Chad Gilbert built music around momentum. As a founding guitarist, songwriter, and backing vocalist for New Found Glory, he helped turn the directness of pop-punk into a durable shared language: fast songs, big hooks, jokes between friends, and the feeling that a room full of strangers could become a community by the end of a set. Gilbert died peacefully in his sleep on September 20, 2026, according to a statement from New Found Glory and his wife, Lisa Cimorelli. He was 45.
Starting with what they had
Gilbert formed New Found Glory with his bandmates while they were teenagers in Florida. The group’s early work grew from the resourcefulness common to independent music: friends pooling money, rehearsing, recording, and building an audience one show at a time. In an interview preserved in the reporting around his death, Gilbert recalled working at a movie theater and using savings from that job, alongside money saved by the other members, to make the band’s first full-length record, Nothing Gold Can Stay.
That origin story matters because it describes more than a career beginning. It shows the collaborative engine Gilbert kept returning to. New Found Glory’s music was polished enough to travel widely but retained the sense of a group making something together in real time. Their songs carried adolescent feeling without requiring listeners to remain adolescents. For many fans, the band became part of the soundtrack to growing up, changing friendships, and finding a place to belong.
A lasting place in pop-punk
New Found Glory released more than a dozen albums and toured internationally for decades. Gilbert’s guitar work and songwriting helped define the band’s bright, urgent sound, while his humor and drive helped sustain its live identity. The group’s influence reached beyond its own records. Their approach helped make room for later bands that balanced melodic songwriting with speed, vulnerability, and a sense of fun.
Gilbert also worked beyond New Found Glory. He produced and contributed to recordings connected with other artists in the alternative and pop-punk world, extending the same practical knowledge he had developed inside his own band. Production is often invisible to an audience: the arrangement that suddenly lands, the guitar part that gives a chorus its lift, the decision that lets another performer sound more like themselves. His work in those roles widened the circle of what he helped make possible.
The work kept moving
Gilbert’s public life also included serious health challenges. Coverage before his death documented emergency surgery for a brain tumor and his return to the stage in June 2026. This article does not assign a cause of death beyond the family and band statement, and it does not turn illness into a shortcut for understanding his life. The verified point is simpler: after a difficult period, he returned to performing, and music remained part of how he spent time with other people.
The statement from his family and bandmates emphasized that his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father. That detail belongs beside the touring history and the records, not beneath them. A public career can be measured in albums, rooms played, and artists influenced; a life is also measured in the people who were close enough to know what mattered most to the person behind the stage name.
Songs that make room
Gilbert leaves behind a body of work that continues to move through friendships, playlists, bedrooms, vans, venues, and the private rituals of people who found a little more courage in a loud song. His legacy is not only the sound of New Found Glory. It is the network around that sound: bandmates, collaborators, fans, and younger musicians who learned that sincerity and energy could share the same song.
Chad Gilbert made music with the forward pull of someone who believed the next chorus was worth reaching. The records remain, but so does the invitation inside them: show up, play hard, laugh with your friends, and leave enough room for somebody else to sing along.
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