Rage Against the Machine’s bulls will no longer be parading as the band’s drummer, Brad Wilk, announced Wednesday night that the rock group would no longer tour.
“I know a lot of people are waiting for us to announce new tour dates for all of the canceled RATM shows,” Wilk wrote in the Instagram announcement. “I don’t want to entangle people or myself any more. …I want to let you know that RATM (Tim, Zack, Tom and I) will not be touring or playing live again.”
Wilk did not make it clear whether this explicitly meant that the group had disbanded or whether they had plans to record new music in the future.
Other members of the Los Angeles band have yet to publicly comment on the situation.
“I’m sorry to those of you who have been waiting for this to happen. I really wish that were the case,” Wilk continued in the post. He captioned the message: “Thank you to everyone who has ever supported us.”
The “Killing in the Name” artists were forced to cancel their most recent tour in October 2022 after singer Zack de la Rocha suffered a “severe tear” to his left Achilles tendon during a performance in Chicago.
“It’s been almost three months since Chicago and I still look at my leg in disbelief,” de la Rocha said in his 2022 statement.
“Two years of waiting during the pandemic, hoping to have a chance to be a band again and continue the work we started about 30 years ago. Rehearsing, training, conciliating, working to get back in shape. Then one and a half comes along and my tendon tears. I felt like a bad joke the universe played on me. As I write this, I remind myself that these are just bad circumstances.”
Speaking about the band’s future following de la Rocha’s injury, guitarist Tom Morello did not specify how the group planned to proceed.
“Rage Against the Machine is like the ring from ‘The Lord of the Rings’. It drives men crazy. It drives journalists crazy. It drives people in the record industry crazy. They want it. They want that and they go crazy,” he told Rolling Stone in March 2023. “If there are Rage shows, if there are no Rage shows, you will hear from the band. Don’t know. When there is news, it will come from a collective statement from the band.”
In December 2022, the band’s bassist Tim Commerford announced that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Rage Against the Machine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. Morello was the only member of the band present at the induction ceremony.
“I am deeply grateful for the musical chemistry I have been fortunate to share with Brad Wilk, Tim Commerford and Zack de la Rocha. Like most bands, we have different perspectives on many things, including getting into the Rock Hall,” Morello said at the November ceremony.
He added of the politically minded rock group: “Throughout history, the spark of rebellion has come from unexpected quarters: authors, economists, carpenters. But, as Salvador Allende said, there is no revolution without songs. So who’s to say what musicians with revolutionary intentions might or might not accomplish when the agitated crowd shakes the Richter scale?
In 2000, De la Rocha walked away from Rage Against the Machine, saying in a statement at the time: “I feel it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed.”
The group, known for championing left-wing political theory and causes, came together in 2007 to headline the final day of that year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. He had planned to headline the desert festival again in 2020, after a nine-year hiatus, as the start of his second reunion tour, but that performance never happened as Coachella 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
