Written by: Alex Green
Guns N’ Roses have put out so little new music in the last thirty years that any new music from the legendary band is kind of a big deal.
The two new tracks that dropped back in 2021 (“Absurd” and “Hard Skool”) were curiosities at best, and sounded more like throwaway B-sides rather than new material intended to add to the band’s legacy.
The band’s new song “Perhaps” is not necessarily a return to form, but it’s a start.
A redemptive and self-probing meditation on past deeds and the damage done, “Perhaps” is filled with lacerating honesty (“Perhaps I was wrong/When I didn’t see you”), self-pity (“And I am without you/Just like I was before”), and straight-up narcissism (“My heart bleeds for me”).
It’s not quite a banger, as much as it is a hard rock self-help workout, but it’s also not half bad.
Axl Roses’s voice is a shredded version of what it once was, and the rumors that the recorded bones of “Perhaps” were done long before his once-powerful instrument lost its muscle, are probably on the nose. But “Perhaps” has got traces of Rose’s trademark vocal slither and just a touch of the whipping high notes that once shot victoriously through stadiums in the early ’90s.
Believed to be a castaway from the Chinese Democracy sessions, the song could be old, really old, or super old. The sessions took place in the late ’90s (allegedly) and ended somewhere around 2007 (presumably), so it’s difficult to say which Axl you’re hearing. It’s hard to imagine he could have this much power in his voice at this stage in the game, so it’s likely this is not a new vocal take.
But who cares? The fact is, there’s plenty to get excited about here–Slash’s guitar work is predictably fabulous and Duff’s bass has all the menace and prowl it ever did–but we can’t get too excited just yet, because it’s hard to tell if this is just another digital one-off, or if there’s an album percolating in the lab.
An album would be an interesting listen and even though the band’s penchant for writing stadium-filling anthems seems to be eluding them these days, there just might be some fight left in them yet.
Perhaps…
