Chad Gilbert, the founding New Found Glory guitarist and songwriter who helped connect pop-punk hooks with hardcore weight, died Sunday, September 20th. He was 45.
Gilbert died peacefully in his sleep surrounded by friends and family, with his wife, Lisa Cimorelli, and his mother, Jackie, beside him. New Found Glory and Cimorelli announced his death in a joint statement Sunday morning.
“Chad’s guitar playing, songwriting, humor, and relentless drive helped shape New Found Glory for nearly three decades,” the band wrote in a remembrance published by Kerrang!. The statement added that his influence would remain part of the band and the stages it plays.
No specific cause of death was announced. Gilbert had undergone years of cancer treatment and revealed earlier in 2026 that doctors had discovered three brain tumors, leading to emergency surgery and radiation while he was living with stage 4 adrenocortical carcinoma.
He is survived by Cimorelli, their daughter Lily, his mother and his brother Brian.
Gilbert Put Hardcore Inside Pop-Punk
New Found Glory’s melodic hooks made the band accessible enough for mainstream alternative radio and MTV, but Gilbert arrived with a musical vocabulary formed somewhere heavier.
Before New Found Glory, he sang for Florida hardcore band Shai Hulud as a teenager. Gilbert was only 15 when he went on his first tour with the group in 1996, an experience he revisited earlier this year during a January podcast appearance.
That background never disappeared when New Found Glory formed in 1997. Gilbert remembered the band initially functioning as the punk music he played between Shai Hulud tours, long before the supposed side project became the center of his career.
The musical connection remained obvious. New Found Glory could turn from bright, immediately memorable choruses into palm-muted guitars and breakdowns that made just as much sense to hardcore audiences. Gilbert and bassist Ian Grushka were direct about that relationship in an older V13 interview, describing hardcore as fundamental to the band’s identity rather than a separate influence.
That mixture became one of New Found Glory’s defining contributions. The band could exist inside the early-2000s pop-punk boom without giving up the physical weight of the heavier underground scene Gilbert came from.
One Guitar Riff Became “My Friends Over You”
The clearest example of Gilbert’s songwriting impact arrived near the end of the sessions for 2002’s Sticks and Stones.
The album was essentially finished when Gilbert came up with the guitar riff that became “My Friends Over You.” He pushed the band to work on one more song even though the other members were ready to move on.
“I think this is going to be awesome,” Gilbert remembered telling them in an interview later quoted in a retrospective on the album. Producer Neal Avron agreed, and the band finished the song.
It became New Found Glory’s signature single.
Gilbert’s opening guitar part registers almost immediately, but the record carries more force than its bright melody initially suggests. Jordan Pundik’s vocal turns the chorus into a sing-along while the guitars keep a punk attack underneath it.
All five members received songwriting credit on “My Friends Over You,” with MusicBrainz credits listing Gilbert alongside Pundik, Grushka, Steve Klein and Cyrus Bolooki.
Sticks and Stones reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and was eventually certified platinum. “My Friends Over You” carried New Found Glory deeper into mainstream alternative culture without removing the heavier musical instincts underneath the band.
More than two decades later, the riff Gilbert almost never brought into the studio remains one of pop-punk’s quickest musical identifiers.
His Influence Extended Into the Producer’s Chair
Gilbert’s effect on the scene did not stop with New Found Glory’s records.
As a producer, he helped shape A Day to Remember’s Homesick, a record that pushed the contrast between melodic pop-punk and heavy breakdowns toward a younger generation. He also produced H2O’s Nothing to Prove, keeping him connected to the hardcore world that had informed his own guitar playing.
Those credits put Gilbert on both sides of a generational handoff. New Found Glory had helped establish a blueprint for combining enormous melodies with hardcore-derived weight; bands that followed could take that contrast into heavier territory.
His production career eventually circled back to where his own story began.
Gilbert produced Shai Hulud’s 2013 album Reach Beyond the Sun and returned as lead vocalist for the record, more than a decade after his original tenure with the band. Shai Hulud discussed the collaboration at the time.
The teenage hardcore singer had become a pop-punk guitarist, songwriter and producer, then returned to help make another Shai Hulud record without leaving behind the band that had become his central musical project.
Listen Up! Brought Gilbert Back to the Riff
Gilbert remained creatively involved with New Found Glory throughout his illness.
The band released Listen Up! on February 20th through Pure Noise Records. Produced by Steve Evetts and mixed by longtime collaborator Neal Avron, the album arrived while Gilbert was already undergoing treatment.
More significantly, the writing deliberately returned to a process closely associated with Gilbert’s most recognizable work.
On its official artist page, Pure Noise quotes Gilbert describing the record as a return to writing songs from guitar riffs first, the same basic approach behind New Found Glory staples such as “My Friends Over You” and “All Downhill From Here.”
That gave his final New Found Glory album an unexpected connection to the band’s earlier records. Rather than treating longevity as a reason to move away from the musical instincts that established the group, Gilbert was actively returning to them.
Only days before the album’s release, he discussed its outlook in a V13 cover interview, describing a record concerned with taking difficult periods and turning them outward into something encouraging.
Almost immediately afterward, Gilbert faced another medical crisis. In February, weakness in his leg led to a collapse at home. Doctors discovered three tumors in his brain, prompting emergency surgery and radiation. He later disclosed that he was living with stage 4 adrenocortical carcinoma after years of treatment for metastatic pheochromocytoma.
His absence from the stage was not intended to be permanent. Gilbert told People in April that he hoped to rejoin New Found Glory in June.
He did.
Gilbert Returned to the Stage After Brain Surgery
Roughly four months after emergency brain surgery, Gilbert returned to New Found Glory’s stage in Nashville. Continuing mobility problems meant he performed from a motorized scooter.
The night also marked the first New Found Glory show his daughter Lily had ever attended, a detail People recalled in its coverage of his death.
Gilbert had spent his final year speaking about his career and family together rather than treating music as the only measure of what he had accomplished. In April, he said the life he wanted most was already there: his wife, his daughter and a music career that had lasted far beyond anything he imagined as a teenager entering the hardcore scene.
His family’s statement after his death returned to the same point. New Found Glory called him a “legendary musician,” but said being a husband and father was the accomplishment he valued most.
New Found Glory Lost More Than a Guitarist
Gilbert’s role in New Found Glory stretched across nearly the band’s entire existence.
He played lead guitar, contributed backing vocals and helped write the songs while the group moved from Florida clubs and independent releases into the center of the early-2000s pop-punk boom. The band continued recording and touring internationally for nearly three decades.
Its sound changed around the edges without abandoning the combination that made it recognizable: Pundik’s high melodic vocal, Grushka’s bass, Bolooki’s drums and guitars capable of moving between bright hooks and hardcore-derived weight.
Gilbert’s background helped make that heavier side feel native rather than decorative.
His reach can also be heard in the bands that followed. The pop-punk and easycore scenes that paired melodic choruses with breakdowns during the late 2000s and 2010s were working in territory New Found Glory had helped normalize years earlier.
Gilbert’s career moved through several connected versions of that sound: Shai Hulud’s hardcore, New Found Glory’s pop-punk, A Day to Remember’s heavier crossover and the records he produced for musicians who grew up around those scenes.
For bands that saw no reason a catchy chorus and a hardcore breakdown had to belong to different worlds, Gilbert’s career had already made the argument.
The Band Says His Influence Stays on Stage
New Found Glory’s announcement did not describe Gilbert’s death as the end of the band.
Instead, Pundik, Grushka, Bolooki and touring guitarist Dan O’Connor wrote that his influence would remain part of every stage they play and every note they perform. UPI documented the statement Sunday as news of his death spread.
Tributes followed from musicians across the alternative scene, including artists whose careers overlapped with New Found Glory’s long run.
The timing makes the loss particularly immediate. Listen Up! is only seven months old, and Gilbert had made it back onto a New Found Glory stage just three months before his death.
His final chapter with the band did not happen as a distant retirement or a quiet fade from music. Gilbert was still writing, recording and fighting his way back to performing while undergoing treatment.
New Found Glory’s catalog leaves plenty of larger markers: Nothing Gold Can Stay, the self-titled album, Sticks and Stones, “Hit or Miss,” “Head on Collision” and decades of shows built around the communal release that pop-punk does particularly well.
But one smaller piece of that history captures Gilbert’s role unusually well.
Sticks and Stones was already nearly finished. Gilbert heard another guitar riff anyway and convinced everyone to make room for one more song.
It became “My Friends Over You.”