Guns N’ Roses Released Florid Piano Rocker ‘Perhaps’ a Week After it Leaked to Digital Jukeboxes

It’s been 15 years since Guns N’ Roses dropped their last album, so at this point the band’s fans are psyched to hear any new music from the hard-touring Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. And in typical Guns fashion, their new single, “Perhaps,” is actually pretty old, and it’s journey to our ears was circuitous, at best.

The good news is that “Perhaps” has all the elements you want from a GNR song: it opens with a piano-pounding riff and singer Axl Rose’s signature howl and features a menacing, bluesy guitar underpinning a twisty, turgid ballad bisected by one of Slash’s classic hurricane solos.

It’s the first new song we’ve heard since Rose — who had been touring with an expansive cast of side players as GNR for years after the band’s slow-motion implosion in 1996 when Slash quit — reunited with Slash and bassist Duff McKagan in 2016. And, in a pointed about-face from the often pugnacious, no-apologies lyrical attack of the band’s classic catalog, the now-61-year-old Rose sounds downright contrite and apologetic at points in the song.

“Perhaps I was wrong/ When I didn’t see you/ Perhaps I was wrong/ When I didn’t believe you,” he sings in the opening lines. “Hey, my sense of rejection/ Hey, hey, is no excuse for my behavior/ You pulled the gun/ That shot and crucified my savior,” he continues on the track that reportedly was first recorded during the sessions for the band’s most recent album, 2008’s Chinese Democracy.

The latter was the first new music from GNR since the 1993 covers album The Spaghetti Incident? Democracy album took nearly 14 years to complete and featured more than a dozen contributors, with keyboardist Dizzy Reed representing the only link to the band’s classic lineup.

After poor-quality bootlegs of “Perhaps” began circulating when the band played it during soundcheck before a June 2023 Tel Aviv show — an unfinished demo version had been floating around the internet for years — Guns fans were surprised last week when “Perhaps” reportedly leaked via TouchTunes digital jukeboxes according to Blabbermouth.

Though there have been whispers of the revamped GNR recording new music, to date “Perhaps” falls in line with two other “new” songs the band has released recently, two other leftovers that dropped in 2021, “Absurd (aka Silkworms),” and “Hard Skool,” which are also both reportedly from the Chinese Democracy era.

The band also released an official video for the song that features footage of the three iconic members on stage playing to packed stadiums all around the world. Check it out below.