Sorum formed in 2002 with guitarist Dave Kushner. McKagan didn't mince words about the band's final stretch, describing it bluntly as a situation where "the wheels were coming off" during what turned out to be their last tour. It's a rare moment of candor about a band whose collapse has mostly been discussed in vague terms over the years, usually overshadowed by frontman drama that's been rehashed to death elsewhere.
What's striking is how this retrospective lands at the exact moment Slash and McKagan are both neck-deep in new Guns N' Roses material. Velvet Revolver was, in a lot of ways, the sound of two GN'R alumni proving they could build something new outside Axl Rose's orbit — and its messy end is a reminder that even the most talented lineups can implode under their own weight. Watching those same two musicians now plot a quieter, writing-focused year with the classic lineup adds an extra layer of tension to the whole story. Nobody's saying history will repeat itself, but nobody in that camp is pretending it couldn't, either.
Emo and Post-Hardcore's Anniversary Era Keeps Rolling
Taking Back Sunday have announced a 20th anniversary reissue of "Louder Now," complete with a bonus 7-inch and a dedicated celebration show at Red Rocks this October. It's the kind of release that hits different depending on your age — for some, "Louder Now" is the record that soundtracked a very specific stretch of mid-2000s adolescence, and for a younger wave of fans discovering the band through festival sets and algorithmic playlists, it's a chance to understand why the emo-and-post-hardcore crowd never actually left, they just got quieter about it until the right anniversary rolled around.
That same energy is showing up across the wider scene right now. The Used have announced the world premiere screening of "A Mid Summer Night's Symphony," filmed at the Sydney Opera House, landing at the Landmark Nuart Theater in Los Angeles on October 28 with a live Q&A attached. And Staind, mid-tour on a run that's reportedly closing in on half a million tickets sold and generating serious TikTok virality, dropped a new single called "Ghosts" this week — proof that a band built on early-2000s post-grunge angst can still command genuine cultural momentum two decades on, not just nostalgia-circuit ticket sales. Between Taking Back Sunday's vinyl reissue, The Used's cinematic victory lap, and Staind's unexpected second wind, it's a strong reminder that the heavier end of alt-rock and post-hardcore never really needed a comeback narrative — it just needed the industry to notice it never left.
Progressive and Power Metal Keep the Flame Lit
Swedish progressive metal veterans Seventh Wonder have announced their new album "VII," set for release January 29, 2027 via Frontiers Music Srl, backed by the new single and video "Memories." For a band that's built a two-decade reputation on technical precision without sacrificing melody, a self-titled-adjacent numeral title like "VII" feels almost like a statement of arrival — this is simply what Seventh Wonder sounds like now, seven albums deep. It's a good moment to remember that the progressive and power metal corners of the global scene, home to acts like British power metal institution DragonForce, remain some of the most technically ambitious and consistently well-received pockets of the genre, rarely making tabloid headlines but reliably delivering some of the best metal albums of all time conversations year after year.
Judas Priest's Ian Hill and the Cost of Fifty Years Onstage
Elsewhere in the legacy-metal world, Judas Priest bassist Ian Hill opened up about a genuinely frightening moment on tour — a tendon snapping onstage in Brussels, a moment he described thinking, "That's it. That's the end of it." Hill has admitted he nearly retired at the end of that last tour run, a sobering data point for anyone who assumes 80s metal bands and their surviving members can just keep grinding forever on muscle memory and adrenaline. Priest have been playing through physical attrition for years now, and Hill's candor here is a useful counterweight to the usual mythologizing of heavy metal's old guard as indestructible. The body keeps the score, even for the guys who helped invent the genre's uniform.
Voivod Goes Digital, and Black Metal Logos Go Unreadable
On a lighter note, independent developer Chaosmonger Studio has dropped a new demo trailer for "Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior," the officially licensed Metroidvania built around the Canadian thrash/prog legends' dystopian sci-fi universe. It's a genuinely clever use of a catalog as rich in visual world-building as Voivod's, and it's part of a broader trend of metal bands leaning into interactive media rather than just merch drops and vinyl variants to keep their mythology alive between albums.
Meanwhile, MetalSucks' recurring Mondaysucks column spent this week interrogating one of the genre's most beloved running jokes: the genuinely illegible logo design that defines so much black metal branding, dubbed, accurately, "Hell-vetica." It's a bit, but it's also a real design philosophy — obscured, thorn-like lettering as a gatekeeping mechanism, a visual cue that says this isn't for casual passersby. That tension between accessibility and obscurity runs right through the underground right now, and it's exactly why raw black metal, melodic black metal, and depressive black metal corners of the scene remain so fiercely self-contained. Bands like black metal act Gram and the dual black metal/heavy metal project Logos both operate in that same aesthetic lineage — visually dense, sonically uncompromising, built for listeners willing to do the work of decoding them rather than scroll past.
Where This Leaves the Underground
None of this week's headlines are small — a writing-only year for one of the biggest reunion tours ever, a Conspirators album built on improvisation, an emo band's vinyl anniversary, a bassist's near-career-ending injury, a video game built from a cult thrash band's artwork. But the throughline is the same one that's always defined the global metal scene: longevity requires reinvention, whether that's Guns N' Roses finally slowing down to actually write, or extreme metal acts like Polish genre institution Behemoth continuing to push their own sound forward decades into their career. The best heavy metal songs of any era tend to come from exactly this kind of friction — bands forced to stop touring, stop coasting, and actually make something.
For the newer bands pushing crust punk, raw black metal, and experimental extremity further underground right now, with little mainstream coverage to speak of, that same lesson applies at a smaller scale. Keep an eye on upcoming shows in your area this fall — anniversary tours and new album cycles alike are stacking the calendar for 2026 and beyond — and if you're in a band carving out space in any of these corners of the scene, submit your band and get counted among the new metal bands 2026 is already shaping up to showcase.