It’s been forty years since the release of This Is Spinal Tap, so what have the legendary rockers been up to all this time? We’ll get our answers in Spinal Tap 2, but director Rob Reiner dropped a few hints about the lives of Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) while speaking with Empire.

“Nigel has been running a cheese and guitar shop,” Reiner said. “David has been writing music for a true-crime podcast called ‘The Trouble With Murder’. And Derek is the curator of a museum of glue. He’s also written a symphony about the fact that the devil wears a bad hairpiece. It’s called ‘Hell Toupée’.” The director, who also reprises his role as filmmaker Martin “Marty” Di Bergi, added that there will be some great new songs, including Derek Smalls’ Rockin’ In the Urn, which is “all about the fact that even after he’s dead, he’s still going to be performing.“

Official plot details for the sequel have largely been kept under wraps, but Reiner did reveal a few details when the project was announced two years ago. “The plan is to do a sequel that comes out on the 40th anniversary of the original film and I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, why don’t you do another one?” Reiner said. “For so many years, we said, ‘nah.’ It wasn’t until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honor the first one and push it a little further with the story.“

Reiner continued, “They haven’t spent any time together recently, and that became the premise. The idea was that Ian Faith, who was their manager, he passed away. In reality, Tony Hendra passed away. Ian’s widow inherited a contract that said Spinal Tap owed them one more concert. She was basically going to sue them if they didn’t. All these years and a lot of bad blood we’ll get into and they’re thrown back together and forced to deal with each other and play this concert.“

Spinal Tap 2 will also feature appearances from plenty of real-life musicians, including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Garth Brooks, and more. The sequel doesn’t have an official release date yet, but Reiner has estimated that it will come out in “late spring or early summer” of 2025.

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