“Please hold while we get our shit together,” Joe Jonas tweeted in October 2013, shortly before the Jonas Brothers, one of the world’s biggest boy bands, announced their indefinite split.
Now, roughly six years later, the Jonas Brothers — Joe, big brother Kevin, and solo superstar Nick — are back together after taking time off to put family first.
“When it ended it was not good,” Nick said during a reunion interview on the Elvis Duran Show. “It was a couple years of rebuilding our family, and in our mind it seemed impossible for us to do this ever again.”
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A lot happened in those years. Nick launched a successful career as a pop crooner and recently married actress Priyanka Chopra. Joe started his own band, DNCE, and got engaged to Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner. Kevin dabbled in reality TV, had two daughters with his wife Danielle, and founded several real estate and communications companies. The brothers also began to film a documentary about their lives about a year ago, which they say sparked the idea of getting back together.
“[It] was great because we had to have real conversations and not hold back,” Kevin said, adding that the filming process was like unintended therapy for the brothers. “So for us, it worked out in a good way.”
The band abruptly pulled the plug on a comeback tour and album when they broke up in 2013. But on Friday, they released their first new music since with their new single “Sucker,” which dropped with a video featuring the three brothers and Chopra, Turner, and Danielle Jonas partying in an English castle. According to the brothers, the song is a result of being closer than ever.
“We had to work through and understand what we were going through when we were that young,” Joe said during the interview, taking stock of the pressures of immense fame at a young age. It’s not the first time he’s spoken out about it: just after the band broke up, Joe penned an essay for New York magazine detailing his experiences as the “middle Jonas brother,” in which he talked about losing his virginity, smoking weed with fellow Disney darlings Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus, and the band falling apart due to their different musical directions and personal lives.
Joe said returning to music was out of the question for a long time, for a good reason: “It was interesting because for so many years we just put it under the rug,” he added. “We said, ‘We’re done, let’s just try to rebuild our friendship and our relationship as brothers.’”