Rock and roll has never been short on breakups, but it’s the comebacks that tend to stick in people’s memories longest. Some reunions arrive quietly, a low key show here, a festival slot there. Others land like a thunderclap, ending years of public feuding and private silence in a single announcement. What follows is a look at nine bands whose members once seemed permanently done with each other, only to find their way back onstage. The stories behind these reunions vary wildly, from sibling rivalries to lawsuits to outright hatred, but each one proves that in music, “never” rarely means forever.
Oasis
Few reunions in modern music history carried the weight of Oasis getting back together. Liam and Noel Gallagher’s relationship had curdled into one of rock’s most bitter sibling feuds, with each brother publicly trading insults for years. Noel accused his brother of making unsophisticated music and said he could not stand his voice, comments that came two years after Liam said being in a band with him bored the death out of him. The split in 2009 seemed final, and repeated rumors of reconciliation over the following fifteen years went nowhere.
Then, in August 2024, everything changed. Fifteen years after their breakup, brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher apparently put aside their differences, announcing a run of concerts in the U.K. and Ireland for 2025. They kicked off a 19-date tour of the UK and Ireland in Cardiff, Wales on July 4, before heading to North and South America, Asia and Australia, with a finale in São Paulo on November 23. By the time the tour reached North America, even Noel seemed genuinely pleased with how it was going.
Guns N’ Roses
For over two decades, the idea of Axl Rose, Slash, and Duff McKagan sharing a stage again felt like a punchline rather than a possibility. Since 1993, the members of GN’R, especially Axl and Slash, had trashed each other in the press, in a feud among the most venomous and long lasting in music, with the two men straight up hating each other. Fans joked that a reunion would happen “not in this lifetime,” a phrase the band would later use, deliberately, as the title of their comeback tour.
The turnaround began quietly in 2015 when Slash mended fences with Axl, and it culminated in a surprise club show. After decades of swearing it would never happen, Guns N’ Roses did the unthinkable on April 1, 2016, publicly mending fences and reuniting onstage. The core trio of Axl Rose, Slash, and Duff McKagan had not shared a stage since 1993, and the resulting Not in This Lifetime tour went on to become one of the highest grossing tours in rock history.
Blink-182
Tom DeLonge’s on and off relationship with his own band became something of a running joke among pop punk fans. He first split from the group in 2005, returned in 2009, then left again in 2015 to pursue other projects, including his well documented fascination with UFOs. DeLonge, who co-founded Blink-182 with Hoppus in 1992, departed the group in 2015, saying he wanted to change the world for his kids and everybody else. Matt Skiba filled in for years, and most fans assumed that arrangement was permanent.
Mark Hoppus’s cancer diagnosis in 2021 quietly reshaped things behind the scenes. Talk of a potential DeLonge return started to heat up as he reportedly repaired his relationship with Mark Hoppus upon Hoppus’ 2021 cancer battle. By October 2022, the classic trio confirmed their reunion, and DeLonge returned to the band for the first time since 2015 for a run of shows that would take them across North America, Europe, Australia, and Latin America throughout 2023 and into 2024.
My Chemical Romance
When My Chemical Romance announced their breakup in 2013, they insisted it was permanent. The band abruptly announced their breakup on March 22, 2013, and adamantly denied that the group would ever get back together. That certainty didn’t stop devoted fans from constructing elaborate theories about a future reunion, some of them tied to numerology around the band’s original run.
Six years later, those fans got their answer. On October 31, 2019, after a six-year hiatus, the band announced a reunion scheduled as a one-off event in Los Angeles, and after tickets sold out within minutes and following a strong positive response online, the band subsequently scheduled further reunion shows worldwide. The pandemic delayed the full tour, but the band eventually got back on the road, proving the split had not been as final as their 2013 statement suggested.
Pixies
Long before most modern reunion tours became commonplace, the Pixies set the template. Their split in 1993 was anything but amicable, driven largely by tension between frontman Black Francis and bassist Kim Deal. The group disbanded in 1993 under acrimonious circumstances, but reunited in 2004. By his own account, Black Francis later admitted the friction ran deep, telling one interviewer that he and Deal simply “didn’t get along well after a time,” noting she “always had her own ambitions and became comfortable in a leadership role in her other band.”
The 2004 reunion, though, ended up reshaping how the music industry thought about legacy acts. Reformed versions of the band helped make Coachella a platform for high profile reunions, after frontman Black Francis had broken up the seven-year-old band by fax. The Pixies’ legacy and popularity grew in the years following their break-up, leading to sold-out world tours following their reunion in 2004.
Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac’s lineup history reads like a soap opera, full of romantic entanglements and departures that seemed to end things for good. Lindsey Buckingham left the band’s most commercially successful configuration in 1987, following years of tension with Stevie Nicks and the rest of the group after their Rumours-era success. For nearly a decade, the classic five member lineup that had sold tens of millions of records stayed apart, each member pursuing solo work.
In 1997, that lineup reformed for “The Dance,” a live album and tour that reunited Buckingham, Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood on stage together for the first time in years. The reunion was a commercial success and reignited interest in the band’s catalog for a new generation of listeners. It also set a pattern the band would repeat over the following two decades, breaking apart and reconvening as circumstances, and relationships, allowed.
Rage Against the Machine
Rage Against the Machine’s 2000 breakup came amid internal tension over the band’s direction, with frontman Zack de la Rocha departing abruptly. For years afterward, the remaining members formed Audioslave with Chris Cornell, while de la Rocha largely stayed out of the spotlight, fueling speculation that Rage was done for good. The band’s political intensity and famously combustible internal dynamics made a reunion seem unlikely to many longtime fans.
Yet in 2007, the band surprised audiences with a reunion performance at Coachella, followed by sporadic tour dates over the next several years. A more ambitious reunion tour was announced for 2019, delayed by the pandemic, and eventually launched in 2022, only to be cut short after de la Rocha suffered a leg injury onstage during an early show. Even in a shortened form, the tour demonstrated that the band’s chemistry, and its audience, had never really gone away.
Eagles
The Eagles’ 1980 breakup became one of the most quoted band splits in rock history, largely because of how definitively band members described it at the time. Don Henley reportedly said the group would reunite only when hell froze over, a line that became shorthand for a reconciliation nobody expected to happen. Personality clashes, particularly between Henley and Glenn Frey, had made the band’s final years famously tense.
Fourteen years later, hell apparently did freeze over. The Eagles reunited in 1994 for a tour and live album pointedly titled “Hell Freezes Over,” acknowledging the band’s own earlier prediction with a wink. The tour was a massive commercial success and helped reestablish the Eagles as one of the biggest live draws in American music, a status the band maintained through various lineup changes in the decades that followed.
The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins’ original lineup fractured gradually through the late 1990s before the band formally split in 2000, following years of internal conflict and lineup instability. Billy Corgan, the band’s chief songwriter and most public face, continued using the Smashing Pumpkins name for later projects, but the classic quartet of Corgan, James Iha, D’Arcy Wretzky, and Jimmy Chamberlin stayed apart for nearly two decades.
In 2018, three quarters of that lineup, Corgan, Iha, and Chamberlin, reunited for a tour marking the band’s thirtieth anniversary, though Wretzky was notably absent following a public dispute over her involvement. The tour still drew significant attention as a partial reunion of a band whose internal relationships had once seemed irreparably damaged. It also underscored how even incomplete reunions can carry enormous weight for longtime fans who never expected to see these musicians share a stage again.
These nine stories share a common thread: time has a way of softening even the deepest grudges in music, though rarely on any predictable schedule. Some bands needed a health scare to reconsider old wounds, others simply needed enough distance to remember why they started playing together in the first place. Whatever the reason, each reunion offered fans something they had stopped expecting, proof that the loudest breakups don’t always have the last word.
