Since the foundation of the band in 1988, Eugene Robinson has been the singer of Oxbow, providing an intense and expressive vocal style that has helped to define the San Francisco experimentalists’ sound. That’s coming to an end. In a message posted to his Substack, Robinson announced Sunday that he’s leaving the band.

Oxbow were in the middle of a European tour, but the last five shows have been scrapped. Robinson’s message implies that some irreconcilable personal differences with one or more members of Oxbow led to the split. In the following excerpt, he compares his departure to Dr. Dre leaving Death Row Records:

…after 36 years of creative work I can’t think of anything more horrible than to have to face the fact that I am now like Dr Dre. Not in the I Am a Billionaire part, but in the part where he left Death Row records. I remember him famously being called on to explain why he left and since he was dealing with Suge Knight, a man who if he wasn’t already in prison for killing someone might have actually killed some other one, he was…circumspect.

Circumspect, though he did say some version of this: you ever go to a party, and you start to get uncomfortable, and then you get so uncomfortable that you have to leave? That’s why I left Death Row.

While I don’t feel that my life is being threatened, my physical life, I do feel, under the weight of irreconcilable differences, none of them aesthetic or musical, that I now must leave OXBOW. Recent circumstances have caused me several dark nights of the soul and while it feels/seems crazy to kill my involvement in that which I started, I think it necessary so that maybe a kind of healing can take place that will make OXBOW a comfortable place for me to be again. If not, then not.

He also says he’s worried Oxbow “might have contributed to the misery of the world,” though that part of the message is even more vague:

So that’s where we are, and this is where I am. For the first time in just about forever I don’t have any idea of what to do. I’ve always envisioned that by bringing OXBOW to the masses I was engaged in what might crazily be considered G-d’s work. Bring me your lonely, downtrodden and so on…a tribe for people who have no tribes. Sure I’ve punched people in the face at our shows before but this was usually a course correction for people who thought punching me in the testicles was sexy.

However, the very real prospect that we might have contributed to the misery of the world makes me sick to my stomach.

In his message, Robinson reflects on how he originally intended Oxbow’s 1989 debut album Fuckfest to be a suicide note, but the positive response to it helped him see suicide as “a permanent solution to some ‘temporary’ problems.” He says for the first time in decades he doesn’t have a clue what he’ll do next. Read the message here.