Chad Gilbert, New Found Glory's Guitarist and Pop-Punk's Quiet Engine, Dies at 45

Chad Gilbert died on the morning of Saturday, September 20, 2026. He was 45.

His wife, Lisa Cimorelli, and his New Found Glory bandmates announced his death, saying he passed peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by friends and family, with his wife and mother beside him.

"We are devastated and shocked by how quickly he left us, yet so grateful for how peacefully and smoothly he went," the band wrote. "He was a legendary musician, but his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father. His biggest dreams came true."

He is survived by Lisa, their daughter Lily, his mother Jackie and his brother Brian.

The kid from Coral Springs who started a band at 16

Chad Everett Gilbert was born in Coral Springs, Florida, on March 9, 1981. Before New Found Glory existed he was already deep in the South Florida hardcore scene, fronting Shai Hulud as a teenage vocalist — a detail that still surprises people who only know him as the guy playing sunny power chords in a Warped Tour crowd shot.

In 1997, at 16, he founded New Found Glory with singer Jordan Pundik, rhythm guitarist Steve Klein, bassist Ian Grushka and drummer Cyrus Bolooki. He left high school after eleventh grade when the band signed to Drive-Thru Records.

What followed was nearly three decades of records and touring: "Nothing Gold Can Stay," the self-titled breakout, "Sticks and Stones," "Catalyst," and a run of albums that never stopped arriving. Along the way the hardcore kid never fully left — his side project International Superheroes of Hardcore existed almost entirely so he could scream again.

The riffs were the hook

Pop-punk rarely gets credited as a guitarist's genre. Gilbert is the argument against that.

Listen to what he actually played underneath those choruses. The palm-muted eighth-note drive that never gets sloppy. The octave leads that carry a melody the vocal isn't singing. The pre-chorus lift built out of one suspended shape and a change in right-hand pressure. Hardcore-trained rhythm playing pointed at a hook instead of a breakdown.

He was also blunt about his own technical ceiling. "I've said this before, but I think most guys are better at guitar than me, so that's no secret," he told Guitar World in 2023. What he had instead was taste, timing and an ear for the part that makes a song stick.

Les Pauls, always

Gilbert was a Gibson player, and specifically a Les Paul player, for essentially his entire career — an '89 and a Custom among the mainstays.

"I love Gibson guitars because of their attitude," he said in that same interview. "There's something about strapping a Les Paul on that makes you feel cool. It doesn't matter if you can play at 100mph or just average; those guitars make you feel like you can do anything."

That is a fair description of his tone, too: thick, mid-forward, slightly compressed, loud enough to carry a chorus on its own but never so saturated that the chord shapes blur. It is the sound a generation of teenagers chased with a humbucker-loaded guitar and a used amp.

The producer nobody credits enough

“He was a legendary musician, but his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father.”

Away from New Found Glory, Gilbert produced. A Day to Remember's "Homesick," "What Separates Me from You" and "Common Courtesy" all carry his name, as does H2O's "Nothing to Prove." He also released his own material as What's Eating Gilbert, a rockabilly-tinted detour that sounded nothing like his day job and everything like a musician who genuinely liked songs.

If you grew up on 2000s American rock radio, you heard more of Chad Gilbert's decisions than you realize.

He kept working through it

Gilbert's health battles were public and long. He was treated for metastatic pheochromocytoma, a rare cancer of the adrenal gland, and kept writing throughout.

New Found Glory's acoustic album "Make the Most of It" was largely written in a hospital bed. "When I woke up from my surgery, I had ideas in my head," he said. "I spent weeks in the hospital writing this new album, because I suddenly had so much to say."

Earlier this year, four months after emergency brain surgery, he returned to a stage in Nashville and played guitar from a motorized scooter.

Pop-punk said goodbye all weekend

Tributes arrived from across the scene — Blink-182's Mark Hoppus, and members of Simple Plan, Yellowcard, Neck Deep and Sum 41 among them. The common thread wasn't his playing. It was that he was, as one tribute put it, the most positive and creative force in any room he walked into.

His bandmates put it plainly: "Chad's guitar playing, songwriting, humour, and relentless drive helped shape New Found Glory for nearly three decades... His influence will always be part of New Found Glory and his spirit will be felt on every stage we stand on, with every note we play."

What to play tonight

Plug in something with humbuckers. Set the amp for a loud, mid-heavy crunch with the gain lower than you think. Play "My Friends Over You" the way he did — all downstrokes, no shortcuts, the chorus louder because you hit harder, not because you stepped on a pedal.

That was the whole trick. It always was.

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