Photograph courtesy Sub Pop Records
When the Afghan Whigs got back together to record two new songs for a 2007 greatest hits collection, frontman Greg Dulli made it clear that it was still not a reunion. “No fuckin’ way,” he told Billboard. “I don’t look back. I did what I did, now I do what I do.” Three years later, prior to a solo show at the 20th Century Theater in Oakley, he said much the same thing on Cincinnati Magazine’s very pages. “We said what we had to say. I see why people do it, but it’s not for me.” And even when the band finally gave into the siren song of Gen X nostalgia in 2012, touring around several prestige festivals, things were meant to go no further. “We aren’t getting back together to make a new album,” Dulli, who by then had made five records with his post-Whigs band, Twilight Singers, told The Quietus. “We’re doing this one time: See it now, or never see it again.”
Image courtesy Sub Pop Records
Or see it on May 6. That’s when the Afghan Whigs will celebrate their 40th anniversary at Bogart’s. A new album—the band’s fourth since 2014, and 10th overall—is also under way, with a teaser track, “House of I,” already streaming. But if Dulli’s past comments were the rock and roll equivalent of “Freezing Cold Takes”—the long-running social media account for unprophetic sports predictions—that doesn’t mean he was a liar. Things change, and the Whigs definitely did. What might have been a static journey though the past evolved into a thriving future.
This is admittedly not the way I saw it in 2012. “The band playing at Bogart’s on October 25 is not the Afghan Whigs,” began my story for this magazine, lamenting that original drummer Steve Earle, who played on the band’s breakthrough records—including the two they made for Sub Pop and their 1993 classic Gentlemen—wasn’t in the lineup alongside Dulli, bassist John Curley, and guitarist Rick McCollum. But the show I saw in Austin, Texas, with the original trio (and several members of Twilight Singers) was still great.
Image courtesy Sub Pop Records
And then came two big shockers. Not only did the Whigs continue on, but they did so sans McCollum, a move that almost seemed to say, Oh, you think this band isn’t legit without the drummer we fired in the ’90s? What if we also ditched the lead guitarist? Dulli had a “this didn’t age well” take on that one, too: “Three guys started the Afghan Whigs, and three guys made all six albums,” he had said in that same interview with The Quietus. “We’re the only three guys who made all the records and did all the shows. And we are the Afghan Whigs.”
But even though McCollum’s guitar defined the band’s sound as much as Dulli’s songs and soul, his departure also freed the group to become something new. Or, at least, a newish hybrid of Twilight Singers (Dulli, guitarist Dave Rosser, multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, drummer Cully Symington) plus John Curley.
At the time the Whigs first did it in 2012, alt-rock reunions (Dinosaur Jr., the Jesus Lizard, Pavement) were a fairly new phenomenon. So was the idea that the post-punk generation would continue to play music in their 60s and beyond—not like massive classic rockers, but on the same more modest path as blues, bluegrass, or jazz musicians. As time goes by, you’re either a band that breaks up forever or a band with members who get fired, quit, or leave this mortal coil. Ron Wood was not in the Rolling Stones when they made Exile on Main St. Bassist Bill Wyman left in 1993. And the Stones were already preparing to tour with a new drummer in 2024 while Charlie Watts was dying.
Photograph by David Tonge/Getty Images
Image courtesy Sub Pop Records
The Whigs have been through all of that as well. Shortly after the print version of this story went to press, drummer Patrick Keeler became unavailable due to his other job in Jack White’s band. Bryan Lee Brown, a well-known film composer and friend of Dulli’s who also did some work on the new record, takes over the drummer’s chair. But they also lost Rosser to colon cancer at the age of 50 in 2017, as well as longtime pal and backing vocalist Doug Falsetti in 2024. Dulli has often said his animating force is making music with his friends (just like Willie Nelson!). Some bands merely become business partners. Others do their best creative work in tension. Rock and roll romanticizes feuding bands who fight, break up, and reunite, from The Police to Oasis to Spinal Tap. But when you’ve been doing it for 40 years, getting to do it with people you actually want to be in the same room with matters.
Image courtesy Sub Pop Records
The Whigs’s newest full-time member is guitarist Christopher Thorn, a founding member of Blind Melon who has been collaborating in the studio with Dulli for at least a decade. For a certain type of indie-rock snob in the Grunge Years (i.e. me), the idea of a guy from Blind Melon being in the Afghan Whigs seems as implausible as The Replacements’s Tommy Stinson being a member of both Guns ‘n’ Roses and Soul Asylum (which he was). In this age of Spotify and social media, anyone who has figured out a way to keep making the music they want to make, in whatever band or bands they want, is practically heroic.
Is it really the Afghan Whigs’s 40th anniversary? Give or take a dormant decade, sure. But what’s more impressive is this second era (2012–2026) has now matched the first one (1986-) in longevity. They did what they did, and still had more to say. It’s far better to be an active band with new material, after all, than one that plays only the hits. On the band’s 2024 co-headline tour with The Church, they typically played just five songs from the first six albums. Presumably, a longer 40th anniversary set will lean more on old favorites. And hey, if Steve Earle or Rick McCollum show up to play “Gentlemen,” I wouldn’t complain.
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