Slash Announces Fifth Album 'Flying Blind' and 2027 World Tour — Title Single Out Now

The top hat is coming back around. Slash featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators have released the single and video for Flying Blind and announced a fifth studio album of the same name, out worldwide February 26, 2027, plus a full world tour running from early April to late July 2027.

01The Announcement

The announcement arrived over the weekend of October 2-3, 2026, when the band released both the title single and its video. Flying Blind — the song — is the lead single for Flying Blind — the album — due worldwide on February 26, 2027 via Gibson Records, the label launched by the guitar maker's company that has become the band's home.

That makes it a Gibson Records release from a Gibson artist, which is about as on-brand as announcements get in rock music. More importantly, it ends a five-year gap: Flying Blind is the first album from Slash featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators since 2022's 4, and it lands on the collaboration's 15th anniversary — a year and a half of history for a lineup that has outlasted most rock partnerships of its era.

Slash described the record in the announcement with characteristic economy. "It's a really fun, kind of spontaneous rock 'n' roll record. It's very straightforward and down-to-earth and raw," he said, per NME's coverage of the announcement. That last word — raw — is doing a lot of work, and the recording details back it up.

02The Record

The 12-track album was recorded largely live in about a week at Studio Barbarosa in Florida, with longtime producer Michael "Elvis" Baskette behind the board. That one-week-live approach is a deliberate throwback: a band playing in a room together, takes captured rather than assembled, the rough edges left where they fell.

Baskette's presence signals continuity. He is the band's longtime collaborator, the producer who has shaped the sound of the Kennedy-era Slash records, and his return alongside a live-in-a-week recording schedule suggests a group that knows exactly what it is and saw no reason to complicate it.

The single's arrival as a video release as well — the band put out both the song and its visual on October 2-3 — follows the standard playbook for an album announcement in the streaming era: give the audience something to watch as well as something to hear, and give the press a launch moment to hang the tour news on. For a guitarist whose cultural footprint extends well beyond album cycles, the single functions less as a comeback and more as a confirmation: this lineup is active, it has new music, and it intends to be in front of audiences through most of 2027.

03The World Tour

The Flying Blind World Tour runs April 2 through July 26, 2027, opening not in North America but in South America: the first show is April 2 at Teatro Caupolicán in Santiago, Chile, followed by dates in Argentina and Brazil. It is a meaningful opening statement for the tour, and Consequence noted the Latin American starting point in its coverage — a reminder that this band's audience is genuinely global and that the southern hemisphere gets first crack.

The North American leg opens April 23 in Reno, Nevada — a date with local resonance for a Las Vegas publication, given that Reno's rooms have hosted more than their share of rock history and that the Biggest Little City is a short hop up I-580 from the tour's eventual desert audience. Two nights at the Wiltern in Los Angeles follow on April 26-27, with Denver, Boston, New York City's Beacon Theatre and Nashville's Ryman Auditorium rounding out the announced North American dates.

That venue list tells its own story. The Wiltern, the Beacon, the Ryman — these are rooms, not arenas. A band with Slash's name on the marquee could play larger buildings, and choosing theatres and auditoriums instead is a statement about the kind of shows these are meant to be: loud, yes, but close enough to see the fingers on the fretboard.

The Europe and UK leg runs through June and July, closing July 26 at the Rockstadt Extreme Festival in Romania. A festival finale is a canny piece of scheduling: end the tour in front of a massive outdoor crowd, with the catalog and the new material both getting their widest possible audience, and let the summer do the rest of the marketing.

04Tickets and the Title Track

Ticket presale begins Tuesday, October 6, 2026 — the day after this story runs — with the general on-sale following Friday, October 9 via Ticketmaster. That timeline is tight by design: the announcement weekend builds the awareness, the presale converts the most committed fans within days, and the general on-sale lands before the news cycle has moved on.

Fans watching the announcement should note the presale mechanics that typically accompany a tour of this size — fan presales, promoter presales and venue presales tend to stack up across the week, with the Friday general on-sale as the final window. For the theatre-sized rooms on the North American leg, demand is likely to be concentrated: a few thousand tickets per night in markets like Los Angeles and New York does not leave much slack.

The title single, meanwhile, is out now — the October 2-3 release means it is already streaming and its video is already live. Between the single and the presale, the band has effectively given its audience a two-step assignment for the week: listen now, buy tickets by Friday.

05Why It Matters

There is a case to be made that the Slash-Kennedy partnership is the most durable second act in modern hard rock. Fifteen years in, with five albums, the collaboration has outlasted the reunions, the hiatuses and the reboots that define most legacy rock narratives. NME's reporting on the announcement framed it as business as usual for a band that has never really stopped working — and that is precisely the point.

Consequence, in noting the tour's Latin American launch, underscored something else: this is a band whose center of gravity is not fixed in one market. Opening in Santiago rather than Los Angeles or London is a decision that reflects where the audiences actually are, and it is the kind of routing choice that separates a global touring act from a domestic one with ambitions.

For Las Vegas readers, the routing is worth watching closely. Reno in April, the Wiltern two nights later, the whole West Coast swing — this tour will be within driving distance, and the theatre rooms will sell accordingly. Whether the band adds a Las Vegas date of its own remains to be seen, but a group with Slash's Strip history and a 12-track record recorded live in a week is not the kind of act that stays away from Nevada for long. Keep an eye on Music and Culture for the full tour date list as it develops.