New Found Glory Guitarist Chad Gilbert Dies at 45 After Five-Year Cancer Battle

Chad Gilbert, the founding guitarist of the Florida pop-punk band New Found Glory, died on September 20 at age 45, five years after he was diagnosed with a rare adrenal cancer that spread to his lungs, spine and, this spring, his brain. The band and Gilbert's wife, Lisa Cimorelli, announced the death in a joint statement posted to New Found Glory's official Instagram account, saying he died in his sleep with his wife and mother at his side. Gilbert had continued writing and recording with the band through his illness, finishing guitar parts for its eleventh studio album earlier this year between rounds of chemotherapy.

His death closes out a three-decade run in one of the bands most closely associated with the Warped Tour-era pop-punk scene of the late 1990s and 2000s, and it lands amid an outpouring from a genre whose members largely grew up together on the same bills and tour buses.

The numbers

Gilbert co-founded New Found Glory in Coral Springs, Florida, in 1997, meaning the band had been together for 29 years at the time of his death. Over that span it released eleven studio albums, three of which — the self-titled 2000 record, 2002's "Sticks and Stones" and 2004's "Catalyst" — were certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, with "Catalyst" and "Sticks and Stones" reaching No. 3 and No. 4 on the Billboard 200, respectively. The band's most recent album, "Listen Up!", came out on Pure Noise Records on February 20, 2026, roughly seven months before Gilbert's death. He had been in cancer treatment for just under five years, since a December 2021 hospitalization led to a diagnosis of malignant pheochromocytoma; in April of this year, after emergency brain surgery to remove three tumors, doctors reclassified his illness as stage 4 adrenocortical carcinoma.

A career-defining battle, and a final album

Gilbert's illness became increasingly public over the years he lived with it. After the 2021 diagnosis he largely stepped back from touring, and New Found Glory brought in a rotating cast of substitute guitarists — Kevin Skaff, Zach Comtois, Dan O'Connor and David Knox among them — to cover his parts on the road while he continued to write and record in the studio. A 2022 scan found a second tumor, a paraganglioma, in his spine; chemotherapy followed in 2023 after the cancer spread to his lungs. He nonetheless recorded his parts for "Listen Up!" during that treatment, with O'Connor helping double guitar tracks when Gilbert needed to rest. In an interview about the record, Gilbert described the process bluntly, saying he was going through what felt like a nightmare but that there were still lessons to learn and joy to pass along in the middle of it.

The band had continued to perform songs from that album through 2026, including a stop on the Vans Warped Tour revival earlier this year where members spoke from the stage about Gilbert's condition. Beyond his work with New Found Glory, Gilbert had also produced records for other pop-punk and hardcore acts, including A Day to Remember and H2O, and had played briefly in the hardcore band Shai Hulud earlier in his career.

Who is affected

The most immediate loss falls to Gilbert's family: his wife, Cimorelli, whom he married in 2020, their young daughter, his mother and his brother. Within the band, surviving members Jordan Pundik, Ian Grushka and Cyrus Bolooki lose the last of the group's original guitar-playing core, and face a decision — so far unaddressed publicly — about whether and how New Found Glory continues. The touring guitarists who had already been filling in for Gilbert on stage, and the producers and engineers who worked alongside him on other bands' records, also lose a longtime collaborator.

More broadly, the news lands hard within the pop-punk and hardcore scene that New Found Glory helped define in the early 2000s, a community built on years of shared tour bills, side projects and, in Gilbert's case, a widely covered marriage to and divorce from Paramore's Hayley Williams. Fans who followed the band's music, and Gilbert's own public updates about his treatment, had watched the illness play out for years before his death.

Reaction

Tributes arrived quickly from across the genre, including from Blink-182's Mark Hoppus, members of Simple Plan, Dashboard Confessional and Yellowcard, and other musicians who had crossed paths with Gilbert over three decades of touring, according to a roundup published by Guitar.com.

"The most positive and creative force in any room he walked into" and "the best friend to every person he met," who fought his illness "with the soul of a joyous, courageous warrior."

That was how Hoppus described Gilbert in his own tribute. In the band's statement, reported by Variety, New Found Glory and Cimorelli said the number of visitors who crowded the hospital lobby on short notice was a testament to how cherished Gilbert was, and added that despite his musical career, his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father. Coverage from NBC News noted that the statement described his death as peaceful despite how quickly his condition had changed.

What happens next

New Found Glory has not announced whether it will continue touring or recording, and no memorial service details had been made public as of this week. "Listen Up!" remains on sale through Pure Noise Records as the last album to feature Gilbert's guitar work, recorded in the middle of his treatment. The band's remaining members, along with the guitarists who had already been standing in for Gilbert on stage, are expected to address the group's future in the coming weeks, following a mourning period that industry observers say is typical after the death of a founding member of a long-running act. In the meantime, tributes from fellow musicians and fans have continued to accumulate on social media, and reissues or archival releases of Gilbert's catalog with New Found Glory and the acts he produced are considered a likely, if unconfirmed, next step for a catalog now treated as his complete body of work.