Into The Music
Guns N’ Roses opened their 2026 world tour Saturday night in Monterrey, Mexico, and made it count. Playing to a packed crowd at Parque Fundidora as the headliner of the Tecate Pa’l Norte festival, Axl Rose and company delivered a 26-song set that included the live premieres of two tracks that have been sitting in the vault for the better part of three decades.
“Nothin'” and “Atlas” both made their proper concert debuts in Monterrey. The band had briefly soundchecked “Nothin'” before a 2025 show in Yokohama, but this was the first time it was played in front of a real audience. Both tracks were finally released in December 2025, about 20 years after they originated during the Chinese Democracy sessions. That they exist at all is a minor miracle. That they finally got played live is a genuine moment.
The setlist hit all the expected marks. “Welcome to the Jungle.” “Paradise City.” “November Rain.” The Velvet Revolver cover “Slither” is now a fixture, as are the Black Sabbath and UK Subs covers that have become standard issue at GNR shows over the past few years. The crowd in Monterrey was not going to complain about any of it.
What is actually worth noting is what was absent. Keyboardist Melissa Reese, who had been with the band since the reunion tour in 2016, did not appear. The band announced before the show that she would be sitting out the 2026 tour “due to unforeseen personal reasons.” Reese was approaching her tenth year as part of the lineup. Her absence leaves a gap, both sonically and in terms of the continuity that the post-reunion band had built.
The 2026 world tour will move through South America before returning to North America in May. U.S. dates run from July through September, closing in Atlanta. There is a European leg in between. It is a large operation, the kind that only a handful of bands in the world can still pull off at this scale.
Whether GNR still has something genuinely new to say is a fair question. But in Monterrey, with “Nothin'” finally getting its moment, they at least showed they are not just going through the motions. A song that has been waiting 20-plus years to be played live deserves a proper audience. It got one.
