The quote:

It has been in fact, "another Chinese Democracy".

Yahoo is doing some read-between-the-lines editorializing but of course the 10 year mark already passed in 2018.

If they sneak in an album release this year, they'll technically prove Ashba right but you know, 13/14 years is pretty much the same.

And if you count "Oh My God" in 1999 instead of "Sympathy for the Devil" in 1994 as the metric, 2015 would've been the 9-year mark to beat. And they didn't. 

Failing grades, all around.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: just keep releasing stuff.

If something isn't for them, people will just wait for the next thing. But when you release a new album every 14 years (btw, DJ Ashba's quote turned out to be false, lol) and you keep people hanging on a prayer, they will over-criticize your work.

Absurd is a fun little jam. If you don't get into the drone-ish groove, you're gonna hate it. "Isn't the absurd?!!!", "Suckin acid through your haaaaaht!" are just fun Axl moments. It gets your juices flowing. It's a punk pump-up song.

But it should be on a 4 song EP exploring the post-industrial punk electronica thing. In isolation it looks like an oddity.

And it's also a structural mess. They were wise to cut out the minute intro but that really undercut it's identity. The EDM bridge is extra pointless now because it is the only remnant from when the song was more of an electronic influenced rocker. Every New GNR song is compared to NIN but really, Axl wishes. Trent knows how to structure because he studied the best electronic artists and copied. Hell, even Pitman's solo stuff has a way better grasp on the concepts.

In short, I like it but see why others don't. There are valid criticisms.

It’s not great.

Iron Maiden cleared 1.2m in 2 days on their new single on YT alone.

Gn’R needs to turn on the faucet. Even if they drop singles from time to time, it’ll never build to a critical mass. People want to be apart of something. It’s same as it always was, create something exciting and include people in the fun and everyone profits.

Axl is gonna need to decide if he wants to be a borderline retired nostalgia act or put his back into something new.

CD2 shoulda been out in 2018.

Yes Hard Skooooo was second.

If you want to go full autism mode, find old setlist pictures and compare/contrast to setlistfm’s database. You could get real time probability %s

But what doesn’t really make sense is at least to my knowledge, Absurd wasn’t on set lists until 2021, ie they had Hard School seemingly primed for last year and then all the stuff and now Absurd is first.