With just four full-length albums of original material, Guns N’ Roses have become one of rock and roll’s most legendary bands. They came from L.A.’s Sunset Strip, but they easily transcended that scene and even made it obsolete.
Their debut, Appetite for Destruction, which has sold over 18 million copies in the United States alone, is a classic, but it was a slow burner. When it was first released in July of 1987, it was met with some fanfare, gradually creeping up the charts until it eventually ascended to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 about a year later. For those vehemently opposed to glam, “Welcome to the Jungle” was a hardened, gritty song that grabbed the ears of the heavier-leaning rock crowd, while the glitzy “Paradise City” and the tender-hearted ballad “Sweet Child O’ Mine” won over pop radio programmers and MTV.
They never topped Appetite (few albums in rock’s canon can claim to be better), Guns N’ Roses would go on to explore different styles of music. Use Your Illusion I and II each clocked in at over 70 minutes, showcasing piano-driven ballads, moodier and lengthier compositions, some saloon rock, leftovers from the Appetite sessions and some straight-ahead burners.
Things splintered from there as tensions really began to mount and the group bided their time by releasing The Spaghetti Incident?, a covers album of mostly punk rock tunes. With Axl Rose the last remaining founding member until Slash and Duff McKagan rejoined in 2016, the long-overdue Chinese Democracy stood as the only full-length effort to emerge after this, though the trio re-recorded some outtakes from the 2008 album and released them in 2021 (“Absurd” and “Hard Skool”).
READ MORE: There Are Only Four Songs Guns N’ Roses Haven’t Played Live
We’ve taken it all into consideration and have ranked all of their original songs from worst to best in the gallery below. Therefore, The Spaghetti Incident?, their 1986 covers featured on the Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP (and later GN’R Lies) — as well as their 1994 cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” for the Interview With the Vampire soundtrack and the demos they released on the Appetite for Destruction reissue in 2018 have all been omitted.
The only covers included below are the ones included on the Illusion albums, since the rest of both records were all original material, and because the two covers in question became massive hits for the band.
Scroll below to see all of Guns N’ Roses’ songs ranked from worst to best.
Every Guns N’ Roses Song Ranked
All of Guns N’ Roses’ songs ranked.
All 23 Musicians Who’ve Been in Guns N’ Roses
Hope you got some time to get through this one.