METAL SLUDGE / September 15th 2026 – There must be something in the water with all of these recent singer searches for classic hard rock and hair metal bands.
The number of groups who no longer feature their classic / original singer has become a very common theme, especially in recent years.
Some groups have splintered because of personal differences, while others have faced the adversity of select members simply retiring or sadly passing away.
Skid Row are one of these groups and Rachel Bolan is the band’s co-founder, chief song-writer and bassist… Bolan recently spoke with Mitch Joel of the Groove – The No Treble podcast and offered a bit of an update on their on-going singer search.
Bolan says (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “We have the luxury of time, which is the best possible thing, because last time we got a new singer, we were in the middle of doing an album. The time before that, we had a tour booked. And when things don’t work out, they just don’t work out. Sometimes you see it coming from way down the road, and sometimes you get blindsided. So, the point we’re at now, we’re doing this campaign with Sweetwater, and we’ve had over… We’ve watched — there’s probably more; we gotta get caught up — but we’ve watched 300 submissions. There’s been about 20 outside of the Sweetwater campaign, a situation where friends in bands will be like, ‘We got a guy.’ Sometimes they’ll show us and it’s, like, ‘Is that what you really think of this band?’ [Laughs]”
Bolan continued: “But there’s a lot of really, really great singers out there. Some of them just aren’t right for us. But it’s, like, ‘Wow, this dude should be insanely popular,’ or, ‘This woman should be insanely popular.’ But they won’t work out for SKID ROW. So, what we do is we’ll get four or five people through these submissions, and, all right, send them the clean tracks, and they’ll sing on top of them and send them back, or put a video out or whatever they do. And it’s, like, ‘Wow, they’re really good. They sound great. Let’s get a few of them together, get them into New Jersey.’ We’ll get in a room over the course of a week or whatever, and we will just see if it works, see if it works in a live situation.
“Having a studio and singing in a studio is great, but you know how it is. It’s, like, you could get it so perfect and it might not transfer live,” Bolan explained.
After Joel noted that having a great voice is only one part of the puzzle, with one other very important part being the ability to deliver SKID ROW’s vocally challenging songs night after night for weeks at a time, Bolan concurred. “Well, yeah,” he said. “So that’s the thing. That’s the other part of getting in a room with them. It’s, like, okay, we would love to do four in a row, but we’re totally cool with doing three in a row. Where’s your head at with that? Can you do this every night? Can you be away from home for months at a time? There’s all this other stuff that people don’t think about — they might not think about — when they’re auditioning. It’s one of those things. So, only time will tell. But we do have a few people that we’re taking to the second phase again. We have another block of people we’re gonna take into the rehearsal room.”
Read the full article at Blabbermouth.
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