Angels & Airwaves send capsule into space to announce new album, 'Lifeforms,' and tour that ends in San Diego

Ilan Rubin, Tom DeLonge and Matt Rubano of Angels and Airwaves

San Diego Union-Tribune

June 15, 2021 11:58 AM PT

Angels and Airwaves is set to take off again with a new album, “Lifeforms,” and a tour to promote it. Both were announced Tuesday via the launching into space of a renewable hydrogen capsule that played a preview of the album and unveiled the tour dates.

The San Diego band is helmed by blink-182 co-founder Tom DeLonge and The New Regime founder Ilan Rubin, who last year — as the drummer in Nine Inch Nails — became the youngest musician (at 32) ever inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Guitarist David Kennedy and bassist Matt Rubano complete the lineup of AVA, as Angels and Airwaves is fondly known by fans.

The band will release “Lifeforms” on Sept. 24. It is the first new AVA album since “The Dream Walker” in 2014 and the band’s sixth album overall.

The four-man group will promote “Lifeforms” with a 27-city U.S. fall tour. It will kick off and conclude in Southern California, beginning with a Sept. 29 concert at Riverside Municipal Auditorium and ending Nov. 7 at the all-ages SOMA in San Diego.

Tickets for all tour dates go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. local time, with the exception of previously announced Los Angeles and New York concerts that went on sale last month. Tickets for the Nov. 7 SOMA date are $44.50 in advance and $50 on the day of show (although tickets are likely to sell out in a near-instant on Friday).

SOMA, not coincidentally, is the venue where the Poway-bred blink-182 honed its chops back in the early 1990s before evolving into one of the world’s most commercially successful punk-pop bands.

DeLonge stepped away from blink-182 in early 2015 and was replaced by guitarist-singer Matt Skiba of the band Alkaline Trio. A new blink-182 album is now in the works and will feature Skiba, singer-bassist and band co-founder Mark Hoppus, and drum dynamo Travis Barker, who replaced blink-182’s original drummer, Scott Raynor, in 1998.

With blink-182’s 30th anniversary looming next year, speculation is mounting about whether DeLonge, 45, will reunite with Hoppus, 49, and Barker, 45.

DeLonge has devoted much of his time in recent years to his Encinitas-based To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. It’s a think-tank of artists, scientists and technology experts — including former Pentagon UFO researcher Luis Elizondo — dedicated to exploring unexplained scientific phenomena, in particular UFOs.

“Blink is in my DNA,” DeLonge told the Union-Tribune 2017. “I talk to Travis quite a bit and we try and figure out how and when it’s going to make sense. It’s not like I (permanently) walked away. They have someone doing my job for me (in blink). It’s just that I’m so busy. If I wanted to, I could be back (in blink) in a period of days.”