Rock band Rage Against the Machine is done touring and playing live, its drummer said in a social media post Wednesday.
The band previously canceled the remaining shows of a reunion tour of Europe and North America that had been delayed by the pandemic and was scheduled for 2022 and 2023. They will not be rescheduled.
“While there has been some communication that this could happen in the future,” drummer Brad Wilk wrote in an Instagram post, “I want to let you know that RATM (Tim, Zack, Tom and I) will not be touring or playing again. live”.
“I’m sorry to those of you who have been waiting for this to happen,” he continued. “I really wish it were that way.” He added in the caption: “Thank you to everyone who has ever supported us.”
The band, which was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November, did not immediately respond to a request for comment overnight.
Wilk and his bandmates, vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello, formed the group in 1991. Their first public performance was in “someone’s living room” in Orange County, California, according to their website.
Rage, with its fusion of metal, punk rock, funk and hip-hop, rose to prominence throughout the 1990s as one of the most visible rock bands to embrace a left-wing political message. The band denounced “compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite,” as sung in their 1992 song “Know Your Enemy.”
In 1996, while promoting their second album, “Evil Empire,” the band attempted to hang upside-down American flags on their amplifiers during a two-song performance on “Saturday Night Live,” a performance that was interrupted. At the Woodstock ’99 festival, Commerford burned the flag during a performance of “Killing in the Name.”
The band broke up before, including in 2000, at the height of their success.
“I feel it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed,” de la Rocha wrote in a statement at the time. “It no longer meets the aspirations of the four of us collectively as a band and, from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal.”
The band members did not perform together again until 2007, when they headlined the final day of the Coachella music festival. They later toured the United States, Europe and South America.
Rage took another hiatus in 2011. Wilk later said in a Pulse Radio interview that the band’s performance at that year’s LA Rising festival was “our last show.”
During the pandemic, Morello wrote a newsletter for The New York Times about music and his life.
In July 2022, the band played their first concert in 11 years in Wisconsin. This launched their “public service announcement” tour, which was originally scheduled for 2020 but was delayed by the pandemic.
Rage canceled the remaining dates of its tour in North America and Europe months after announcing that tickets were on sale. Their leader, de la Rocha, said the reason was that he had torn his left Achilles tendon.
“I still look at my leg in disbelief,” he said in a statement in October 2022. “Two years of waiting during the pandemic, hoping for a chance to be a band again and continue the work we started 30 years ago.” . years ago.”
