Guns N’ Roses returning to Philly with show at Citizens Bank Park

Axl Rose, Slash, Duff McKagan, and the rest of the Guns N’ Roses crew will return to town this summer for their first Philadelphia show in nearly three years.

The long-running heavy metal act will perform at Citizens Bank Park on July 8 as part of a lengthy worldwide stadium tour dubbed the “Guns N’ Roses 2020 Tour,” the group announced Monday. General public ticket sales begin Friday at noon via LiveNation.

Guns N’ Roses last played in Philly at the Wells Fargo Center in October 2017, as part of the group’s “Not In This Lifetime Tour.” That run, which kicked off in 2016, marked the return of founding members Slash and McKagan to the group after about two decades of absence. The tour’s name itself was a nod to a 2012 interview with TMZ in which Rose quipped that fans wouldn’t see a reunion of the original group “in this lifetime.”

By 2016, however, Rose changed his tune in a Q&A session at the China Exchange in London, saying that the band’s reunion “didn’t happen by chance or whatever.”

“It was always looked at as a possibility, but it never seemed right or felt right,” Rose said.

That tour ultimately ran for 158 dates across three years, and pulled in about $584.2 million during its run, Billboard reports. The publication named the “Not In This Lifetime Tour” the third-highest-grossing tour in the history of the Billboard Boxscore in November.

Guns N’ Roses last released new music in 2008, with the long-awaited Chinese Democracy. Last year they released a box-set reissue of their 1987 debut album Appetite for Destruction. New material from the band, however, has been touted — including by guitarist Richard Fortus, who recently told Forbes that new music could come as soon as this year.

“We always rehearse stuff up. It’s just a matter of everyone sort of feeling comfortable to integrate it into the show,” Fortus said. “I hope that we have new music out this coming year.”