The Van Halen drummer confirmed the news on the Metal Sticks Podcast with Nicko McBrain
After previously denying that he was working on any new music, Alex Van Halen has now confirmed that he has a new project in the works. The legendary Van Halen drummer broke the news to Iron Maiden’s Nicko McBrain on Modern Drummer’s Metal Sticks Podcast. Alex stated that he is working with Toto’s Steve Lukather on the project, plus “a couple of other people.”
“I’m getting ready to do this record with [Steve] Lukather and a couple of other people,” Alex said. “It should be exciting”
Recently, the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported that Alex Van Halen was working on finishing some previously unfinished Van Halen material from the vault along with help from Steve Lukather.
“Ed [Eddie Van Halen] and Steve Lukather were very good friends and they often worked together,” Alex told Guitar World in a March 2025 interview. “There is no one else who can do this process with me as well as he can.”
However, Lukather was seemingly caught off guard by Alex’s comments, and is quoted in the very same guitar world article saying: “Did Alex say that? Oh, in that case the news is true. Ed, Alex and I were very close for years. It is true that we worked on it together.”
While Lukather didn’t deny helping to sift through material, in the VH vault, he took to Instagram on March 15, 2025 to make one thing abundantly clear.
“For the record: ever since Alex Van Halen dropped some [news] we were working together I think there is a huge misunderstanding. I will NOT EVER play a guitar note on a VH song ever! Al asked me to help him go through a ton of unfinished recordings of Al and Ed writing and recording that never saw the light of day. As of now that’s all I got. The fact that anyone would think for even a second that I would play anything on this is ridiculous. I have too much love and respect for that and … I play nothing like Ed.. [acting] more as a co-producer or something. I am honored Al would ask me though. Let’s see…”
Apparently, there’s a ton of material to go through.
Speaking on a recent episode of Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho Podcast, Alex Van Halen told the Fozzy frontman there’s about “three or four records” worth of material that was left unfinished by the band.
“I’ve talked about loosely, and I am rather superstitious, but I can say a couple things that I’ve mentioned before,” Alex said.” “We’re gonna go through the ‘vault’ and go through some of the musical ideas that were there. There was some good stuff in there. And you have to remember, when in the thick of it, sometimes the really great stuff kind of passes you by. And it’s not until you revisit it going, ‘Whoa, I forgot about that. That kicks ass.’ But that takes time. And you wanna do it right. I wanna do it right.”