Chad Gilbert, guitarist and songwriter of New Found Glory, has died at 45

Chad Gilbert, who founded New Found Glory as a teenager and wrote most of what the band became known for, died on the morning of Sunday 20 September. He was 45.

The announcement came from his wife, Lisa Cimorelli, and his bandmates in a joint statement. "On the morning of September 20th, Chad Everett Gilbert passed away peacefully in his sleep," it read, describing a death surrounded by friends and family, with his wife and his mother beside him as he had wanted. He is survived by Cimorelli, their daughter Lily, his mother Jackie and his brother Brian. The band, signing alongside Jordan Pundik, Ian Grushka, Cyrus Bolooki and Dan O'Connor, wrote that his playing, songwriting, humour and drive shaped the group for nearly three decades.

His treatment ran for five years. In 2021 he was found unresponsive at home and had emergency surgery to remove a rare tumour from his adrenal gland; the cancer returned repeatedly in the years that followed, reaching his spine and later his lungs. Six months ago he disclosed that three tumours had been found pressed against his brain after he lost control of his left hand and leg, and in April he said the diagnosis had been revised to stage four adrenocortical carcinoma. Accounts differ on the detail of the first diagnosis, with Rolling Stone describing it as liver cancer and other outlets as an adrenal tumour.

He kept working through all of it. Gilbert recorded guitar parts for Listen Up!, the band's 2026 album, while undergoing chemotherapy, and returned to the stage with them in Nashville in June, performing from a mobility scooter after brain surgery. At the 2026 Vans Warped Tour stop in Washington, DC, the band stopped to shout him out from a stage he could no longer stand on.

Gilbert co-founded New Found Glory in Coral Springs, Florida in 1997 at 17, alongside Jordan Pundik, Ian Grushka and Stephen Klein, having already fronted the hardcore band Shai Hulud as a teenager. He wrote most of the band's songs, including My Friends Over You and Head On Collision, and 2002's Sticks and Stones, which reached number four on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold, made them one of the defining acts of the early-2000s pop-punk boom. Away from the band he produced records for A Day To Remember, H2O, Terror and Trapped Under Ice.

Mark Hoppus, who heard New Found Glory's first album and pushed his own label and management to take them on, wrote a tribute for Rolling Stone. "Chad was the best friend to every person he met," Hoppus wrote, describing the guitarist as the most positive force in any room and closing with a line he addressed to him directly: "I miss you already, little brother."

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