Artist · chart history · #807 in indie & aaa artist polls
At the Drive In
Band El Paso United States Active 1994–2018
At the Drive In formed in 1994 in El Paso, United States and was active until 2018. At the Drive In has 29 chart appearances on 27 radio countdowns from 16 stations on RockLists, spanning 2000–2025. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “One Armed Scissor”, which appears on 23 lists with a best position of #37. The station that charted At the Drive In most often is CD101 (Columbus, OH), with 8 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2001.
At the Drive-In were a post-hardcore band from El Paso, Texas, and at their peak they sounded like a riot breaking out inside a sampler of every great punk record ever made. After a string of early lineup shuffles they locked into a five-piece: Cedric Bixler-Zavala howling up front, Omar Rodríguez-López and Jim Ward on guitars that tangled and snapped, Paul Hinojos on bass and Tony Hajjar on drums.
Relationship of Command, from 2000, was their third album and it is the one that collected the accolades, a landmark of the genre loaded with lurching, jagged songs like "Pattern Against User", "Arcarsenal" and "Invalid Litter Dept.". "One Armed Scissor" was the single that crashed through, a spasm of stop-start guitars and hollered vocals that felt dangerous on the radio. Then, having finally got everybody's attention, they broke up in 2001.
The pieces went in 2 directions. Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López started the Mars Volta, while Ward, Hinojos and Hajjar formed Sparta, and Hinojos later jumped over to the Mars Volta too. At the Drive-In reunited in 2012 to play Coachella and Lollapalooza, split again, then returned in 2016 with Sparta's Keeley Davis in Ward's place and made a new album, in•ter a•li•a, a year later, before calling an indefinite hiatus in 2018.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by At the Drive In on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One Armed Scissor | 23 | #37 | – | 2001 | |
| 2 | Invalid Litter Department | 2 | #47 | – | 2001 | |
| 3 | Arcarsenal | 1 | #315 | – | – | |
| 4 | Pattern Against User | 1 | #60 | – | 2001 | |
| 5 | Invalid Litter Dept. | 1 | #85 | – | 2001 |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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