Into The Music
Guns N’ Roses kicked off their 2026 world tour Saturday night in Monterrey, Mexico, and they did it properly. A 26-song set at Parque Fundidora during the Tecate Pa’l Norte festival included the long-awaited live debut of “Nothin’,” a track that has been sitting in the vault since the Chinese Democracy sessions and was finally released in December alongside “Atlas” to coincide with the tour announcement.
The crowd in Monterrey heard something very few people ever expected: Axl Rose performing a song that had bounced around as a demo and a rumor for the better part of two decades. A few weeks earlier, “Nothin'” had briefly surfaced during a Yokohama soundcheck in May 2025, but Saturday was the real thing. Three songs later, “Atlas” got its proper live debut too, formerly circulated under the name “Atlas Shrugged” before the band cleaned it up for release.
This is worth paying attention to for more than just the novelty of hearing new(ish) GNR material. The Chinese Democracy era was famously tortured, a years-long saga of lineup upheaval and recording sessions that produced one album, a mountain of unreleased material, and more think-pieces than any rock record probably deserves. That the band is now performing songs from those sessions, in front of packed festival crowds, with Slash and Duff McKagan back in the fold, feels like a genuine closing of the loop.
The rest of the set leaned on the hits, as you would expect. Standard covers were in the mix too, including Velvet Revolver’s “Slither,” Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” the Damned’s “New Rose,” and UK Subs’ “Down on the Farm.” None of that is new information for anyone who has followed GNR live over the past decade, but context matters. This is a band that once seemed incapable of finishing a sentence, and they are now launching a full world tour with coherent momentum.
There was one notable absence. Keyboardist Melissa Reese, who had been with the band since the 2016 reunion tour that brought Slash and McKagan back, will not be part of the 2026 run due to what the band described as unforeseen personal reasons. Reese was approaching her tenth anniversary with GNR, and her departure leaves a gap in the live setup that will be interesting to watch.
From Monterrey, the tour moves through South America before returning to North America in May for stops at Hard Rock Festival in Hollywood, Florida and Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach. A European leg follows, and then the North American arena run begins in Raleigh on July 23, wrapping up in Atlanta on September 9.
Guns N’ Roses have been a touring institution since their reunion, and this run has the look of something more purposeful than the usual victory-lap circuit. New songs with real performance history, a world-scale itinerary, and a fanbase that still shows up in enormous numbers. The 2026 tour is already delivering on its early promise.
There is something almost operatic about Guns N’ Roses as a story , the chaos, the collapses, the long silence, and then the reunion that nobody quite believed would happen followed by a tour that just keeps extending. And now vault material finally played live in Monterrey, of all places, in front of a Mexican crowd who probably waited longer and wanted it more than most. In opera, the third act revelation is always about returning to what was promised. I don’t know what those songs sound like yet, but I am moved by the image of Axl Rose finally delivering something that has been locked away for decades. Whatever their faults, that is drama.
Genuinely surprised by how much this piece moved me. GNR isn’t exactly my scene , the queerness of the glam era they grew from is something they sort of absorbed and then abandoned , but there’s something I respond to in the idea of music held in a vault for decades finally getting its first breath of live air. A 26-song set with debut material in Monterrey feels like a band taking the audience seriously for once, not just running through the hits for the guaranteed applause. Whether that lasts through the rest of the tour is a different question, but I’ll take a genuine moment when one shows up.