The Scorpions have announced that their forthcoming album, Sting in the Tail, will be their last, and they’ll be disbanding following an extensive tour in support of the album.

We are extremely grateful for the fact that we still have the same passion for music we’ve always had since the beginning. This is why, especially now, we agree we have reached the end of the road. We finish our career with an album we consider to be one of the best we have ever recorded and with a tour that will start in our home country Germany and take us to five different continents over the next few years.  We want you, our fans, to be the first to know about this.

It’s really cool that the Scorpions are  – wait a minute? They didn’t break up in 1990 after Crazy World came out? According to some crack research (aka, their Wikipedia page) they’ve released seven albums since then. Admittedly, some of them were only released overseas, but it’s still been at least a decade since they’ve been a household name.

Although they’d been around since the ’70s, the German quintet were one of the most popular bands of the ’80s hair metal explosion, unleashing songs like “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and “No One Like You,” before their 1990 ballad “Wind of Change” became the unofficial anthem to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had taken place the prior year. They were one of the first Western bands to play Russia, and are still a huge international band.

On the one hand, good for them for going out on a high note, releasing their final album and touring for a few years, then calling it a day. It seems like a little late to be doing it, but at least they aren’t just suddenly quitting before giving people one last chance to see them. But if they pull a KISS or Ozzy, announcing a farewell album/tour just to come back again after it’s popular, all good will towards them is taken back.

Sting in the Tail will be out in March.