Blink-182 Reunite With Tom DeLonge, Announce 2023 Stadium Tour

Hoppus and Barker discussed DeLonge’s departure in an interview with Rolling Stone at the time, saying that after the band signed a recording contract and booked a studio for album sessions, he received emails from DeLonge’s management announcing that he was leaving the band. “To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised because his attitude leading up to that had been not excited and not interested,” Hoppus said. Barker called DeLonge “disrespectful and ungrateful” to have his manager break the news and not call them himself. “Why Blink even got back together in the first place is questionable,” Barker said.

Following DeLonge’s departure, Blink-182 hired Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba. They released two albums under that lineup: 2016’s California and 2019’s Nine. The band toured consistently in the late 2010s. They were booked to perform at the famously doomed Fyre Festival.

During his time away from the group, DeLonge has continued recording with Angels & Airwaves. He has notably committed much of his time to the study of aliens, UFOs, and conspiracy theories. He founded the company To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015 and was the executive producer behind the History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. In 2020, the Pentagon declassified UFO videos that DeLonge’s company had previously shared.

In the recent past, Barker has become something of an omnipresent cultural and tabloid figure. He has collaborated with Post Malone, Machine Gun Kelly, Willow, and XXXTentacion, to name a few. In May 2022, he married Kourtney Kardashian.

Since 2019, Hoppus has been hosting the Apple Music 1 radio show After School Radio. In 2021, he revealed that he was diagnosed with cancer; later that year, he said he was cancer free. In an August 2022 interview with People, Hoppus revealed that DeLonge and Barker visited him before he started chemotherapy. “It was the first time that all three of us were in the same room in like five years,” Hoppus said. “It’s actually better than it used to be. There was no agenda. There were no lingering grudges. It felt very back to what it should be: three friends sitting in a room.… Everybody’s in a really great place right now.”