Michael Stipe doesn't want us holding out hope for an R.E.M. reunion

Bad news college rock fans because Michael Stipe doesn’t sound like he’s getting R.E.M. back together anytime soon.

The band split in 2011 after 31 long years together. And exactly 10 years to the day of the breakup, lead singer Stipe decided to mark the occasion by quashing any notions of an R.E.M. reunion.

As per Consequence of Sound, Stipe discussed it during his appearance on WNYC’s ‘All Of It’. Host Alison Stewart had brought up to Stipe a Rolling Stone article that had the odds of an R.E.M. reunion at 30%. Not on Stipe’s watch. “That’s wishful thinking,” he said bluntly. “We will never reunite. We decided when we split up that that would just be really tacky and probably money-grabbing, which might be the impetus for a lot of bands to get back together.”

It’s not the first time he’s moved to quell reunion talk. “I love those guys very much and I respect them hugely as musicians and as songwriters and everything, but I just don’t want to do that thing that people do,” he said in an interview with CBS This Morning back in 2014. “I despise nostalgia. I’m not good at looking back.”

R.E.M. shouldn’t be too disheartened because the band have other things on the go: they’ve offered a series of archival releases recently, with the latest one, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, coming out on October 29th. It follows reissues of Monster, Automatic for the People, and Out of Time.

Stipe has been keeping busy on his own too, recently publishing a photograph book. On the forthcoming Velvet Underground & Nico tribute album (out this Friday, September 24th), he covers ‘Sunday Morning’. In 2020, Stipe released ‘Drive to the Ocean’ and his Big Red Machine collaboration ‘No Time for Love Like Now’.

For more on this topic, follow the Classic Rock Observer.