Coachella Music & Arts Festival used its schedule reveal late Wednesday night to add a notable new act to the bill: Blink-182.
In a post containing the daily schedules for the 2023 festival, set to take place at Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA over the next two weekends (April 14th–16th and April 21st–23rd), Coachella organizer Goldenvoice included a peculiar caption, “Take off your pants and jacket.” While some of Coachella’s younger fan demographic may have taken the phrase as a benign call for “sun’s out, guns out” revelry, fans who were around in the early 2000s were quick to notice that the caption pointed to the 2001 Blink-182 album of the same name. Sure enough, a quick look and the schedule grids shows that Blink-182 is now scheduled to perform a 50-minute set on Friday evening at 6:45 p.m. on the Sahara stage. The Coachella schedule reveal also heralded another addition to the lineup, English electronic artist James Blake, who will perform on Friday at 8:30 p.m. on the DoLab stage.
Related: How To Stream Every Coachella 2023 Performance For Free
The surprise Coachella appearances will serve as the auspicious debut for Blink-182’s long-awaited return to its classic lineup featuring Tom DeLonge (guitar, vocals), Travis Barker (drums), and Mark Hoppus (bass, vocals). While the reunion of the DeLonge-Barker-Hoppus Blink-182 lineup was announced back in October of 2022, Blink-182 announced that it would regroup its classic lineup for its “most ambitious outing to date,” a massive world tour set to begin in March 2023 and run through 2023 and 2024.
Then, in early March, just as the tour was supposed to begin, Travis Barker suffered a freak finger injury that forced to band to postpone the tour’s initial dates, moving its start date back to May 4th in St. Paul, MN. Now, fans at Coachella will get to experience the first verses in this new chapter of Blink-182 before the tour kicks off in earnest.
Travis Barker solidified the classic Blink-182 lineup in 1998 after original drummer Scott Raynor was ousted from the trio due to his struggles with alcohol abuse. Hoppus, Barker, and DeLonge went on to become one of the biggest acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s with albums like 1999’s Enema of the State, 2001’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and 2003’s Blink-182.
DeLonge has left the band on two separate occasions. In 2005, Blink-182 took an “indefinite hiatus” due to the guitarist’s desire to tour less and spend more time with family. During that time, Hoppus and Barker continued to perform together as +44 while DeLonge formed Angels & Airwaves. Blink-182 re-formed in 2009 for an often dysfunctional reunion stint that ran until 2014. In 2015, DeLonge exited the band once again and was replaced by guitarist Matt Skiba. Blink-182 has released a pair of successful albums, 2016’s California and 2019’s Nine, in the time since DeLonge’s last departure. DeLonge has found new notoriety as a UFO researcher, among other things.
The latest Blink-182 reunion wave began to build when Hoppus was diagnosed with cancer in 2021. When both DeLonge and Barker happened to visit Hoppus at his home at the same time, the three had an impromptu reconciliation. “We got into more life stuff. What we’ve learned over the years about ourselves. How we’ve grown, how nothing really matters when it boils down to what we were dealing with in that moment,” DeLonge told GQ of the chance meeting in a 2021 interview. “And so, it wasn’t some big meeting about Blink-182, it was more about brothers meeting and saying, ‘How do we support Mark?’”
Hoppus’ chemotherapy proved successful. In September 2021, he announced in an Instagram post that he was cancer free. On Halloween, he appeared during Barker’s House of Horrors livestream for his first live performance since his diagnosis.
Blink-182 joins a loaded Coachella lineup featuring Gorillaz, Burna Boy, Chemical Brothers, YUNGBLUD, Rosalía, boygenius, $uicideboy$, The Kid LAROI, Charli XCX, Marc Rebillet, Hiatus Kaiyote, Björk, Willow, DOMi & JD Beck, and many more. See below for the complete Coachella 2023 schedule. For information on how to stream the entire festival for free, head here.
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