Angels and Airwaves Music

A Mixture of Musicians Get Together to Form Angels & Airwaves

The San Diego alternative rock band Angels & Airwaves is an interesting mix of musicians that were part of other bands before coming together to create beautiful music.

The band’s front man, Tom DeLonge (guitarist/vocalist, Blink 182 and Box Car Racer), started working on the band’s debut album shortly after his former band, Blink 182, publicly announced their hiatus in February 2005. He chose to keep mum about the whole thing. It was in September 2005, when he spoke publicly about it and revealed the new name of his band: “Angels & Airwaves.”

The band is composed of DeLonge, guitarist David Kennedy (Over My Dead Body, Hazen Street and Box Car Racer), Atom Willard (Rocket From the Crypt, The Offspring), and Matt Wachter (30 Seconds to Mars), who replaced former The Distillers bassist Ryan Sinn in May 2007.

The musical background of each member promises to be critical in coming up with a music that will make Angels & Airwaves, or AVA, an interesting act to watch out for.

AVA’s first single from the still unreleased album We Don’t Need to Whisper, The Adventure, was not supposed to be released when a fan hacked DeLonge’s email account and stole 5 demos from the album. The single was leaked on to radio stations. The band then decided to release the single on May 18, 2006, with We Don’t Need to Whisper following five days later.

It entered the Billboard 200 and landed on the number 4 spot. The album sold well and eventually turned gold. The album was certified gold in Canada on May 26, 2006 and went on to become silver in the UK.

A year later, after citing difficulties within the band, bassist Sinn announced on May 15 on a fans club message board that he is no longer a part of AVA. He was replaced by Wachter, who filled in the slot Sinn left empty at the Free Earth Day concert at the M.I.T. campus and was later confirmed as a permanent member.

The band’s second album, I-Empire, was released under Universal/Island Records in 2007. The band front man revealed several things about the album in an interview with a magazine called Kerrang! Among them is his statement that the new AVA album “will be stripped down, a departure from the heavy effects found in We Don’t Need To Whisper.”

I-Empire would have 12 tracks, which includes Star of Bethlehem. The single was recorded in late 2006 and was already released on the KROQ 2006 Christmas CD. The album sold 66,000 copies in its first week, landing it at the number 9 spot on the Billboard 200 chart. It also topped the iTunes Top Albums chart. However, the album seemed to have lost its momentum as its third week sales went down, putting the album at the number 103 slot.

The band unveiled a newly designed website that features a flash application that plays a portion of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1958 speech.

Similar to what happened to the first single in the first album, the first single from the new album, Everything’s Magic, was leaked on the Internet and another classic piece of Angles and Airwaves music was out there.

Angels & Airwaves then decided to set their sights on film making. They announced their plans of filming and releasing a documentary that features their music. They came up with Start the Machine, and a feature film dubbed I-Empire.

DeLonge has expressed hopes for the documentary’s release to theaters in 2008 before they release it on DVD. It has already been submitted to several festivals for consideration. In an interview with SuicideGirls, David Kennedy described the feature film as “all these vignettes that intertwine kind of like Pink Floyd’s The Wall meets Crash.”

On August 29, 2007, Angels & Airwaves updated their website with a new trailer for their new album. On June 21, 2008, DeLonge released Modlife, a social networking site and online operating system for musicians, bloggers and businesses. He says he aims to “fix” the music industry.

The band then went on tour in 2008, the Warped Tour, as well as Weezer’s Fall tour.

Sadly, on April 28, 2009, a month after announcing that Blink 182 is back together, DeLonge, citing not having enough time for AVA, announced that the band is splitting up. He is currently writing new materials and planning on touring with his former band.