Chad Gilbert, the founding guitarist and backing vocalist for pop-punk mainstays New Found Glory, has died at age 45.
New Found Glory and Gilbert’s wife, Lisa Cimorelli, confirmed his death in a joint social-media statement. The statement said Gilbert died peacefully in his sleep on the morning of September 20, with his wife and mother at his side. It did not disclose a cause of death.
Gilbert had publicly discussed a long-running battle with cancer. Earlier in 2026, he said doctors had found three brain tumors and that he had been diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma after prior treatment for a rare adrenal cancer.
“He was a legendary musician, but his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father,” the joint statement said.
He is survived by his wife Lisa, daughter Lily, mother Jackie and brother Brian.
A founding presence in New Found Glory
Gilbert helped form New Found Glory in 1997 in Coral Springs, Florida, alongside Jordan Pundik, Steve Klein, Ian Grushka and Joe Marino. Marino was soon replaced by drummer Cyrus Bolooki. Gilbert had already played in several bands while growing up in the area, and the group’s formation came out of a shared local scene and an impulse to make a place for people who felt outside the mainstream.
That sense of connection remained central to how Gilbert described the band’s beginnings. Recalling the group’s formative years earlier in 2026, he spoke of a lunch-table community of students with dyed hair who accepted one another regardless of appearance. In his telling, the band was partly an extension of that belonging: a way to hold on to the feeling of finding one’s people.
He left high school after 11th grade when New Found Glory signed with Drive-Thru Records. The move placed a serious bet on a young band, but it also began a run that would stretch across decades. Gilbert played on every New Found Glory album, from 1999 debut Nothing Gold Can Stay through the group’s 11th and latest album, 2026’s Listen Up!.
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In a band context, a founding guitarist means more than being present on early recordings. It denotes someone involved in establishing the musical identity, working relationships and creative language that carry forward as a project grows. Gilbert’s long tenure is unusually straightforward by that measure: his playing spanned the band’s first release through its most recent full-length album.
From scene connection to a mainstream breakthrough
New Found Glory became a major name in late-1990s and early-2000s pop-punk and pop-rock. The group’s mainstream breakthrough arrived with 2002’s Sticks and Stones. Its lead single, “My Friends Over You,” reached No. 85 on the Billboard Hot 100.
That chart result is one useful marker of the band’s reach, but it does not fully explain why a guitarist’s death carries weight for listeners. New Found Glory’s story, as Gilbert himself described it, began with community before it became a commercial success. For fans who found the group through its early work, its breakthrough years or the records that followed, a band’s continuity can become part of the music’s meaning. The same people remain attached to songs at different points in their lives; the players who made them can feel like fixtures in that long-running soundtrack.
Gilbert’s role also included backing vocals. Backing vocals are the supporting vocal parts arranged around a lead singer: harmonies, responses, doubled lines or other elements that add texture and momentum. In a guitar-led pop-punk group, that combination of guitar and supporting voice can be especially important to the collective feel of a recording, even where the lead vocalist is the most immediately recognizable voice.
His work was not limited to New Found Glory. Gilbert also performed with Shai Hulud and with International Superheroes of Hardcore, a New Found Glory side project. That wider record points to a musician whose activity extended beyond a single band name, while New Found Glory remained the consistent through line of his career.
What the health details do—and do not—establish
The information shared about Gilbert’s illness should be read carefully. The family-and-band statement confirmed his death but did not name a cause. The earlier disclosure establishes that he had faced serious cancer diagnoses and that doctors had found three brain tumors; it does not establish a medical cause of death. Keeping those points separate matters, particularly when public memorial messages can quickly turn limited health details into assumptions.
Adrenocortical carcinoma is the name given in Gilbert’s public account of his diagnosis. The available information also described earlier treatment for a rare adrenal cancer. Beyond those facts, no additional medical explanation has been provided here, and it would be inappropriate to infer it.
The joint statement instead focused on the circumstances of Gilbert’s final hours and the response from those close to him. It described friends and family gathering at the hospital, portraying that turnout as evidence of how widely loved he was. The language is understandably personal rather than clinical: an account of a husband, father, friend and musician whose absence will be felt across overlapping communities.
A career measured in durability
Gilbert’s New Found Glory discography provides a clear frame for his legacy: 11 albums, beginning with Nothing Gold Can Stay in 1999 and continuing to Listen Up! in 2026. Longevity alone is not a verdict on artistic importance, but it is evidence of sustained collaboration—particularly in a band that originated in a local Florida scene and retained a central founding member across its entire album run.
There is also a practical reason that continuity matters to audiences. Bands are often experienced as catalogues: listeners enter through a hit, an older record, a live memory, or a recommendation from a friend, then work backward and forward. A musician who appears throughout that catalogue helps link those entry points. Gilbert’s presence from the debut to the latest album means his career is inseparable from New Found Glory’s recorded history.
For readers revisiting music stories across pop culture, Joking Joystick has also covered the scale and persistence of another landmark band’s screen-era legacy in its report on the Beatles four-film event’s recreation of an A Hard Day’s Night opening. The circumstances are very different, but the common thread is how musical groups continue to live in public memory through the work, images and communities built around them.
Remembering the person alongside the musician
The statement from New Found Glory and Cimorelli made clear that Gilbert’s public reputation as a musician was only part of how those nearest to him saw him. It emphasized that he most valued being a husband and father. That distinction is worth preserving in coverage of an artist whose name will naturally be tied to albums, singles and a genre-defining era: his family’s remembrance centers a private life and relationships that existed beyond the stage.
Gilbert’s death closes a career that began with a group of Florida friends looking for belonging and grew into a band with a decades-long catalog and a mainstream milestone in “My Friends Over You.” The facts currently confirmed are simple and painful: a founding member of New Found Glory has died at 45, after years of publicly known cancer struggles, leaving behind his family, bandmates, collaborators and listeners.
