Bear McCreary Assembles Slash, Steve Vai, Tim Henson and Guthrie Govan for New Concept Album

The six-time Emmy-winning composer's follow-up to The Singularity brings together an A-list guitar roster alongside orchestral arrangements.

Six-time Emmy-winning composer Bear McCreary is releasing The Singularity: Ekleipsis, a concept album pairing guitars with orchestra that features Slash, Steve Vai, Tim Henson, and Guthrie Govan among its contributors. The lead single, Cool Kids, unites Guns N' Roses members Slash and Duff McKagan with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and vocalist Brendan McCreary. A second track, Black Box, dropped simultaneously with the single.

How Cool Kids Came Together

According to McCreary, the song originated with an unsolicited voice memo. “Cool Kids was born when Duff McKagan sent me a voice memo of a riff he was messing around with,” McCreary explained. “My ears perked up instantly – his riff was undeniable! So Duff and I went into the studio the next week with my brother, vocalist Brendan McCreary, and Chad Smith to write the song together.”

Slash's contribution came later. “When Slash got back into town, he added his signature screaming guitar parts, and there it was,” McCreary said. He described the song's theme as one of collective identity: “It's a song about all of us being proudly who we are, but I wouldn't blame anybody for assuming the title was inspired by the fact that Brendan and I got to create this song with the coolest kids in rock and roll.”

A Deep Bench of Guitar Talent Across the Album

Cool Kids is only one piece of a remarkably stacked tracklist. Steve Vai and Tim Henson share duties on Blueshift, while Henson also appears alongside Coheed and Cambria's Claudio Sanchez on Sweet Misery. Guthrie Govan contributes to a track called Alexandria, and Gojira's Joe Duplantier appears on Black Box, which is described as having a heavy, anthemic edge built on grinding guitars. Alissa White-Gluz, who recently launched her shred-focused new band Blue Medusa and joined DragonForce, appears on Our Kingdom.

The album is a direct sequel to McCreary's 2024 hard rock record, The Singularity, which featured Serj Tankian. Ekleipsis picks up thematically where that record left off, exploring what McCreary frames as disillusionment and perseverance in the face of struggle.

• Cool Kids — Slash, Duff McKagan, Chad Smith, Brendan McCreary
• Blueshift — Steve Vai, Tim Henson
• Sweet Misery — Tim Henson, Claudio Sanchez
• Alexandria — Guthrie Govan
• Black Box — Joe Duplantier
• Our Kingdom — Alissa White-Gluz

Tour Dates: UK, Europe, Then North America

McCreary plans to support the album with live dates. The touring schedule begins in the UK and Europe in July and August, followed by dates in the US and Canada in September.

What we know

• Bear McCreary is a six-time Emmy-winning composer whose film credits include Godzilla: King of the Monsters, The Cloverfield Paradox, and Paws of Fury.
• The Singularity: Ekleipsis is the follow-up to McCreary's 2024 hard rock album The Singularity, which featured Serj Tankian.
• The lead single Cool Kids features Slash, Duff McKagan, Chad Smith, and Brendan McCreary.
• Duff McKagan originated the song by sending McCreary a voice memo of a riff.
• Steve Vai and Tim Henson both appear on the track Blueshift.
• Guthrie Govan appears on a track called Alexandria; Joe Duplantier of Gojira appears on Black Box; Alissa White-Gluz appears on Our Kingdom.
• McCreary will tour the UK and Europe in July and August, then the US and Canada in September.

The take

Bear McCreary has spent two decades building one of the most distinctive voices in film and television scoring, with a compositional style that leans heavily on ethnic instrumentation, large orchestras, and rock energy simultaneously. His work on Battlestar Galactica alone earned him a devoted following among listeners who don't typically track TV composers by name. The move into hard rock albums with orchestral underpinning is a logical extension of that identity rather than a detour from it.

What makes Ekleipsis particularly interesting from a guitar-world perspective is the curatorial instinct on display. Pairing Slash's blues-rooted vocabulary with McCreary's orchestrations is a natural fit; Slash has always sounded best when there's something lush behind him, as the Guns N' Roses ballads demonstrated. But placing him on the same tracklist as Tim Henson, whose Polyphia-derived approach is about as far from Sunset Strip blues rock as you can get, signals that McCreary is deliberately mapping the full spectrum of contemporary guitar language onto a single project. Guthrie Govan's inclusion adds a fusion dimension that few rock composers would even attempt to integrate. This kind of cross-generational, cross-genre guitar assembly is relatively rare outside of tribute records or charity singles, and the fact that it's organized around original material with a coherent thematic arc makes it a more ambitious undertaking than most.

Why it matters

For classic rock fans, the Slash and Duff McKagan pairing on Cool Kids is the obvious draw, but the broader album represents something worth watching: a serious composer using the full range of modern guitar talent to bridge orchestral and rock idioms. As legacy acts age and the guitar hero archetype evolves, projects like Ekleipsis that treat both traditions with equal weight could help define what ambitious rock-adjacent music looks like in the mid-2020s. The touring commitment also means this material will be tested in front of live audiences, not just streamed.

What's next

McCreary is scheduled to tour the UK and Europe in July and August in support of The Singularity: Ekleipsis, followed by US and Canada dates in September. Two tracks, Cool Kids and Black Box, are already available.

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