CRO-MAGS announce return of drummer PETE HINES
11-09-2025
New York hardcore legends CRO-MAGS have announced the return of drummer Pete Hines, skinsman behind the pioneering album “Best Wishes” (1989).
CRO-MAGS founder, frontman and bassist Harley Flanagan comments: “It’s so great to be playing with Pete again. It’s not often in life that you get the chance to go back and relive a past with friends that was meaningful to you both. I am really looking forward to this.”
CRO-MAGS just finished a summer tour of European headline and festival dates, and will return to the U.S., hitting the Midwest and East Coast before closing alongside Iggy Pop, SEX PISTOLS and others at the CBGB Festival in Brooklyn, New York on September 27. With Hines behind the kit, the CRO-MAGS are rounded out by guitarists Dominic DiBenedetto and Dave Sharpe.
Following a successful U.S. theatrical tour this summer, “Wired For Chaos”, the documentary based on Flangan‘s life, will be available on a DVD / Blu-ray package (with unreleased special features) on November 11, with a simultaneous release for video on demand.
In 2020, CRO-MAGS released their first album in twenty years with the critically acclaimed “In The Beginning”. To close out the same year, the band dropped the six-song EP “2020”.
In 2018, Flanagan, who founded the CRO-MAGS at the age of 14 and toured with the band for some 20 years, sued members of the group for allegedly using the CRO-MAGS name without his permission.
Claiming that CRO-MAGS was his idea when he formed it back in 1981, Flanagan filed a lawsuit against the then-most recent lineup of the group — including singer John Joseph McGowan — in part for copyright infringement, saying he trademarked the “Cro-Mags” name for recording in 2010 and for merchandise in 2009 and then again in 2017.
According to the New York Post, Harley claimed in the lawsuit that the other members of the CRO-MAGS took over the band around 2002 when “Flanagan‘s first son was about to be born… and Flanagan had to stop touring to help with the baby.”
“Wired For Chaos”, a gut-wrenching documentary based on the life of one of punk rock’s most notorious figures, Harley Flanagan, will arrive in theaters June 20. A new trailer for the film is now released.
Watch the trailer below.
This film is not about punk rock — it’s about an extraordinary life and surviving astounding circumstances against immeasurable odds. “Wired For Chaos” touches on child stardom, trauma, child abuse and neglect, violence, depression, and the evolution of a boy into one of modern music’s fiercest personalities.
Flanagan burst on to the punk music scene at the age of 11 in the late 1970s as drummer for his aunt’s New York-based band THE STIMULATORS, later founding the seminal hardcore act CRO-MAGS. Flanagan tells his inconceivable story through gritty footage of NYC’s downtown 1970s and ’80s music scene as the backdrop, alongside stories from friends and peers like Flea, Ice-T, Henry Rollins, Michael Imperioli, members of BAD BRAINS, BEASTIE BOYS, CIRCLE JERKS, ANTHRAX and many others.
While Harley‘s journey as a musician is certainly explored, “Wired For Chaos” centers on the lasting effects of trauma and its integration into his present-day life. Harley Flanagan was a child prodigy musician, who raised himself in the very adult world of rock ‘n’ roll. He was born to a Warhol Factory “it” girl, enmeshed in the Lower East Side artist sub-culture of the late ’70s and ’80s, surrounded by copious amount of sex, drugs and violence as victim and later perpetrator, simultaneously achieving punk rock legend status.
In addition to touring with his band CRO-MAGS all over the world, today Harley Flanagan is also a jiu-jitsu professor (under the tutelage of Master Renzo Gracie), devoted husband (having married a Park Avenue attorney), the father of two sons and a deeply introspective human. He confronts his past, hoping that it can bring him some peace, and pass what he’s learned forward to others struggling. Though he has moved on from the violence of his youth, it is never far away as he works through his very pronounced PTSD. His primal instincts to survive remain sharp. The film is built around a vast archive of material, scenes with Harley and his friends, several intimate interviews with Harley and his wife, and abstract imagery and animation.
Harley‘s childhood with iconic artists (Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Joe Strummer, Alan Ginsburg) looks enviable on the surface, but ultimately his DNA is riddled with the trauma of abuse and sexual violence, laying the groundwork for an unstable adolescence and rocky young adulthood.
Filmmaker Rex Miller‘s career spans more than 25 years and has yielded two Peabody Awards, several Emmys and two Oscar shortlists. He recently directed (with Sam Pollard) the film “Citizen Ashe” (CNN Films), which won “Best Documentary” at both the 2022 Critics Choice and Grierson Awards and was nominated for a Sports Emmy for “Best Feature Documentary”.
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