Fifteen years after Oasis imploded, the dueling brothers at the heart of the beloved British band are once again teasing a comeback.

On Monday, Noel and Liam Gallagher — the band’s main songwriter and singer, respectively — each tweeted out an 11-second video with the date and time of August 27 at 8 a.m., flickering in the Oasis font. The Oasis Instagram account shared it too.

The posts come a day after Britain’s Sunday Times reported that anonymous industry insiders are “adamant” that the two will reunite for a series of high-profile concerts next summer, including a headlining slot at the Glastonbury Festival and what would be a record 10-night run at Wembley Stadium.

“See you down the front,” Liam then replied in a thread about the article on the social platform X.

He also posted a cryptic tweet of his own: “I never did like that word FORMER.”

The apparent hints are causing a stir on social media, where scores of the group’s fans are posting about the cultural significance — and personal finance implications — of an Oasis reunion tour. Several have joked that those looking to buy tickets should aim for the first night only, lest the famously fight-prone brothers break up the band once again.

Oasis, which started as a five-person band out of Manchester in 1991, is credited with reviving the genre of Britpop music, fueled in part by its rivalry with the London-based band Blur.

The group rose to fame with its 1994 album Definitely Maybe, and cemented its legacy with such hits as “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Champagne Supernova.” As of three decades later, Oasis has sold 75 million records worldwide.

The Gallaghers, who were the only constant members of the band’s ever-changing lineup, became known for their splashy antics both onstage and across the tabloid pages — as well as their own deepening rivalry.

Years of insults, incidents and infighting culminated on Aug. 28, 2009, when the band broke up minutes before they were set to take the stage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris.

“People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer,” Noel wrote in a statement at the time. He would later recount a backstage argument in which his younger brother grabbed his guitar and started “wielding it like an axe.”

The Gallaghers went their separate ways, but continued their careers in music: Liam and other Oasis members kept the band going under the name Beady Eye, while Noel formed his own band, High Flying Birds.

The two have performed their old hits separately over the years, though never with each other.

And they’ve publicly floated the prospect of a reunion more than once, including in 2015 and 2018. But such a reconciliation has yet to actually materialize — and the two have continued taking very public swipes at each other on social media all the while.

Eagle-eyed hopefuls, however, are spotting hints that detente could be on the horizon.

While performing at the Reading Festival on Sunday, Liam dedicated the Oasis songs “Half The World Away” to his brother and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” to haters of the band. As his set ended, the onstage screens flashed that same August 27 announcement video.

A brief timeline of the Gallagher feud, from fisticuffs to legal battles

Singer Liam Gallagher (L) and brother Noel Gallagher of band Oasis perform on stage in San Francisco in 1997. After the band split, they pursued separate musical careers and continued to trade public insults.

Dave Hogan/Getty Images

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Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Noel and Liam’s tumultuous relationship goes back decades, blazing a trail of barbs and bad blood that is nearly impossible to detail in full (though outlets like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Radio X have bravely attempted).

Here are some of the highlights, or low points:

• April 1994: Shortly before their commercial breakthrough, the brothers sat for an interview with NME’s John Harris and spent the entire time bickering — over the meaning of rock and roll, an drunken incident on a ferry several months earlier and how much they hated each other, among other things. A year later, they released the audio as a single called “Wibbling Rivalry” (subtitle: “fourteen minutes of verbal mayhem”). 
• September 1994: During a concert in Los Angeles, Liam hits Noel over the head with a tambourine and slings insults at both the band and the American audience. Noel storms off and briefly quits the band, but rejoins later that tour and uses the incident as inspiration for the track “Talk Tonight.” 
• Spring 1995: While recording the second Oasis album — (What’s The Story) Morning Glory — Liam brings a group of visitors to the studio while Noel is trying to work. Noel, trying to get them to leave, ends up hitting Liam on the head with a cricket bat. Years later, the rescued cricket bat was sold at auction with a certificate of authenticity. 
• August 1996: Liam pulls out of their “MTV Unplugged” taping at the last minute, blaming a sore throat, then proceeds to spend the entire performance heckling his brother from the crowd and drinking champagne. Later that month, Liam also pulled out of a U.S. tour just before it started — he ended up joining a few days in, but it was canceled after two weeks. 
• May 2000: During a night of drinking in Barcelona, Liam questioned the paternity of Noel’s daughter, prompting Noel to leave the band once again. He didn’t return for the rest of the European tour. 
• December 2002: After experiencing issues with his voice and walking offstage early at several shows throughout the fall, Liam wraps up the year by kicking a German police officer in the chest, sparking a brawl at a Munich bar and losing several teeth in the process. “I haven’t spoken to him directly,” Noel said at the time. “Why should we talk after what’s gone on?”
• October 2005: Noel says in an interview that his brother is “frightened to death” of him: “I can read him and I can f****** play him like a slightly disused arcade game. I can make him make decisions that he thinks are his but really they’re mine.”
• 2008-2009: Liam dishes it back in several interviews of his own, telling Q magazine at one point that Noel is “the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.” 
• August 2009: Oasis abruptly cancels its set at the V Festival in England, with Liam blaming a case of laryngitis. Years later Noel claimed his brother was actually hungover, which prompted Liam to sue him for libel (he eventually dropped the suit). That month, Noel quits the band for real. He told NPR about it in 2012: “We were backstage waiting to go onstage to 30,000 people in Paris. The tour manager came in and said, ‘Five minutes!’ We broke up within that five minutes. I’m not proud of that, but all things come to an end.”

The brothers kept slinging insults years after the breakup

The Gallaghers kept fighting long after they were no longer bandmates, insulting each other in awards speeches, interviews and social media posts (including the infamous 2016 “potato” tweet, which became a yearslong bit of its own).

There were occasional public calls for reconciliation interspersed throughout the drama, giving fans brief glimmers of hope.

Liam hinted at a truce in 2017, but called it off a month later. In 2018, he tweeted at his brother suggesting a reunion, but after no reply wrote, “I’ll take that as a NO then.” During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Noel released a previously hidden song recorded in 1995, to Liam’s apparent displeasure.

But by 2023, both brothers seemed to be taking the idea of a reunion more seriously.

Notably, that same year, Blur — their Britpop archrival, which had been on hiatus since 2015 — reunited to release an album and perform at a number of summer festivals. The Ballad of Darren was critically acclaimed, with outlets from the BBC to Mojo to NPR including it on their best-of-the-year lists. The group closed out its triumphant 2023 by announcing another hiatus.

“If Oasis hadn’t had reached their potential, and there was something left to do, it would be different, but I just don’t see what the point would be,” Noel said in a January 2023 interview. “It would be make a load of money, I’ve got a load of money. To do some monumental [venue] I’ve already done them.”

But he left the door open to the possibility, adding: “Now that’s not saying in 10 years’ time it won’t appeal to me…”

Two months later, Liam responded to a fan’s tweet asking if there was any chance Oasis might get back together.

“It’s happening,” he wrote.

At least, as the band would put it, that’s the word on the street.

Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year. The tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) has gone through a slew of revised editions, expansions and hack ‘n’ slay imitators, weathered a Satanic panic or two, seen itself replaced in the hearts and minds of the nation’s nerds by games like Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, only to experience a bold popular resurgence in recent years, thanks in no small part to so-called Actual Play TTRPG podcasts and web series like Critical Role, Dimension 20 and The Adventure Zone.

In other words: As a pop culture phenomenon, it’s been hacked, but it still slays.

I played my first game of D&D in 1978, just four years after its launch. I was 10 years old; it was summer. My friend down the street invited me over to his house, which usually meant forcing me to play catch with him in his backyard (read: He’d whip a baseball at my face, I’d flinch and let it bounce off me, I’d pick it up and toss it back so it landed in the grass 3 feet in front of him with a woeful thud; repeat until dinner time). On this occasion, to my surprise and delight, we sat on his screened-in porch as he took out what I have since learned was the box of rulebooks and polyhedral dice known as the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.

I loved it from the jump, largely because everything about the game was so deeply indebted to my beloved Tolkien (Wizards! Halflings! Orcs! That titular dragon on the box cover, atop its pile of gold!). But it didn’t last; my neighbor started at a new school in the fall, and we lost touch.

I didn’t start playing my first real, sustained D&D campaign until three years later. My friend David wanted to try his hand at being a dungeon master and invited me and three other kids I didn’t know to form an adventuring party. When I arrived at that very first session in David’s bedroom, they’d already created their characters — a fighter, a thief and a ranger. They urged me to play as a cleric, who could hang back and heal them whenever they got beaten up. I liked the idea of staying out of the heat of battle and just being the guy who patched my friends up, earning their deep and abiding gratitude. Feeling needed, appreciated. It was tempting, I admit. But then destiny, in the form of my nascent queerness, intervened.

David invited me to look through a thin paperback D&D supplemental rulebook called The Rogues Gallery — page after page of ready-made characters I could choose from. I flipped through the clerics, but nothing grabbed me. But then, on page 12, just above the chart of a class of characters called Illusionists, I saw it. Him.

The Illusionist in question.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The Rogues Gallery, by Brian Blume with Dave Cook and Jean Wells. 1980, TSR Games.

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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The Rogues Gallery, by Brian Blume with Dave Cook and Jean Wells. 1980, TSR Games.

It was a pencil sketch by illustrator Jeff Dee. A tall, thin male figure stands facing the viewer. In his right hand he holds a staff, while his left is open, palm up. He holds his arms slightly away from his body, and sets his shoulders at a rakish tilt — the resulting stance is somewhere between that of an insouciant shrug and a hearty “ta-DAHHH!” He is surrounded by a thick fog — the spell he is presumably casting — out of which leer several monstrous faces.

I liked that. But what I loved, what moved me, what sealed the deal for my young, closeted, queer self, was his outfit.

Thigh boots, for one thing. I mean, what was I, made of stone?

Plus, scandalously tight pants set off by a belt and dagger. And clinging to every ridge of his slim, muscular torso, a sleeveless tunic — a tank-top, basically — that still somehow managed to boast kicky shoulder pads.

This is the important bit, the part you must understand: I’m not just talking thin, epaulet-like shoulder bumps. No, these were dramatic, flared, Ming the Merciless meets Julia Sugarbaker shoulder pads.

The other stuff — the parted-down-the-middle blowout, the cheekbones, the diadem, the big chunky necklace? Icing on the cake. Superfluous. I’m self-aware enough to know that it was that tank top with shoulder pads that did it.

“I want to be an Illusionist,” I said, firmly, which caused my fellow players to roll their eyes and mutter the first of what would turn out to be a sustained pattern of homophobic slurs in my general direction. I didn’t, and still don’t, care. I was fierce, and I was fabulous.

I fell hard for the game, then. I subscribed to Dragon magazine, and regularly pestered my mom to schlep me to Dragon’s Lair, in a sad strip mall just north of Wilmington, Del., where I dutifully bought more rulebooks, more dice, more dungeon modules and a steady stream of lead miniatures that I painted very, very, very badly.

It wasn’t easy. Just as I was entering my heedless, full-bore devotion to the game, the Philly paper ran an article in its Sunday magazine which cited “experts” about the game’s purported Satanic roots. An article that, the following Sunday, caused the sweet, kindly pastor at our sleepy suburban Grove United Methodist Church to launch into what was (for him, anyway) a fire-and-brimstone sermon decrying the game. About the same time, novelist Rona Jaffe published Mazes & Monsters, an extended bout of literary hand-wringing over the game’s supposed deleterious effect on the youth of America, which was promptly made into a profoundly cheesy, absolute hoot-and-a-half of a TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks as a dude who suffers a psychotic break attributed to the game.

This article in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine (July 26, 1981) came down generally positive on D&D, while devoting several column inches to psychologists fretting that players used it to escape reality, and to religious figures who warned that the game was a work of Satan. The cover alone may have been enough to fire up our pastor.

Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine/ via Newspapers.com

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Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine/ via Newspapers.com

Over the handful of years I played D&D in earnest, back then, I had to talk my parents off the ledge every time some new magazine article or 60 Minutes segment came out spotlighting the entirely manufactured “controversy” around the game. It was exhausting. But I kept at it; I had to. I needed to.

Because there was this one time? When my friends and I were being rushed by a phalanx of orcs, and I cast an illusion of a deep pit on the ground in front of us, filled with bubbling acid and metal spikes, and the orcs failed their saving throws and believed they fell into said illusory pit, and impaled themselves on the illusory spikes, and dissolved in the illusory acid and thus died actual deaths?

That? That was cool. And, for just those few fleeting seconds, down there in the deepest, most tortured throes of my closeted, excruciatingly awkward puberty, so was I.

Ta-dah.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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