Tom DeLonge officially leaving Blink-182 in ‘friendly divorce’

The internal conflict that has roiled Blink-182 for the last few months may be coming to an end.

Mark Hoppus, the SoCal pop-punk trio’s bassist, said in a new interview with the Das Process podcast that he and drummer Travis Barker are “going through what so far has been a friendly divorce” with Tom DeLonge, the guitarist who left Blink (or maybe didn’t) earlier this year.

In January, Hoppus and Barker announced that they’d drafted Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio to replace DeLonge after the guitarist refused to commit to plans to perform and record with Blink-182. Then DeLonge issued a statement of his own, claiming he hadn’t quit and that he’d said only that he wasn’t available for certain commitments in 2015.

With Skiba in place of DeLonge, the group played a rare club date in March at the Roxy in West Hollywood, then headlined Orange County’s Musink festival, where it was billed as “Blink-182 w/ Matt Skiba.”

Now Hoppus has said DeLonge has “finally” admitted he doesn’t “want to do Blink anymore.”

“I was crushed,” the bassist said in the podcast. “It’s like, man, you have this huge, beautiful thing that we’ve spent 20 years building, and you just wanna walk away from it. But that’s Tom’s choice. At the same time, I was like, he finally did it.”

Responding to a request for comment, DeLonge’s representative referred The Times to a Facebook post by the guitarist from January in which DeLonge wrote that he would “do Blink 182 as long as it was fun and worked with the other commitments in my life, including my family.”

“It’s exciting to think that we’re gonna move forward,” Hoppus said in the podcast interview. “And it’s a little scary to think that we’re gonna move forward and sound a little bit different.”

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