Foo Fighters' longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins has died at the age of 50, the band has announced in a statement.
On Friday, March 25, a statement was released on the group's official Twitter page.
The statement read:
"The Foo Fighters family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins.
"His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever, Our hearts go out to his wife, children, and family, and we ask that their privacy be treated with the utmost respect in this unimaginable difficult time."
Foo Fighters are currently in the middle of a tour in South America and were set to perform at Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogotá, Colombia, at the time of Hawkins' death, Rolling Stone reports.
Dave Grohl, who had been the drummer with Nirvana, formed Foo Fighters in 1994.
Hawkins joined the group in 1997, having previously played the drums for Alanis Morissette. He went on tour with Foo Fighters that year to perform their album, The Colour and the Shape.
Grohl fairly recently referred to Hawkins as his "best friend and partner in crime" in his 2021 memoir, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music.
Grohl wrote:
"During his stint as Alanis Morissette’s drummer, long before he became a Foo Fighter, we would bump into each other backstage at festivals all over the world, and our chemistry was so obvious that even Alanis herself once asked him, ‘What are you going to do when Dave asks you to be his drummer?'
"Part Beavis and Butthead, part Dumb and Dumber, we were a hyperactive blur of Parliament Lights and air drumming wherever we went."
In a recent Rolling Stone cover story, Foo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel recalled how keen Hawkins was for the band to become better musicians when he first joined.
He said: "He came into a band that was pretty scrappy, in general, and kind of acclimated to that for a second, and then was like, ‘Hang on a second, what if we become good?' That was Taylor’s thing, like, ‘Why don’t we learn how to be better as a band and pay more attention to what we’re doing live?'"
The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year.
Hawkins' cause of death is not known at this time.