Def Leppard has released a new single, “Rejoice,” ahead of the band’s upcoming Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace, which begins Feb. 3.
“This song’s been an amazing journey from concept to conclusion,” lead singer Joe Elliott said in a press release. “I said to [guitarist] Phil [Collen] one day, ‘I’ve got this idea for a lyric where the narrator is at absolute rock bottom and wants to rise up to a higher level. Do you have a musical piece that might match with that?’ And he said, ‘As it happens, yes I do.’”
Collen described the creative process, saying, “I had this riff, this idea for a song a while ago actually, so when Joe came to me I created this drum loop based with a tribal sound and it fit perfectly with this other arrangement I had. I sent it to Joe and it was like magic – he sang straight over the top of it. And that’s how the song was formed.”
Collen added, “Then we gave it to Ronan [McHugh] who’d done a proper drum loop with different sounds. It all started gelling and just sounded like a powerful chant. We love it. It’s hard rock for us. It’s got a bit more of an ‘oomph’ than stuff we’ve been doing for a while. It’s kind of magical.”
“Rejoice” is Def Leppard’s first new material since their mid-2024 release “Just Like ’73,” a collaboration with guitarist Tom Morello. In January 2025, the band released a cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” with proceeds benefiting victims of the Southern California wildfires.
Def Leppard’s most recent studio album, “Diamond Star Halos,” was released in 2022 and featured the singles “Kick,” “Take What You Want” and “Fire It Up.” The group is also set to release “Diamond Star Heroes: Live From Sheffield,” a live album, in 2025.
In addition to the Las Vegas residency, Def Leppard will perform three shows in India in March and tour Europe during the summer of 2026.
“We’re going to dig a little deeper in the set,” Elliott told UCR regarding the residency. “There’s a lot of people coming that are just there to enjoy Vegas, and we’re just a side show, one of the billions that they could have chosen to go to. So they aren’t going to be that interested in the deep cuts. They want the hits and then the first 10 or 12 rows, they just want the deep cuts. So you got to strike a really fine balance, which is what we’re currently working on now.”