TWISTED SISTER will hit stages around the world in 2026, featuring the return of Joe “Seven” Franco on drums, a former member of TWISTED SISTER who last recorded and performed with the band in 1987 for the “Love Is For Suckers” album and tour. Playing bass will be Russell Pzütto, who has previously appeared in concert with TWISTED SISTER and has been a touring member of Dee Snider‘s solo projects.

Tour dates and details remain under wraps, tighter than your mom’s jeans in the ’80s. But if you’re a betting person, start saving your pennies and preparing your vocal cords now.

Two and a half years ago, TWISTED SISTER staged a one-off reunion at the Metal Hall Of Fame in Agoura Hills, California.

During an appearance on Wednesday, September 10 episode of SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”, Dee Snider spoke about TWISTED SISTER‘s decision to reunite next year to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary. Regarding why he changed his mind about returning to the road, nine years after the completion of TWISTED SISTER‘s “40 And Fuck It!” farewell tour, Dee said: “It really was a milestone thing. I turned 70 years old in March. And milestones, they are what they are, but at the same time, they’re reflection times for people. And me reflecting, I realized, wow, next year is 50 years since I joined TWISTED SISTER, since we became — me, Eddie (Ojeda, TWISTED SISTER guitarist) and Jay Jay (French, TWISTED SISTER guitarist) — became a band. And that’s significant. And the offers kept coming in and the interest is there to have us reunite. And I called the guys up and said, ‘What do you think?’ I mean, almost as a challenge to each of us to say, ‘One more time. Can we do it one more time?’ And certainly we’ve got people like (Paul) McCartney and (Mick) Jagger and Alice Cooper out there, and Ozzy — may he rest in peace — and how can you say, well, I’m 70. I’m too old. So, the guys said, ‘Seriously?’ I said, ‘Seriously. One more time. Let’s do it one more time.'”

Elaborating on his initial reluctance to step back on stage with TWISTED SISTER again, Dee told host Eddie Trunk: “Eddie, I go to quote you. I quoted you often… We talked about my performing style. We talked about the type of entertainer I am, and you said, ‘Dee, you really did paint yourself in a corner. You created a stage persona, a stage energy that people come to expect,’ and anything less will be disappointing, not just to the audience, but to me as well. So, yeah, I’m in shape and stuff like that, and you’ve seen me (in recent months guesting on stage) with Bret Michaels out there, but that’s four songs, dude. It’s not 18 songs. But you know what? I just said, ‘We’re still here, and let’s do it. Let’s challenge ourselves.’ And we’re doing it for all the right reasons. It’s not about money. It’s not about — none of those typical things. It’s ’cause we want to do it one more time. And there’s interest there all over the world, so, we’re going for it, man. 2026.”

Asked by Trunk if it’s fair to say that he was the one who initiated the TWISTED SISTER reunion this time around, Dee said: “Yeah, and I’m not saying it like I’m the one who made (the decision to reunite). I’m the one who was screaming from the top of my lungs, ‘Never. Ever.’ You know that. That was your introduction: ‘He’s been saying for a decade now, ‘Uh-uh. Never gonna happen. We retired. That’s it.’ … So the guys didn’t even bring it up to me. And Eddie, me and Jay Jay, we talk all the time, and we know offers are coming in, but it wasn’t even a discussion because it was accepted, ‘Dee‘s not gonna do it again.’ And I stopped doing my solo stuff as well as a few years back. So, it was basically that I said, ‘Hey, guys. I’m up for it if you’re up for it.’ And I’ve gotta say, they both — Jay and Eddie — had to think about it, ’cause they, too, were in a certain mindset, like, ‘This is behind us now.’ And then we had a group meeting on it and said, ‘Let’s go for it.'”

Snider also talked about his workout regimen and diet that will keep him in shape at 70 years old while on tour. He said: “If you’ve seen the web site, the (TWISTED SISTER reunion) announcement page, it’s a flat line (laughs) and then the heartbeat slowly starts coming back in. That’s not by accident.

“When TWISTED retired, I remember shows where we were doing our farewells around the world, and people were crying in the audience, because I’m saying, ‘This is really it, guys. We’re done,'” he continued. “And people were crying. I go, ‘Listen, I want a pancake. Look at me. I’m ripped to shreds. I want a carb. I’m gonna re-record (TWISTED SISTER‘s classic song) ‘I Wanna Rock’ (as) ‘I Want A Carb’.’ I said, ‘You know what it takes to look like this? It’s painful. It sucks.’ And I was 60 years old, and (people said), ‘Wow. He is in ungodly shape.’ Yeah. And I was miserable. So I’m not gonna tell you once that, once I was done with that… I’ve been enjoying life. I’ve been out… And COVID hit, and I was always very regimented with working out, and workouts, it was tough to go to a gym, unless you had your own gym. It was tough to go to a public gym. And all of a sudden I fell out of the pattern. So I’m being totally honest here. At 70, I said, ‘This can’t be it. I need to challenge myself to go out in a blaze of glory… I’m going, ‘Okay, March (of 2025). I called the guys. What do you say? Let’s do it. We talked. All right, let’s do it. When are we going out? Next late spring, summer. Good. I’ve got like a year to get in shape.’ So I’m back in the gym… But still, there’s a big difference between going out and doing four songs with Bret Michaels and holding the stage for 20 songs. So it’s gonna be a challenge. But I sure don’t wanna embarrass myself and the band doesn’t wanna embarrass itself. So, people, you’ll be impressed. I promise I will make some 20-year-olds feel really badly about themselves.”

Dee also addressed the fact that TWISTED SISTER‘s 2026 reunion will not include longtime bassist Mark Mendoza. The tour will instead feature Russell Pzütto on bass. Pzütto has played with TWISTED SISTER in the past, and has also been part of the touring bands for Snider‘s solo projects.

“I can only simply say irreconcilable differences and leave it at that,” Dee stated about Mark‘s absence from the TWISTED SISTER reunion. “I can’t get into the weeds and I can’t go down that path. And I won’t. But irreconcilable differences. People change, and however it is, and I’m not saying he changed; maybe we changed whatever it is. So in deciding who to use on bass, my bass player on the last two Dee Snider albums, ‘For The Love Of Metal’ and ‘Leave A Scar’, was Russ Pzütto. And he was Mark Mendoza‘s bass tech, and a great bass player… So, he did an amazing job on those two albums. He was a great guy to tour with. The band all knew him from years of working with TWISTED, and again, he seemed like a likely choice. As a matter of fact, one time he was Mark‘s choice to fill in for him. And one gig, it was in Belgium at Graspop, and Mark couldn’t make it, and Russ stepped in and played with TWISTED. So he actually has performed with TWISTED once before.”

Asked if he thinks the door is open for Mark to play with TWISTED SISTER again at some point during the reunion tour, Dee said: “I can’t imagine it right now. I can’t imagine it right now. I mean — I plead the fifth. I can’t go beyond that. But things have happened that I don’t see being reconciled, hence the term ‘irreconcilable differences.'”

According to Forbes, TWISTED SISTER has sold its remaining recording copyrights, trademarks and other name, image and likeness rights to Warner Music Group. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

TWISTED SISTER guitarist and manager Jay Jay French, who had been involved in every aspect of the band’s business for decades, told Forbes contributor Lewis Schiff that the decision to sell the rights in September 2024 was “driven by several factors, including the aging of the bandmembers and the fact that none of their kids wanted to continue in the TWISTED SISTER business.”

TWISTED SISTER‘s deal with Warner Music Group came nearly a decade after singer Dee Snider sold his Snidest Music music publishing catalog of 69 songs — including the band’s classic rock anthems “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” — to Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG).

The songs in the catalog have been featured in numerous national commercials, films, television and the Broadway musical “Rock Of Ages”, which had a three-year residency at the Venetian and then a one-year residency at Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas until January 2017.

Regarding why he chose to sell his publishing catalog in 2015, Dee said during a June 2023 appearance on the “New Theory Podcast”: “It’s math. And I was told there’d be no math (laughs) in rock and roll… But when you are getting your royalty checks every year, and they’re big — I’m in the 50-percent tax bracket between state and federal taxes — so they’re chopping off 50 percent. But capital gains on a sale of property is, like, 15, 20 percent. So if you can — they call it multiples. They give you 10 years’ worth of royalties in advance, or whatever that number is. When you do the math, you look at it and you go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna save 30 percent on taxes.’ It’s not even guaranteed that 10 years from now… I believe these songs will still have value. They’re taking a chance. And I can take this chunk of change and I can invest it and secure it and make it my retirement fund, which I did. So it goes from being a thing that comes in and you’re getting half of it taken away by the government every six months to a thing, guaranteed, ‘Okay, I know I can work with this.’ So a lot of people are doing it for just that reason.”

Snider went on to say that “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” are “the two most licensed songs of the ’80s. They’re like where ‘We Are The Champions’ and ‘We Will Rock You’ were in the ’70s,” he explained. “At first, there was a lull after the demise of the band and when grunge came in. But all of a sudden, I guess it was in the mid-to-late 1990s, this retro thing started, and there was this resurgence. And so we started getting this licensing. And that was great. And it just kept going. But now the song has transcended, particularly ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’, and it’s become… It’s almost a folk song. Not like it’s acoustic, but folk in the sense that it just is a staple. And so it’s now taken a life of its own, so it’s not even a retro thing anymore. It just keeps popping up. So you get a movie like ‘Ready Player One’, Steven Spielberg‘s movie, and there it is in all its glory. I’m, like, ‘Thank you, God.'”

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “Stay Hungry” were the biggest hit single and album, respectively, in TWISTED SISTER‘s career. Snider said “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is now part of America’s cultural fabric. “(It has proven) itself to be a folk song,” he said. “It was just in that Steven Spielberg movie, ‘Ready Player One’; it was the finale of that movie. Here, all these years later, the big finale of Steven Spielberg‘s big movie, and the guys holds up a boombox, and the entire battle scene is set to ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’.”

In a 2018 interview with SiriusXM‘s Eddie Trunk, Snider said that he is now glad he didn’t got an offer for the catalog a couple of decades ago when he really needed the money. “I bottomed out in the ’90s; I was dead broke,” he said. “If I had been made an offer for anything, for nothing, I would have sold. But there was zero interest — zero. (That stuff was thought of as) buried and over. No one saw it coming back. Metal was a dirty word. You couldn’t touch my catalog with a 10-foot pole — thankfully, because I would have done it for pennies on the dollar. Because I was broke.”

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” has been used in commercials for hotel chain Extended Stay America, Claritin, Walmart, Stanley Steamer and Yaz birth control.

The song’s lyrics say in part “Oh you’re so condescending/Your gall is never ending/We don’t want nothin’/Not a thing from you.”

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” was first released as a single (with B-side song “You Can’t Stop Rock ‘N’ Roll”) on April 27, 1984. The “Stay Hungry” album was released two weeks later, on May 10, 1984. The single made #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, making it TWISTED SISTER‘s only Top 40 single, and the song was ranked #47 on VH1‘s “100 Greatest ’80s Songs”.

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” was written solely by Snider. As influences for the song, he previously cited the glam rock band SLADE, the punk band SEX PISTOLS, and the Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful”.