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Faith No More have reunited—for real this time, apparently. After a series of ill-omened interviews, Mike Patton and the band have lined up four stadium shows Down Under with System of a Down, their first live dates since 2016. Check out the full itinerary below.
Faith No More have been reliably unpredictable since Patton joined as the permanent singer in 1988, launching an erratic and sometimes scandalous classic era that lasted more or less until their first split in 1998. A reunion tour and greatest-hits LP followed in 2009, and the band played on and off for the next decade, releasing their first album in 18 years, Sol Invictus, in 2015, and regrouping with former singer Chuck Mosley in 2016, a year before his death.
The rockers were set to reunite again in 2020 but canceled due to the pandemic; they rescheduled dates for 2021, but scrapped those, with Patton citing unspecified mental health problems. A second hiatus followed, during which Patton was diagnosed with agoraphobia and started drinking heavily. He reunited his grindcore outfit Dead Cross for an album, made a song for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game, and continued to tour with his enduring high-school band Mr. Bungle. (A year or so later, its long-departed co-founder Theobald Lengyel was charged with murder.) This February, Patton reunited with yet another one of his groups, Tomahawk, for their first show in 13 years.
Patton is not the only Faith No More member to publicly opine on the band and its future. Bill Gould and Mike Bordin both gave grim assessments in interviews last April. Later that year, keyboardist Roddy Bottum prepared an album with Imperial Teen and released a memoir, The Royal We, in tandem with a series of confrontational readings designed “to combat the racism, the anti-trans and homophobic mindsets” of the Trump era, he told The Guardian’s Stevie Chick. Bottum later said Faith No More were on “semi-permanent hiatus.”
The band teased the upcoming reunion with a cryptic post in June, and on July 26, they confirmed their brief tour with System of a Down in a joint Instagram post. The two groups will co-headline four dates in Australia and New Zealand in January and February next year. Those are all the dates for now, but if the comments section on their post is any indication, there’s plenty of demand for a wider run.
Revisit Saby Reyes-Kulkarni’s column The Misunderstanding of Faith No More.
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