All signs are pointing to Courtney Love getting her band back together. The former grunge goddess who scored top 10 (Celebrity Skin, No. 9) and top 15 (Nobody’s Daughter, No. 15) albums on the Billboard 200 during her band Hole‘s late 1990s and early 2000s run posted a series of videos of former bassist Melissa Auf der Maur on her Instagram feed on Tuesday (March 3), sparking speculation about a possible reunion.
The post, whose soundtrack was the band’s 1998 Billboard Hot 100 No. 85 hit “Celebrity Skin,” featured a series of contemporary videos of photographer/author/musician Auf der Maur in a gauzy black dress, dark blue poncho with furry hat and a blue denim shirt dancing and smiling in front of a wall of her snaps from life on the road.
Auf der Maur, who joined Hole in 1994 before splitting in 1999, seemed in on the messaging, adding in comments, “it starts with eternal love …. ” While Love has not made any further comments, shortly after the initial tease she also added a vintage pic of herself with Auf der Maur and former guitarist Eric Erlandson taken at Los Angeles’ iconic Chateau Marmont hotel just a few months before the release of 1998’s Hollywood-obsessed, Grammy-nominated Celebrity Skin.
Love, who now lives in England, has largely receded from the music scene over the past decade, occasionally hopping up on stage as part of Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s Coverups cover band side project to sing classic covers during the group’s London shows.
Both Love and Auf der Maur have new projects in the pipeline, including the singer’s upcoming raw documentary Antiheroine (release date TBD), which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and the bassist’s 1990s rock memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry (March 17). Love rejoined Instagram in January after several years away and later that month she posted a snap of her and Auf der Maur enjoying a cup of tea at the Chateau.
Auf der Maur joined the band after the release of their breakthrough 1994 opus Live Through This, following the overdose death of bassist Kristen Pfaff and later played bass and sang backup on Celebrity Skin, but did not appear on 2010s Nobody’s Daughter, which was essentially a Love solo album with an all-new backing band. Auf der Maur briefly joined the Smashing Pumpkins in 1999 and then released her self-titled solo debut in 2004, followed by a second, independently-released effort, Out of Our Minds, in 2010.
Back in 2018, Auf der Maur and Love reunited to play some Hole songs during a tribute to Love at the Basilica Hudson, the upstate New York venue that Auf der Maur runs with her husband, filmmaker Tony Stone.
The pair also were back in the studio in 2024 for an unspecified project, and in a New York Times profile over the weekend about her book, Auf der Maur revealed that she spent five days in London last spring recording vocals for Love’s upcoming album. “I wanted her voice,” Love told the paper, “because it’s robustly an octave over mine. It’s surprisingly, to me, more robust and embodied now than it was in ’98 … Silver, tinkling, all the things I can’t do. We’re perfect together.”
Love has been coy about reuniting the band over the years, telling Vogue in 2021 that it was “just not gonna happen,” and then seeming to have a change of heart three years later in 2024 when she performed in London with the Coverups and told the crowd, “Later, I’ll be back in Hole.”
At press time no additional information was available about a possible Hole reunion and co-founder guitarist Eric Erlandson and longtime drummer Patty Schemel did not appear to have commented on Love’s posts. The last time all four members performed together was in 2012 during an unannounced after-party for Schemel’s Hit So Hard documentary.
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