For a band that was occasionally dismissed as a joke or a fad when it began confusing mainstream listeners with their idiosyncratic art-punk more than a half century ago, Devo is sure having a big 2025.
After playing Radio City Music Hall for SNL 50: The Homecoming Concert in February, talks began with The B-52s — another conceptual, quirky band who was featured on the NBC special — for a co-headlining tour. That trek, the Cosmic De-Evolution Tour with opener Lene Lovich, kicked off Wednesday (Sept. 24) night in Toronto, and follows the Netflix premiere of the new documentary Devo, helmed by Chris Smith (director of the 1999 cult classic American Movie and the 2023 Netflix doc Wham!). Beyond its 2025 tour, it was recently announced that Devo will play both weekends of Coachella in 2026. “We’re going to be playing to some pretty big crowds,” muses Devo co-founder Gerald Casale.
In a nod to the title of Devo’s subversive, nine-minute art film In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976), I’ll start this article at the end of my interview with Casale, Bob Mothersbaugh and Mark Mothersbaugh, before moving on to the meat-and-spuds Q&A. Prior to signing off the Zoom call, Casale called attention to a poster of the 1920 horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on my wall. “The story goes (the director) got in trouble with the authorities for it, and he had to edit the whole thing so it seemed like a dream,” he shares of a film which depicts authority as evil, or at least insane. “When it was real, that was unacceptable.”
Devo knows a thing or two about delivering uncompromising observations about human nature and unsettling predictions for our future under the guise of fantasy. Since the mid ‘70s, the Akron, Ohio rock band has explored conformity, capitalism and how it relates to what can sometimes seems like humanity’s race to the bottom – i.e., “de-evolution,” or Devo for short — alongside a colorful cast of characters while wearing matching suits, energy dome hats and plastic hairpieces.
Here, Casale and the Mothersbaugh brothers offer their candid thoughts about the Netflix documentary, artificial intelligence, FCC censorship and their tour with the B-52s.
