Mike Patton

Michael Allan Patton was born in Eureka, California, on January 27, 1968, the son of a social worker and a physical education teacher, in a strictly secular home. At Eureka High School he met the bassist Trevor Dunn and, later, the guitarist Trey Spruance, in the music theory class and the jazz ensembles. He and Dunn got to know each other by trading records, and bonded over their studiousness, sarcastic humor and disaffection. With Spruance and the drummer Jed Watts they joined up as Mr. Bungle, and played their first show in Bayside, California, in November.

Patton enrolled at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, in nearby Arcata, to study English literature and become a writer; music was “an enjoyable yet not-too-serious hobby”. He worked part-time at the only record store in Eureka. In 1986, at a pizza parlour where Mr. Bungle played, Spruance gave Faith No More’s drummer Mike Bordin their demo, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny. In 1988 the band approached Patton to audition; they tried more than fifteen singers, Chris Cornell among them, and settled on him for his versatility. He was announced in January 1989, replacing Chuck Mosley, and had to leave his studies.

It is Faith No More’s third album and the first with Patton, who had replaced Chuck Mosley after Jim Martin suggested him, having heard the first Mr. Bungle demo. The band had written and recorded the music before he arrived: “Surprise! You’re Dead!” was taped in December 1988, after Mosley was fired and before Patton was hired, and Patton then wrote every lyric and recorded the vocals the following month. The producer Matt Wallace said Patton wrote the words over ten to twelve days. His only input, from a few days in a San Francisco coffee shop, was to advise more metaphors to soften some of the darker, heavier themes.

The album did not enter the Billboard 200 until February 1990, after “Epic”, and peaked at No. 11 in October 1990, a year and a half after release. “Epic” reached No. 9 on the Hot 100, the band’s only top-ten single there, and its video was on MTV all year, angering animal rights activists with a slow-motion shot of a fish flopping out of water. The band toured from 1989 to mid-1991, on bills with Metallica, Billy Idol, Soundgarden, Voivod, Primus and Poison, and got a name for mocking the lifestyles of its glam metal tourmates.

In 1990 the band left Eureka for San Francisco and signed to Warner Bros., which put out all three of its studio albums in the 1990s. It has been speculated that Patton’s success with Faith No More was the main reason. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1991 that, under normal circumstances, Mr. Bungle’s chances of a major-label deal were “a long shot”.

John Zorn produced. The record mixes metal, funk, ska, carnival music and free jazz, and was normally filed as funk metal. Steve Huey of AllMusic called it “a dizzying, disconcerting, schizophrenic tour through just about any rock style the group can think of”. Reviews were mixed: Entertainment Weekly found it “puerile” and “unlistenable”, and Trouser Press “one of the finest records of its kind”. The first track, once called “Travolta”, was renamed “Quote Unquote” on later pressings for fear of a lawsuit from John Travolta. Its video, directed by Kevin Kerslake, never aired on MTV because of bodies dangling on meat hooks.

It is Faith No More’s fourth album, and the first where Patton had a real hand in the music. The band wanted to move away from funk metal toward a more “theatrical” sound, and wrote through most of 1991. They went into Coast Recorders in late 1991 to track 17 songs, wrote two more in the studio, “Malpractice” among them, and recorded 19. Patton took lyrics from questions on the Oxford Capacity Analysis, fortune cookies and late-night television, and “RV” was a character sketch from watching people in diners and coffee shops. The title was Roddy Bottum’s, “a really beautiful name for a really hideous drug”, and the sleeve sets a blue egret on the front against a cow on a meat hook on the back. The label warned it would be “commercial suicide”.

It debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, the band’s only top-ten album in the US, but sold less there than The Real Thing, while outselling it in many other countries. The band toured Europe with Guns N’ Roses and Soundgarden, then the US with Guns N’ Roses and Metallica until they were fired from it in September 1992 for taking jabs at their hosts in the press. Jim Martin, who was unhappy with the new direction, left after the 1993 tour; this was his last album.

It was the first record without Jim Martin, who left in 1993: Bottum says he was fired by fax, Martin that it was his own decision. Mr. Bungle’s Trey Spruance took the guitar, then left before the tour, and the band’s keyboard tech Dean Menta replaced him. It was made at Bearsville in upstate New York, the only Faith No More album not recorded in California; Billy Gould called the remote studio a form of “sensory deprivation”. Bottum was largely absent, grieving his father and Kurt Cobain, so it was written largely without keyboards. During the sessions the band had a car accident with Patton at the wheel.

Instead of crowding many styles into each song, as on Angel Dust, the band wrote songs in different styles, from punk and thrash to bossa nova, gospel and country. Reviews at first were mixed: Rolling Stone’s review gave it two stars, though a Rolling Stone biography of the band called the result a “genre shuffle”. Later opinion has been kinder. It reached No. 31 in the US, and “Digging the Grave” was a No. 16 single in the UK.

It was four years after the debut when Mr. Bungle’s second album came out, held up by artwork delays and the members’ many side projects. “Funk metal” gave way to “avant-garde” and “experimental”. It is Italian for flying saucer, and the name of the yacht in the James Bond film Thunderball, whose theme the band had covered live and in the studio but never released. It jumps between death metal, jazz, Arabic music, musique concrète, klezmer, tango and easy listening, sometimes within a song, and some lyrics are in other languages or made of nonsense words. Dunn recalled that Patton was “really into Joe Meek, the Peter Thomas soundtrack to Raumpatrouille, Kagel and the tangos of Troilo”.

Greg Prato of AllMusic called it “the musical equivalent of a David Lynch movie”, and Mark Sutherland of NME “70 minutes of irredeemable excrement”. The band took it on its first world tour, across North America, Europe and Australia in 1995 and 1996. Theo Lengyel, a founding member, left after the tour over creative differences.

Patton met the composer and saxophonist John Zorn in 1990, and Zorn produced Mr. Bungle’s first album. Since they began improvising together in 1991, along with Patton’s discovery of the singers Demetrio Stratos and Diamanda Galás, he went deep into extended vocal technique, and Zorn is credited with teaching him how to improvise vocally with an ensemble. Adult Themes for Voice, released on April 23, 1996 on Zorn’s Tzadik label, is entirely vocal sounds with no other instrument, arranged as noise music; Patton recorded it in hotel rooms while touring with Faith No More, on a four-track Portastudio. AllMusic’s Greg Prato said “there isn’t a note of music on the album; it’s essentially noise”, and reviews were largely negative.

Pranzo Oltranzista followed in 1997, his second solo project, “Musica da Tavola per Cinque” or “Banquet Piece for Five Players”, based on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook, with Marc Ribot on guitar, William Winant on percussion, Erik Friedlander on cello and Zorn on alto saxophone. Neither record has words to quote. In some projects, Patton has said, he drops lyrics for preverbal sounds, because he thinks language “distracting information”; and he has said the voice is an instrument.

It is Faith No More’s sixth album, the first with the guitarist Jon Hudson, and the last before an eleven-year hiatus. Demos were begun with Menta while Patton was on the road with Mr. Bungle; after the band fired Menta, momentum died and everyone went off to side projects, which left it, in a later phrase, “a miracle baby”. Patton flew to Italy to be with his wife and wrote two songs there, “Home Sick Home” among them, in about a day. In early 1997 all five finally met in San Francisco with the Swiss producer Roli Mosimann, who got the band using Pro Tools. The cover photograph is Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomáš Masaryk, and the jacket shows his funeral, Gould’s idea.

It topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand and went platinum in Australia, while in the US it continued the band’s decline. Rolling Stone gave it one and a half stars, and later writers were kinder. The tour ran from April to December 1997, with Limp Bizkit opening some US dates and being booed by Faith No More fans. The band played its last show in Lisbon on April 7, 1998 and split that month. Patton has said the declining quality of the band’s work was part of why.

Fantômas began just before Faith No More collapsed, as a series of “spasmic” songs composed by Patton. He sent demos to the Melvins’ guitarist Buzz Osborne, Mr. Bungle’s bassist Trevor Dunn and Sepultura’s drummer Igor Cavalera, who said no, and recommended Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, who said yes. The band is named for a supervillain from crime novels popular in France before World War I, and from the French films of the 1960s. Patton wrote every song, and played vocals and samples.

The album is built on science fiction comic books: every song is a page number, “Page 1”, “Page 2”, and the artwork was mostly taken from the Italian comic Diabolik. Track 13 is not listed, thirteen being unlucky; it is only the fading of a cymbal from “Book 1: Page 12”. In AllMusic’s words, “if you’re looking for something completely original and cutting edge, Fantômas is highly recommended”. There are no lyrics to quote: of Fantômas and much of the Moonchild Trio Patton has said he avoids lyrics for preverbal sounds.

Ipecac Recordings was founded on April 1, 1999, in Alameda, California, by Patton and Greg Werckman. It was created for the sole purpose of putting out the first Fantômas album, and it is named after the vomit-inducing syrup, with the slogan “Making People Sick Since 1999”. It has put out Melvins, Oxbow and Isis, and most of Patton’s own bands. Its first year also brought the noise artist Merzbow, the special-education children’s band the Kids of Widney High and Fantômas; in 1999 Patton made an album with Merzbow, She, as Maldoror.

The label signs bands to one-record contracts only, “renting” or licensing records, and artists can leave when they like. It keeps overhead low and sends royalty cheques every six months; Werckman says even bands that do well are “stunned” by them. “I’m a musician first and a businessman second,” Patton has said. He got tired, he says, of labels that “didn’t understand anything other than giant rock albums”. He has self-produced and self-released most of his catalogue since, including the later Faith No More and Mr. Bungle albums.

Mr. Bungle’s third album is its most accessible, with its genre shifts less frequent and its songs more concise, and the recording was, said Dunn, “a bit of a nightmare”: partly in a rehearsal space Spruance had turned into a studio, with two 24-track tape machines and two ADATs linked, and over 50 tracks on some songs. Warner’s own press kit pointed to English pop, Elvis, Neil Diamond and Michael Jackson, and Trey Spruance named Brian Wilson as an influence. The band’s page names Burt Bacharach and the Beach Boys, blended with lounge, doo-wop, exotica, surf and thrash metal. The writing was much less collaborative than on earlier records.

Warner moved the release from June 8 to July 13 so it would not land beside the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication. Mr. Bungle said Anthony Kiedis then had them taken off summer festivals in Europe, and, after the band parodied the Chili Peppers at a Halloween 1999 show in Pontiac, Michigan, off the 2000 Big Day Out in Australia and New Zealand. The band toured North America, Europe and Australia and the 2000 SnoCore Tour with Incubus and System of a Down, where, Dunn said, they were “completely out of place”. Its last show for nearly twenty years was in Nottingham on September 9, 2000, and the split was confirmed in 2004.

Fantômas’ second album is a set of covers of film themes, played in many styles and not always faithful to the originals. The lullaby of Rosemary’s Baby was previewed on Ipecac’s site, and a tour of Europe in May and June came first. “The Godfather” is Nino Rota’s stately theme turned into thrash metal with scat lyrics; other pieces, such as the eerie lullaby from The Night of the Hunter, stay close to their sources.

Critics were warm. Pitchfork gave it 8.4 out of 10, finding Patton’s vocals the centre of its strength; AllMusic’s Blake Butler called it “yet another testament to the unabashed genius of Mike Patton and his co-conspirators”. Dave Lombardo’s “jazzy” drumming on “Experiment in Terror” stood out for CMJ. It spent two weeks on the Australian chart, peaking at No. 18. The band played it whole in 2008 and again at the 2014 Rockout festival in Santiago, Chile.

Patton met the Jesus Lizard’s guitarist Duane Denison at a Mr. Bungle show in Nashville, and the two began swapping music. Denison wrote the basic tunes on a four-track and sent cassettes; Patton added vocals and samples, and the album took about a year. Denison brought in Helmet’s drummer John Stanier, and Patton invited Kevin Rutmanis of the Melvins and Cows on bass. They cut it in Nashville in May and June 2001 with Joe Funderburk, who had worked with Emmylou Harris and the Judds. Patton called it “the closest thing to a rock band I’ve been involved with for a while”.

AllMusic’s Blake Butler gave it four stars, calling it “moody, violent, beautiful, sarcastic, vomitive, silly [and] heartstopping”. It reached No. 20 on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart. The band toured with Tool, whose fans did not take to it and often booed; Tomahawk also played the 2002 Big Day Out in Australia.

Lovage was a collaboration headed by the producer Dan the Automator, under his “Nathaniel Merriweather” name from Handsome Boy Modeling School, with Patton and Jennifer Charles on vocals and Kid Koala on turntables and samples; Kid Koala also toured with the band, on a 13-city US tour. This is its only album. It came out in 2001 on 75 Ark, with later reissues by Bulk, and reached No. 37 on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart.

The sleeve is a homage to the cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s N° 2. Reviews were mixed: Metacritic averages 66 from 12 reviews, with AllMusic giving 2.5 stars and finding Dan the Automator’s “strict-composer approach” sometimes “unlistenable”, and Blender finding it “works both as satire and actual make-out fare”.

In 2002 the Dillinger Escape Plan, whose singer Dimitri Minakakis had left, put out Irony Is a Dead Scene on August 27, an EP recorded with Patton on vocals. By the time it came out the band had been touring with its new singer Greg Puciato for nearly a year; AllMusic called it “a brilliant collaboration”. Patton had turned down a request to join a new supergroup of Guns N’ Roses members, later Velvet Revolver, and sang with the Dillingers instead. That year he also played Eyvind Kang’s Virginal Co Ordinates in Bologna, released as an album in 2003.

In 2004 he sang on Björk’s Medúlla, alongside the beatboxer Rahzel, and made Romances with the Norwegian Kaada, inspired by Mahler, Chopin, Brahms and Liszt with soundtrack elements, its track titles taken from 18th-century French songs. In 2005 came General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners, with the hip-hop turntablists, which Patton produced over two years and released on February 5 on Ipecac: free jazz and glitch, themed as a war between two musical styles. In 2006 he sang an operatic piece by Kang, based on Giordano Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus, in Modena, without a microphone; it was released as Athlantis in July 2007.

Tomahawk’s second album was made after the Tool tour, where the crowd booed the band off stage. Denison compared it to being pro-choice at a Bush rally. The band organised its own tour for the record, with the Melvins, Skeleton Key and Dälek, and said no when Tool’s Adam Jones offered to direct a video. Joe Barresi engineered and produced.

Critics found it more focused and unified than the debut, and drew comparisons to Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Pitchfork gave it 8.4 out of 10, and CMJ’s Tom Mallon called Patton’s vocals his most diverse since Mr. Bungle’s California. It reached No. 7 on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart and No. 137 on the Billboard 200, and charted in Norway and Australia.

Fantômas’ third album is a single extended song, built on the idea of surgery without anesthesia. Patton made it with Lombardo, Osborne and Dunn, with photographs taken from The Sacred Heart: An Atlas of the Body Seen Through Invasive Surgery, and the writer Richard Selzer’s voice among the credits. The name on the box was sometimes read as “Surgical Sound Specimens from the Museum of Skin” or a Selzer quote, but it is officially Delìrium Còrdia.

Reviews were mixed to positive. Rolling Stone gave it three stars, calling the 20-plus-minute final section “maddening” but saying the album “demands repeated listens, if only to hear the freakish wonder that is Mike Patton’s voice”; Pitchfork, at 5.9 out of 10, found it “gloomy background music” but praised the “intensity” of Lombardo’s drumming.

Fantômas’ fourth album is a concept record of twisted cartoon sounds and music, with a tribute to the obscure and dubious holidays of April: each of its thirty tracks is named for a day in April 2005 and some of its holidays, from April Fool’s Day to Walpurgisnacht. The limited edition was a spiral-bound April 2005 mini calendar with imagery by Yoshitomo Nara, designed by Martin Kvamme.

Pitchfork wrote that it “still suffers from the same flaws that hampered Delirium Cordia”: with the average track under 90 seconds, musical ideas “either bleed from one song to the next or don’t sustain themselves long enough to register”. That summer the band toured Europe with Terry Bozzio on drums, because Lombardo was on tour with Slayer; he came back for the last dates on September 15, 2005. Tool named Fantômas a major influence on 10,000 Days, the record that followed in 2006.

Patton conceived Peeping Tom in 2000, naming it after Michael Powell’s 1960 film. The record took almost six years, built from song files swapped through the mail with Norah Jones, Kool Keith, Massive Attack, Amon Tobin, Dan the Automator, Rahzel, Odd Nosdam, Jel, Doseone, Bebel Gilberto, Kid Koala and Dub Trio. “This is my version of pop music,” he said. “In a way, this is an exercise for me: taking all these things I’ve learned over the years and putting them into a pop format.”

It peaked at No. 103 on the Billboard 200. The first single, “Mojo”, with Dan the Automator and Rahzel, came with a video that features Danny DeVito, Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, Rachel Hunter and Dan the Automator. Reviews were generally favourable: Metacritic averages 64, Pitchfork gave 6.2 and AllMusic’s Cammila Collar 4.5 stars, calling it Patton’s most accessible work since California.

Tomahawk’s third album was made after bassist Kevin Rutmanis left, for reasons Wikipedia calls unknown. Denison and Stanier recorded in Nashville and sent their parts to Patton in San Francisco, who added vocals and samples; both Denison and Patton played bass. The songs are based on Native American compositions that Denison researched while touring Indian reservations with Hank Williams III, disappointed that the Native American rock groups he heard sounded so “normal”. He found transcriptions of traditional music, mostly a single melody line, often for a nose flute; the title nods to the uncredited composers.

Denison called it a “detour” from the band’s usual sound, and a concept album. Reviews were mildly positive: AllMusic gave four stars and Pitchfork 5.9 out of 10, comparing it to a film score. It reached No. 158 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the Top Heatseekers chart. No live shows followed, and the band stayed inactive from 2008 to 2011.

Patton’s film work began in 2005, when he signed to score the independent film Pinion, though it was held up and may be on the shelf permanently. He played two major characters in Steve Balderson’s Firecracker, and in 2007 gave voice to the monsters of the film I Am Legend. Later scores: Crank: High Voltage in 2009, The Solitude of Prime Numbers in 2010, The Place Beyond the Pines in 2012 and Stephen King’s 1922 for Netflix in 2017. He narrated Bunraku in 2010 and voiced Eddy Table in the short The Absence of Eddy Table in 2016.

He is an avid video-game player, and gave his voice to the force of The Darkness in 2007, reprising the part in The Darkness II in 2012; to the Anger Sphere in Valve’s Portal; to most of the infected in Left 4 Dead; and to Nathan “Rad” Spencer in Capcom’s Bionic Commando. On Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse he was the reformed rocker Rikki Kixx in a two-part episode on August 24, 2008. His scores, Wikipedia says, blur genres in a way described as “radical”, the way Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s do; he calls flexibility and following the author’s vision the most important qualities.

On February 24, 2009, after months of rumor, Faith No More announced it would reform with the Album of the Year lineup for a reunion tour, The Second Coming Tour. A compilation, The Very Best Definitive Ultimate Greatest Hits Collection, came out from Rhino in the UK on June 8. The band played Download, Hurricane, Southside, Roskilde and other festivals that summer, and into 2010 at Soundwave in Australia, adding covers of “Poker Face” and Michael Jackson’s “Ben”. After an eleven-month break it played four shows in South America in November 2011 and, with Spruance, the whole of King for a Day... in Chile, then more of Europe in 2012.

Then it went quiet again, Patton touring with Tomahawk in 2013. Mr. Bungle stayed away: Dunn told SF Weekly in February 2013 there would be no reunion, because that band “said what it needed to say”. Patton, asked in 2014, said, “Who knows?”, adding that he had said the same of Faith No More “and that happened”. On July 4, 2014, Faith No More played its first show in two years at Hyde Park in London, supporting Black Sabbath, and debuted “Motherfucker” and “Superhero”.

Patton adopted Bologna, home of his wife, the Italian artist Titi Zuccatosta, as a second home, and became fluent in Italian. He started listening to the pop of the 1950s and 1960s, intrigued by singers backed by orchestras rather than pop bands. He had thought of a covers record with a small band, then was offered the chance to write for an orchestra. The record is those songs, played live with an orchestra, a fifteen-piece band and a choir, assembled as composites of the first three dates of the Italian leg of the tour, like “a giant Rubiks Cube”.

It includes a Morricone song, “Deep Down”, from the 1968 film Danger: Diabolik, whose original singer Patton reached through Daniele Luppi, though she declined to take part. “Scalinatella” is sung in Neapolitan, which the conductor, a native of Naples, corrected in rehearsal. “You have to treat a song with respect, yet twist it up,” Patton said. It peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s Classical Albums chart, where it stayed for forty-two weeks, and reviewers compared it to Mr. Bungle’s California.

Tomahawk’s fourth album is the first with Trevor Dunn, of Mr. Bungle and Fantômas, on bass in place of Rutmanis. It was cut live in six days at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound in Nashville, with Collin Dupuis, who had worked with the Black Keys. A week of rehearsal was planned, but Patton had a death in the family and left for several days, so the band had “a day and a half”, Stanier recalled. Fifteen tracks were recorded, thirteen released, with a cover by the cartoonist Ivan Brunetti.

“Stone Letter” came out first, on Record Store Day’s Black Friday, November 23, 2012, and as a download on December 4. Reviews were mostly positive, with a Metacritic average of 79; Pitchfork called it “Tomahawk’s most straightforward, stripped-down release to date”. It reached No. 69 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the Hard Rock Albums chart. The band calls the sound “avant-pop”.

It is Faith No More’s seventh album and its first since Album of the Year, eighteen years before, the longest gap in the band’s career. It is also the first on Reclamation! Records and the first since Angel Dust with the same lineup as the one before, the fifth time Matt Wallace worked with the band. After the “Motherfucker” and “Superhero” debut at Hyde Park in July 2014, “Motherfucker” came first, on 7-inch for Record Store Day’s Black Friday on November 28, then “Superhero” in March 2015. Songs are shaped by the Cramps, Link Wray and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Reviews were generally favorable (Metacritic 79), Rolling Stone named it the second best metal album of 2015, and it won Metal Hammer’s Golden God for Best Album. In August 2016 the band played two shows with Chuck Mosley to mark the reissue of We Care a Lot; Mosley died in November 2017. Faith No More then went on hiatus.

Nevermen is a supergroup of Patton, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio and the rapper Doseone, with whom Patton had worked on Peeping Tom. It is their debut album. The artwork is by Keith Tyson, and a video was made for “Mr Mistake”. It debuted at No. 9 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart.

Metacritic averages 69 from nineteen reviews. Consequence of Sound said that when the three voices join, “they’re an unparalleled force”, and the Skinny called it “a timeless, genre-smashing work with a psychedelic soul”; Pitchfork, giving 5.8, found its best songs the ones that “temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere”.

Dead Cross is a crossover thrash supergroup: Michael Crain on guitar, Justin Pearson on bass, Dave Lombardo on drums and, from 2016, Patton on vocals. Lombardo, Pearson and Crain formed a live band in about twelve days, and with the vocalist Gabe Serbian it was officially formed on November 30, 2015. Serbian left in 2016 after recording vocals, which the band chose not to release. In December Patton was named as the new singer. The music for the debut was already recorded, so he recorded the vocals separately, and wrote his own lyrics.

Patton called it “a traditional hardcore record. It is very pointed, direct and visceral”: no keyboards, samples or orchestration, and he named the Accüsed, Deep Wound and Siege as the kind of stuff “we had collectively all grown up with and loved”. The band announced its first tour on May 22, 2017, to start on August 10. A self-titled EP followed on May 2, 2018, with two new songs and two remixes.

Patton met the French composer Jean-Claude Vannier in 2011, working on a Serge Gainsbourg tribute event at the Hollywood Bowl, and they “bonded immediately”. Patton had been “besotted” with Vannier’s music since hearing his arrangements for Gainsbourg. The record is Patton singing a selection of Vannier’s songs, Patton backed by a band in Los Angeles and Vannier by an orchestra in Paris. Vannier called Patton a “formidable vocalist”.

In May 2018 Patton played two shows called Forgotten Songs in Modena with the pianist Uri Caine, previewing “Chansons D’amour” from this album. Reviews were good: Metacritic averages 79 from six reviews, and AllMusic’s Thom Jurek called it “a dark jewel from two remarkable musical iconoclasts”, rooted in “sleazy chanson, lounge tropes, blues, cinema music, and sound library tropes”.

It is Mr. Bungle’s fourth album, its first in over twenty years and its first on Ipecac, a re-recording of the 1986 demo that Faith No More’s drummer had heard in a Eureka pizza parlour. Patton, Spruance and Dunn played it with Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Slayer’s Dave Lombardo. The band announced in August 2019 three reunion shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Brooklyn, and added more until there were seven; they played in February 2020, with the comedian Eric Andre introducing the band on February 7 and the original drummer Jed Watts guesting, and none of the Warner albums’ songs. Revolver wrote that the band played “zero of the songs that made them influential”.

The band then re-recorded the demo and three new songs. “Raping Your Mind” had an animated video by Eric Livingston, “Eracist” followed on September 24, and the closing “Sudden Death” on October 23. Dunn said they were “finally utilizing our Ph.Ds in Thrash Metal”; Metacritic gives it 81, “universal acclaim”.

Tomahawk’s fifth album came eight years after Oddfellows. The music was recorded years before the vocals, while Patton was off with other bands, among them Mr. Bungle; Dunn recalled that he, Denison and Stanier had tracked their parts about four years before, then waited for Patton. He thought what he got would have worked as an instrumental album. Denison called the sound “cinematic rock”, for its members’ shared love of soundtracks, and “Doomsday Fatigue” was inspired by the mood of westerns and had the working title “High Noon”.

Denison said the album is “an escape from the realities of the world”, written in the pandemic. Patton said “Eureka” was inspired by his home town, and “Doomsday Fatigue” by dwelling on the news during the pandemic until he was “having a hard time getting off the couch”. The singles were “Business Casual”, on January 21, 2021, and “Dog Eat Dog”, on February 26. It reached No. 1 on the UK Independent Album Breakers chart, No. 5 on the UK Rock & Metal chart, No. 18 in Australia and No. 34 in Switzerland.

Dead Cross was recording new material in December 2019, covered Black Flag’s “Rise Above” in June 2020 and released a video for “Skin of a Redneck” on December 23, 2020. Its second album was announced on July 19, 2022, with a video for the lead single “Reign of Error” put out the same day on Ipecac’s YouTube channel, and came out on CD, LP and tape.

In December 2022 Rolling Stone put “Reign of Error” at No. 92 on its list of the 100 best songs of the year.

In November 2019 Faith No More announced its first shows in five years; they were moved to 2021 because of the pandemic, and in September 2021 Patton cancelled all of them, citing mental health reasons. In 2022 he said he had been diagnosed with agoraphobia, which had cost the band and Mr. Bungle shows in 2021, and told the Guardian he had not spoken to the other Faith No More members since. In October 2024 Bottum called the band’s state a “semi-permanent hiatus”, and in April 2025 Bordin said Patton was “clearly unwilling to do shows” with it because of his Mr. Bungle commitments.

On September 16, 2025 Patton and the Avett Brothers announced a collaboration, AVTT/PTTN, out on November 14 via Thirty Tigers with Ramseur Records, with 2026 tour dates and spots on The Tonight Show and CBS Mornings. In early 2026 Mr. Bungle toured South America. Then, on June 16, 2026, Faith No More posted its logo with “2027” and signed with the Brazilian promoter 30e; Gould confirmed a tour for 2027, and in July the band confirmed shows in Australia and New Zealand with System of a Down.