What Happened to Dru Hill? Reunited and Back on Tour in 2026

Four kids from Baltimore who met flipping fudge at the Inner Harbor spent the late 90s stacking R&B number ones, and then one of them put on silver hair and made “Thong Song.” After that, Dru Hill mostly disappeared from the charts, cycled through more lineup changes than most people can name, and became a group you heard on the radio without wondering where they went. So where are they now? Thirty years after their debut, they are back together and playing arenas.

01Profile

Group name

Dru Hill

Formed

Baltimore, Maryland, 1992

Where the name comes from

Druid Hill Park in West Baltimore, locally shortened to "Dru Hill"

Founding members

Tamir "Nokio" Ruffin, Mark "Sisqo" Andrews, Larry "Jazz" Anthony, James "Woody" Green

Lead singer

Sisqo, reportedly born November 9, 1978, which makes him 47 as of this writing

Signature songs

"Tell Me," "In My Bed," "Never Make a Promise," "How Deep Is Your Love," "These Are the Times"

Studio albums

Four, from Dru Hill (1996) to InDRUpendence Day (2010)

2026 lineup

Sisqo, Nokio, Jazz, Scola, Smoke, Black

Six names on that last line, three of them originals. If you have not checked in on Dru Hill since the Clinton administration, that number alone tells you most of the story.

02The Rise: Four Kids From the Fudgery

A group named after a park

Nokio put the group together in Baltimore in 1992, and the four members famously solidified as teenagers working at the Fudgery, the singing candy shop at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor where employees perform for customers while they work. It was, in retrospect, an absurdly good training ground: you either learned to hold a note in front of strangers or you did not last the summer. They took their name from Druid Hill Park, the huge green space in West Baltimore that locals shorten to “Dru Hill.”

The debut that would not quit

Their first real break came from a soundtrack. “Tell Me,” recorded for the 1996 Whoopi Goldberg film Eddie, introduced the group’s formula: Sisqo’s acrobatic lead, Jazz’s smoother counterweight, and four-part harmony that sounded like church choir kids who had discovered New Jack Swing. The self-titled debut arrived in November 1996, went platinum, and peaked at No. 23 on the Billboard 200 while producing “In My Bed,” “Never Make a Promise” and “5 Steps.”

What made Dru Hill different from the boy-band wave cresting around them was that they were unmistakably an R&B vocal group, closer to Jodeci than to anything on TRL. They sang together, they danced hard, and they were young enough to be marketed as heartthrobs without anyone having to pretend they could not actually sing.

Enter the Dru

Enter the Dru (1998) was the peak. “How Deep Is Your Love,” built for the Rush Hour soundtrack with a Redman verse bolted on, became the song most casual listeners still associate with the group, and “These Are the Times,” written and produced by Babyface, gave them a ballad that has aged remarkably well. Across their run they placed seven singles in the Billboard Hot 100’s top 40. For a stretch of about two years, Dru Hill were as close to a sure thing as R&B radio had.

03The Turning Point: When the Dragon Went Solo

Then came the silver hair. Sisqo’s solo debut Unleash the Dragon (1999) did not just do well, it detonated. “Thong Song” became one of the defining pop novelties of the era and “Incomplete” went to No. 1, and suddenly the frontman of a respected R&B quartet was a standalone pop star with a signature look and a catchphrase. The group has never fully escaped the gravitational pull of that moment.

Almost simultaneously, the original lineup came apart. Woody left in 1999 and turned to gospel, releasing the album Soul Music on Kirk Franklin’s Gospo Centric label; by his own later accounts and reporting from the period, a frightening incident during a trip to Paris pushed him toward his faith. The group effectively went on ice while Sisqo’s solo career ran its course.

They regrouped in 2002 on Def Soul, adding a fifth member, Scola, and released Dru World Order. It underperformed commercially, and according to reporting at the time, Def Jam parted ways with the group by 2004 after years of limited output. That is the hinge of the whole story: not a scandal, not a collapse, just a window that opened, a solo hit that swallowed the group’s momentum, and a label that stopped waiting.

• 1992Nokio forms the group in Baltimore; the four members later solidify while working at the Fudgery.
• 1996"Tell Me" breaks through via the Eddie soundtrack; the platinum debut album follows in November.
• 1998Enter the Dru delivers "How Deep Is Your Love" and "These Are the Times."
• 1999Sisqo releases Unleash the Dragon; Woody leaves for gospel music.
• 2002The group reunites with new member Scola for Dru World Order.
• 2004Def Jam parts ways with the group, per reporting at the time.
• 2010InDRUpendence Day arrives — still their most recent studio album.
• 2020TV One's Unsung devotes an episode to the group's success and turmoil.
• 2023A 25th anniversary tour reunites past and present members on one stage.
• 2026The R&B Lovers Tour, a hometown AFRAM set, and a teased Las Vegas residency.

04The Revolving Door of Dru Hill

Here is the thing that genuinely confuses people: if you saw Dru Hill in 2005, 2012 and 2026, you may have seen three different groups.

Woody came back around 2001 and stayed until 2008, when he stepped away for good. His replacement, Tao, arrived through an actual talent search — a “Dru Idol” competition held in Baltimore — which is either charmingly scrappy or slightly alarming depending on how precious you are about original lineups. In 2018, Jazz and Tao both exited, and Smoke and Black, formerly of the group Playa, came in. At one point Sisqo was the only founding member left standing, and he has been candid about being the constant in a rotating cast.

That churn is a big part of why the group faded from public consciousness even while working steadily. It is hard to build a comeback narrative when the roster on the poster keeps changing, and it is harder still when the frontman’s solo hit is more famous than anything the group recorded together.

The correction came in 2023. For their 25th anniversary, Dru Hill did something smart: instead of picking a canonical lineup, they put nearly everyone on stage at once. Founding members Sisqo, Nokio and Jazz shared the bill with Scola, Tao, Smoke and Black — a group that had spent two decades splintering, playing as an expanded ensemble. The version touring in 2026 is a slightly tightened take on that idea: Sisqo, Nokio and Jazz plus Scola, Smoke and Black.

05What Dru Hill Are Doing Now

An arena tour with 90s R&B royalty

The biggest development is that Dru Hill spent most of 2026 on an arena tour. In September 2025, Keith Sweat announced the R&B Lovers Tour with Joe, Dru Hill, Ginuwine and Kut Klose, a package that opened February 13, 2026 in Norfolk, Virginia, and ran through the spring with stops in Atlantic City, Birmingham, Charlotte, Orlando, Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit. Additional dates have been added since, including a listing at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena for August 29, 2026.

This is the register Dru Hill now operates in, and there is no shame in it: multi-act legacy bills at 10,000-seat rooms, where four acts each deliver a tight, hit-dense set. It is a business model that has quietly kept a generation of 90s R&B acts working full-time.

A hometown 30th anniversary

In June 2026, the group played AFRAM in Baltimore — the free Juneteenth-weekend festival celebrating its own 50th anniversary — on the Amazon Music Mainstage alongside Charlie Wilson, Tamia and PJ Morton. The venue was Druid Hill Park, the place they are named after, in the year marking three decades since their debut. It is difficult to script a neater full-circle moment, and reporting ahead of the festival suggested Woody might turn up as a guest.

Vegas, and maybe new music

In a March 2026 radio interview with Raleigh’s K97.5 ahead of a Lenovo Center date, Sisqo teased a Las Vegas residency, hinting at Excalibur as the venue because the castle-and-dragon branding lines up with his own. He also drew a line under what the group is selling in an era of processed vocals.

We don’t use none of that. We just get up there and sing. — Sisqo, K97.5 interview, March 2026

He made the same point to NY1 in November 2025 before a Bronx show at Lehman Center, describing what audiences get as “that real live soul singing.” As for new material, the group’s official site says they are recording, and Sisqo has told interviewers that new music from both Dru Hill and his solo catalog is likely — but no album has been announced, and the last studio record remains InDRUpendence Day from 2010. Treat the new-music talk as intent rather than a release date.

06Summary

Dru Hill never really vanished; they just stopped being a chart story and became a touring one. The group that got overshadowed by its own lead singer has spent the last few years doing the least glamorous and most effective thing available to a legacy act — getting the original voices back in the same room and going to work.

If you only know them from “Thong Song” adjacency, that is exactly the misunderstanding this reunion is designed to fix. Thirty years on, the pitch is simple — six men, live harmony, no autotune — and on a bill with Keith Sweat and Ginuwine, it turns out that is still worth an arena ticket.