Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins dies at 50

Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters performs at the Innings Festival at Tempe Beach Park on Feb. 26 in Tempe, Ariz. The band’s longtime drummer has died, the band announced late Friday.

Amy Harris/Invision/AP

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Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters performs at the Innings Festival at Tempe Beach Park on Feb. 26 in Tempe, Ariz. The band’s longtime drummer has died, the band announced late Friday.

Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Taylor Hawkins, the long-time drummer for the mega-platinum Foo Fighters, has died. He was 50.

Hawkins’ death was confirmed by the band in an online post late Friday night. It did not release a cause, but called his passing a “tragic and untimely loss.”

“His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever,” the statement read. “Our hearts go out to his wife, children and family, and we ask that their privacy be treated with the utmost respect in this unimaginably difficult time.”

Hawkins, was scheduled to play with the Foo Fighters in Bogota, Colombia, Friday. He had been with them since 1997, three years after the band began.

With his frenzied, frenetic energy — he didn’t play the drums so much as pounded them — Hawkins was the perfect complement to singer and guitarist Dave Grohl.

“Part Beavis and Butthead, part Dumb and Dumber, we were a hyperactive blur of Parliament Lights and air drumming wherever we went,” the frontman wrote in his 2021 autobiography, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music. In the book, Grohl called Hawkins his “best friend and partner in crime.”

This story will be updated.