Great Band Implosions Of The 21st Century

The sprawling saga of blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge's ousting from the band is a sad one, no doubt — nobody really likes to see decades-old friendships splinter so sharply and so publicly — but it's far from unique.

Bands have been falling out with each other, breaking up and making up since time immemorial, formerly unified fronts splintering and collapsing under the weight of conflicting tastes, interests and priorities. Let's take a look back at some of the big ones from the past 15 years...

at the drive-in

It's hard to talk about spectacular fall-outs between band members without mentioning El Paso-bred post-hardcore heroes At The Drive-In. At the turn of the century, the band were on course to redefine the scene, their seminal 2000 LP Relationship Of Command earning them an army of eager fans around the world, including in faraway Australia.

At the outset of the band's set at 2001's Big Day Out event in Sydney, tension was palpable — the band had not long before escaped serious injury in a tour-van crash, while their constant time on the road was gnawing at the edges of sanity — before, midway through their performance (and in response to what they saw as unsafe behaviour from members of the crowd), everything stopped and frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala chastised the crowd, calling them all robots and sheep and saying, "I think it's a very, very sad day when the only way you can express yourself is through slam-dancing."

One month later, At The Drive-In was no more, the victims of "complete mental and physical exhaustion" as well as diverging creative interests that saw Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez follow their freaky dreams in The Mars Volta, while remaining trio Jim Ward, Paul Hinojos and Tony Hajjar would stick to their roots in the less acclaimed (though far more accessible) Sparta.

taking back sunday

The wave of bands straddling the emo/post-hardcore border in the early 2000s had deep roots in New York, especially the areas of Long Island and New Jersey, which served as a thriving base for a burgeoning movement of acts that, at the time, included the likes of Thursday, Glassjaw, Brand New and Taking Back Sunday.

The scene, or at least parts of it, was more incestuous than it might appear to the casual observer in 2015 — Brand New frontman Jesse Lacey was an early member of TBS, while the saga between he and TBS guitarist John Nolan and an unspecified girl for whom they both had a thing was chronicled extensively in Brand New's Seventy Times Seven and TBS' response piece There's No I In Team, from their acclaimed debut LP Tell All Your Friends.

Even though that rivalry soon smoothed over (can we just take a moment to remember and appreciate Brand New's ultra-spiteful 'Mics are for singing, not swinging' merch from the era?), the civility in the ranks wasn't to last: Taking Back Sunday's frontman Adam Lazzara would eventually take up with Nolan's sister, Michelle — never a good idea — and, amid swirling rumours of infidelity and growing creative divides, Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper packed their shit and went to form their own fragile mope-rock outfit with Michelle and assorted others, Straylight Run.

Taking Back Sunday would rotate through replacement members for the next decade, bringing in players from other fallen great acts of the time (Matt Fazzi of Facing New York, Fred Mascherino of Breaking Pangaea, for example), admittedly obtaining more commercial success than they had with the vanilla line-up, but losing a lot of the distinctiveness that made them great in the first place.

The original line-up did eventually reconvene seven years after their split, in 2010, and have since stuck together through two consequent album releases, leaving those tumultuous days but a distant memory — but, man, in 2003, the whole Lacey-Nolan/Lazzara-Nolan/Everyone-Nolan drama was too much to bear.

botch

Washington hardcore cult heroes Botch lived and died like many of their ilk — in a fevered, fiery swirl of screams, sweat and distortion. They lasted longer than most, sticking it out for nine whole years through two studio albums, American Nervoso and the lauded We Are The Romans.

But — and this is where Botch stand apart from so many of their peers — it was not the "sophomore slump" that proved to be the spanner in their works, but the fact that We Are The Romans was so good that they felt it pretty damn daunting to follow up, internal tensions between members Tim Latona and Dave Knudson having built up over the years to the point that the men were no longer even speaking by the time 2001 drew to a close.

A couple of months later, staring down a wall of writers' block, the pressure of delivering a worthy follow-up to We Are The Romans, and the fact that two of their members didn't even want to look at each other, Botch called it a day in February 2002, Knudson going on to form Minus The Bear with members of Kill Sadie and Sharks Keep Moving, while fellow Botch alumnus Brian Cook brought together These Arms Are Snakes, which featured (another) ex-Kill Sadie member (Steve Snere) as well as Ryan Frederiksen of Nineironspitfire.

(In case you were wondering, Kill Sadie could pretty easily have been an honourable mention on this list, surviving together for just four incendiary years before everything fell apart in 2001, but we figure that even Botch is pushing the limits of familiarity for non-hardcore fans.)

oasis

If there's a British band that was active in the opening decade of this millennium that typified in-fighting and inter-member acrimony better than Oasis, we're not sure we've heard of them.

It's no secret that sibling co-founders Liam and Noel Gallagher seem to enjoy ("enjoy") something of a love-hate, on-off-on relationship, ping-ponging between being hailed as the next Lennon/McCartney and being written off as a couple of uncontrollable thugs. Throughout all the gossip and whispers and pointed glances, though, Oasis continued to release passable, in some cases admirable, albums, establishing themselves strongly enough for them to almost blow the whole thing by comparing themselves favourably to The Beatles.

But it was none of that which would bring about the demise of Brit-rock's favourite new sons; rather, it was some good old-fashioned biffo at a 2009 festival in Paris. While details of what exactly happened between the brothers have remained a point of contention for the six years since it all went down - there have been insinuations of smashed guitars and other mature behaviour - what we do know is that, shortly after Oasis' set, Noel wrote a statement that said, "It is with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight. People write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer."

rage against the machine

In 2000, Los Angelean political rap-metal icons Rage Against The Machine looked to have it all. They'd enjoyed nearly 10 years of burgeoning popularity as their incendiary, activism-soaked compositions such as Killing In The Name, Bulls On Parade, Testify and Guerrilla Radio found their way into every disaffected teen's Discman (they were things, once) from here to Alaska. They had their songs synced to feature films, appeared on Saturday Night Live, opened for, um, U2, and even saw one of their albums, The Battle Of Los Angeles, hit Double Platinum status some time after selling a casual 450,000 units in its first week.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a band so steeped in anti-capitalist dogma, all of this action didn't sit well with the members of Rage, and especially not frontman Zack De La Rocha, who, after growing rifts in the fold, quit the band in a huff in October 2000. "I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed," he wrote in a statement at the time. "It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band, and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal."

Well, no shit, Zack. Your song appeared on The Matrix soundtrack.

Despite numerous rumours regarding a reformation (and apparent offers of big money to do so), Rage have remained outliers where so many of their other peers have caved, refusing to reconvene the machine with the exception of a brief reunion spell from 2007-2011. Since then, though: nada.