A few days ago original alternative rock band At The Drive-In announced their first live performance since 2012 with an appearance at Ohio’s Rock on the Range Festival (details on the festival can be found here).

At The Drive-In are set to be one of the many headliners of the festival, which also includes Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shinedown, Five Finger Punch Death, Megadeth and many many more.

At the Drive-In’s last group performance was in London three years ago, headlining the Brixton Academy in the summer of 2012 having also performed at both the Reading festival and Leeds festival. Members Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler both announced that those gigs would be their very last as At The Drive-In.

However both Omar and Cedric have promised such things throughout their musical career, At The Drive-In was where they both first experienced widespread success; however they only ever produced three critically acclaimed albums ‘Relationship of Command’, ‘Acrobatic Tenement’ and ‘In/Casino/Out’. The band initially broke up in 2001 with Omar and Cedric wishing to expand and diversify the music that they produced, they felt that they had out grown alternative rock and At The Drive-In.

After that Omar and Cedric went on to create the hugely successful progressive/latin rock band The Mars Volta and Jim Ward, Tony Hajjar and Paul Hinojos created the alternative rock band Sparta.

Jim Ward was interviewed by El Paso Times last week and was unable to confirm whether or not he would be performing on stage with the rest of At The Drive-In. If he ends up not performing with them it would certainly be a massive disappointment, as Ward’s backing vocals and guitar playing are as important to the sound of At The Drive-In as Rodriguez-Lopez’s intrinsic guitar playing and Bixler’s impassioned vocals.

Listen to my personal favourite At The Drive-In song below:

Lopez last spoke of the band in 2013, when talking to Rolling Stone magazine:

“We don’t talk about it that way. It’s there; we have possibilities. Everybody’s doing something right now. Cedric has a record coming out, Tony and Jim in Sparta are doing stuff. We’re just trying to feel again when the moment opens up where nothing is forced and nothing is an obligation.”

At The Drive-In are unfortunately a musical cliché in that they always produced critically acclaimed and genre defining music but only for a short length of time before arguments within the band tore the music apart. Even to this day arguments and differing opinions continue, especially shocking with Bixler and Rodriguez-Lopez who have recently disbanded The Mars Volta apparently due to lead guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez not being committed enough, see more here.

I remain a massive fan of their work and hope that they perform a few more times together and put all past bitterness behind them, but who knows what will happen!