Update: Courtney Love, Melissa Auf der Maur Not Reuniting Hole
Hole’s Melissa Auf der Maur and Courtney Love at the 1998 Billboard Music Awards (photo: Kevin Mazur / WireImage).
Updating a story first posted here earlier today (March 4), Courtney Love and Melissa Auf der Maur are not reuniting their ’90s rock band Hole after all. Speculation began running high after Love posted a video of Auf der Maur on Instagram with the caption “so do we tell the kids about the tour,” to which Auf der Maur replied, “it starts with eternal love ….”
As it turns out, Love personally replied to SPIN’s Instagram post about the developments, writing, “No Hole reunion” and clarifying that her reference to a “tour” was actually about Auf der Maur “playing some shows [and] new songs” at some point. However, it’s unknown if she was referring to Auf der Maur’s previously announced promotional events in support of her memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry, which chronicles her experiences playing with both Hole and Smashing Pumpkins and is out March 17 through Da Capo.
Auf der Maur famously joined Hole for the band’s 1994 tour in support of the album Live Through This, mere weeks after the deaths of both Love’s husband Kurt Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff. She remained in the group for five years and was featured prominently on its 1998 album Celebrity Skin.
Later this spring, she will perform alongside the National’s Aaron Dessner and HAERTS at a May 30 benefit for Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School in upstate New York. The event will be hosted by The White Lotus star Walton Goggins and held at Basilica Hudson, which Auf der Maur co-owns with her husband, filmmaker Tony Stone.
Meanwhile, the Hole punditry comes amid the rollout of the Love documentary Antiheroine, an early cut of which premiered at Sundance in January even though it was unfinished. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Love was not happy was this version but is “dedicated” to eventually completing and promoting it. Both Auf der Maur and Hole drummer Patty Schemel are interviewed in the film, as are R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong.
Love hasn’t released music with Hole since 2010 and her lone solo album remains 2004’s America’s Sweetheart, although she’s been working on its follow-up for years and in 2025 drafted Auf der Maur to sing on it. She surprisingly popped up in 2024 as a guest on 070 Shake’s cover of the Tim Buckley classic, “Song to the Siren.” As recently as 2021, she told Vogue that a Hole reunion is “just not gonna happen.”
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