Phil Collen says Def Leppard‘s next album might not arrive until 2028, two months after Joe Elliott said 2027.
Phil Collen has poured cold water on the idea that Def Leppard‘s thirteenth album is close. After it was suggested that Def Leppard‘s new album could arrive in early 2027, the guitarist said the wait could run a year longer.
He told Chile’s “Radio Futuro“: “Well, we are Def Leppard, so it may be ’28, but we’re always recording. We’re constantly recording. In fact, when we finished the last album, we didn’t really finish it; we just kept carried on recording. So that’s how we do it. So, yeah, it’ll be ready when it’s ready.”
The interviewer’s assumption was not plucked from nowhere. Joe Elliott told France’s “Oüi FM” in July that the record was due in early 2027, and confirmed “Rejoice” would open it.
“The single is the lead-off track, if you like, from the new album,” Elliott said then. “The song is called ‘Rejoice‘. We released it in time for the Vegas residency. We did a Vegas residency in February, and we wanted to play a new song, so it made sense to actually put it out.”
Whether Collen is correcting that or simply managing expectations, the two answers are eight months apart at minimum.
“Rejoice” came out on 22 January through UMe, written by Elliott and Collen and produced by Ronan McHugh. It was the band’s first original material since “Just Like ’73” in June 2024, which carried a guest solo from Tom Morello, and followed their January 2025 cover of Ben E. King‘s “Stand By Me“, recorded for FireAid after the Los Angeles wildfires and used in the Netflix film “Bank Of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger“.
Elliott described how the song came together: “This song’s been an amazing journey from concept to conclusion. I said to Phil [Collen] one day, ‘I’ve got this idea for a lyric where the narrator is at absolute rock bottom and wants to rise up to a higher level. Do you have a musical piece that might match with that?’ And he said, ‘As it happens, yes I do.'”
Collen added: “I had this riff, this idea for a song a while ago actually, so when Joe came to me I created this drum loop based with a tribal sound and it fit perfectly with this other arrangement I had. I sent it to Joe and it was like magic – he sang straight over the top of it.”
Elliott has also said previously that the record contains the fastest song the band have ever recorded, and their most bombastic.
Speaking about the glam rock influences that shaped Diamond Star Halos, Collen pointed to how the writers he admires kept moving.
“I think, with all of our glam rock idols, like David Bowie for example, he changed. The songwriting got better, and in his case, a little bit weirder, some of it later on. But there was some amazing stuff. I think you just take on more influences. I think everything I write now, or all of us write, we’re very excited about how that goes. We don’t worry about what other people think. Queen is a great example. Everyone in the band would write very different songs. Freddie Mercury would come up with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody‘; Brian May [came up with] ‘We Will Rock You‘. Very different. And we have a similar thing going. Whoever writes songs in the band, they’re just drastically different. So it’s really diverse, I think, which is what we’ve always wanted…. That’s what [Queen has] always done. The songwriting, it evolved. John Deacon wrote ‘Another One Bites The Dust‘, and it was very different to ‘Radio Ga Ga‘, but when Queen had done it, it still sounded like Queen. And that’s what I meant by we wanna be like them. It’s, like, you can just do anything you want and it still sounds like Queen. But in our case, it still sounds like Def Leppard,” he explained.
Collen was asked what he makes of May as a player.
He replied: “I idolize him, his playing. I think he’s very underrated. He’s a team player. Just incredible tone and vibe and feel and everything, but it all works within the structure of the song and the band. There’s a lot of players out there that don’t really listen to the band or singers that don’t really listen to the music. And Queen were very different. It was a collective. It was almost like a collected consciousness. They actually all worked together. And that’s beautiful.”
He continued: “When you play with, say, some jazz bands, you get in there and they’re all kind of thinking as one unit. And so there’s a similar thing that goes with that, that I loved about Queen. And it’s something that we do, and I’m very proud of us. Even when we play live, we harmonize. It locks in so beautifully. And me and Vivian] play off each other. It’s just great. I just love it. It’s a joy.”
Diamond Star Halos came out on 27 May 2022 through Bludgeon Riffola and Mercury, produced by the band with McHugh, and took its title from a line in T. Rex‘s “Bang A Gong (Get It On)“. The Las Vegas residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace ran from 3 to 28 February, following earlier runs in 2019 and 2013.
The Chilean interview is tied to the end of the band’s touring year. Def Leppard resume in Hollywood, Florida on 15 October, take in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia and Argentina with Extreme supporting, and finish on 8 November in Santiago.
Campbell, whose playing Collen praises here, disclosed last week that his Hodgkin’s lymphoma has returned after the donor transplant he underwent in early 2025 failed to hold, and that he is continuing treatment while touring.
