While the world continues to wait for the long-rumored follow-up to Guns N’ Roses‘ 15-years-in-the-making Chinese Democracy album (2008), the veteran hard rockers offered up a glimpse of the future on Wednesday (Jan. 24). It came in the form of the band’s first A.I.-generated music video for their 2023 one-off single “The General.”
The trippy collaboration with Dan Potter — creative director of the London-based studio Creative Works — is a mix of 20 live performance footage vignettes from GNR’s concerts mixed with swirling, candy-colored rotoscope-like images of a young boy navigating through a futuristic world. According to a release, the vertiginous video “dives into the subconscious of a young boy who stares down the monsters of dark childhood memories, blurring worlds in the process.”
In between the neon nightmare visions of a city at night, the clip intercuts the live footage of the band on stage, with skeletal projections flashed onto singer Axl Rose’s face as the A.I-generated characters morph back and forth into the band’s members jamming out on stage to the bombastic song.
Since reuniting with founding members guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan in 2016, GNR have been touring the world amid whispers of session for the original members’ first album of new material since the 1991 double disc Use Your Illusion I and II. In addition to “The General,” GNR dropped the rocking ballad “Perhaps” last August, another track believed to have its origins during the Chinese Democracy sessions. September also saw the release of a massive Use Your Illusion I & II box set featuring 63 unreleased tracks and videos.
Watch “The General” video below.
