Smith Westerns all attended the same elite Chicago high school, and rose to indie fame together at the turn of the decade. But the tour grind appears to have driven the group apart and now they are officially broken up.
A week after announcing a "hiatus" and final show, Cullen Omori told The Chicago Reader that they struggled to piece together a new project after attempting to take some time off.
"We decided we were going to take some time off with the intention that we would possibly revisit putting out more Smith Westerns music," Omori said. "And as the year went on it become more apparent that to get us back in the studio, to get us all on the same page, was gonna be something that was not very possible."
Guitarist Max Kakacek made the first move.
"He thought it would be a good time to stop since we hadn't done anything this year," Omori said. "And Cameron and myself were down with it. We were fine. We weren't angry or anything.
Omori made it clear the group will likely not reunite, despite originally calling the breakup a "hiatus."
"The band just didn't work," Omori said. "Both creatively and personally. The terminology I used, 'indefinite hiatus,' I thought was a clever way of saying 'it's not going to happen in the future.' But yeah, there's no plans to reignite Smith Westerns. It's broken up. Me and Cameron, when Max left the band, we decided we weren't going to dissolve it until we played these last shows because it sprang up on all of us."
The group's last album, 2013's Soft Will, failed to hit the Billboard 200 after 2011's Dye It Blonde notched the No. 114 position and garnered the No. 1 spot on the U.S. Heat chart.
