Neutral Milk Hotel Reunites For Upcoming Tour

Neutral Milk Hotel is getting the band back together. Unfortunately, no new music seems to be in sight, but what is in sight are a few tour dates featuring all four well-known members of the band, who came to indie fame thanks to the success of the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and, to a lesser extent, On Avery Island. The upcoming dates will be the first time the band has come together in full to play since Neutral Milk Hotel broke up in 1998 after lead Jeff Mangum called the band off, later suffering a nervous breakdown.

Neutral Milk Hotel announced the tour news on Monday, via the website Walking Wall of Words. The site confirms that original members Jeff Mangum, Jeremy Barnes, Scott Spillane, and Julian Koster will all be a part of the endeavor, as well as lists five tour dates. Five dates isn’t a lot, but hopefully, it’s the start of something more. The first date listed is for October 22 in Athens, Georgia at the famed 40 Watt Club. The group will play that venue again on the follow evening and then will head to Asheville, NC on October 25. Then, on November 28, Neutral Milk will play a date in Taiwan, with the final date scheduled for Tokyo on December 1.

That may not seem like a ton of dates to play, but the site does note there is more to come, so if you do live elsewhere in the world, don’t get too discouraged, yet. It’s not too much of a surprise the guys would make a go of touring at this juncture. It’s fairly trendy to produce reunion tours now, and Mangum came out of seclusion and began performing live again back in 2008, scheduling an increased number of shows in 2011 and 2012. People were interested in seeing Mangum’s solo shows, but I can only imagine how financially successful (not to mention rewarding) a Neutral Milk Hotel tour could be.

Neutral Milk Hotel became a band in the late eighties, but the group’s most well-known works came in the nineties, with the aforementioned On Avery Island in 1996 and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea in 1998. You can get a hint of what the tour will offer in the video, below, which features Mangum singing “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” at Coachella in 2012.

Jessica Rawden
Managing Editor

Jessica Rawden is Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. She’s been kicking out news stories since 2007 and joined the full-time staff in 2014. She oversees news content, hiring and training for the site, and her areas of expertise include theme parks, rom-coms, Hallmark (particularly Christmas movie season), reality TV, celebrity interviews and primetime. She loves a good animated movie. Jessica has a Masters in Library Science degree from Indiana University, and used to be found behind a reference desk most definitely not shushing people. She now uses those skills in researching and tracking down information in very different ways.