Brother of The Band Perry Exposes Falsehood Behind New Lineup

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Kimberly Perry, Johnny Costello

At this point, we’ve gotten so far beyond the comical and nonsensical with this entire epic that is “The Band Perry” and their decade long implosion, reinvention, reconstitution, and now whatever the latest iteration is, all you can do is sit back and marvel why anyone would take any of this seriously, why certain media outlets put any effort out to legitimize it (and got duped), and why otherwise well-curated festivals have been booking this band, and artists continue to collaborate with them.

Kimberly Perry’s Batman villain-level maniacal manipulations have been going on for years. In the latest twist, brother Neil Perry, who was one of the two brothers in the band, has come out to say that he was terminated and has been frozen out of the family business that he helped build, and that the way his exit was portrayed by Kimberly Perry and specifically Rolling Stone Country was a complete and utter fabrication to try and save face.

The other brother in the trio, Reid, left in late 2025, after the band initially broke up in 2023 before returning again in mid 2025 with Reid, Kimberly, and Kimberly’s husband Johnny Costello. Currently, The Band Perry only consists of Kimberly and Costello as the two full-time members.

In multiple Instagram posts on Tuesday afternoon (8-12), Neil Perry said in response to a Rolling Stone Country interview where Kimberly Perry said her brothers were supportive of the latest iteration of the band without them,

I explicitly asked my sister not to misrepresent my support for the current version of the band.

By May of 2024, none of us were consistently on speaking terms, and Reid had stopped engaging in both personal and business matters. Kimberly came to me about bringing the band out of hiatus, and we initially agreed that moving forward with Reid was not something we were prepared to do. Kimberly reached out to him, and he confirmed he was not interested. I was then presented with three options: move forward as a duo, hold auditions or have her husband step in. I was fine with the first two, but soon understood Kimberly wanted to move forward with the third. We ultimately decided not to proceed.

A few weeks later, Reid rejoined the band through conversations I was not part of, and I was given three days to decide whether I would continue under those circumstances. At the end of that three-day window, I asked for a conversation the following week and was told I was out of time. I was approached again a month later, but could not move forward under those circumstances. At that point, I understood that continuing to tour was no longer realistically an option for me and I would soon be forced out by the 2/3 partnership agreement. What I did not agree to was losing my financial interest and access to resources and business I had spent my life helping build.

Shortly after the band signed a label deal, my brothers left the band. What remained is my sister and her husband.

Something I had spent my entire life building. A band. A business. A family. A name. My sister wanted her husband to become a member of the band, taking my brother’s place. I made it equally clear that I was not okay with that. By then, the situation had become about far more than the lineup. I had witnessed instability and broken trust that fundamentally changed my ability to move forward.Weeks later, I was terminated. The day after my birthday.

Then I watched a story emerge that didn’t resemble the one I lived.

That story emerged in a February 2026 “Exclusive” puff piece in Rolling Stone Country, taken from and interview with Kimberly Perry by Senior Editor Joseph Hudak on the Nashville Now podcast. Often, artists trade their “exclusivity” for the right to portray themselves however they wish, with the media acting like nothing more than a stenographer. That’s basically what Joseph Hudak and Rolling Stone Country did.

As Saving Country Music said at the time while deconstructing multiple falsehoods and mischaracterizations forwarded in the puff piece, Rolling Stone Country “characteristically did not offer her and scrutiny whatsoever on all the relaunches and gaslighting over the years.” At the time though, this had more to do with Kimberly Perry portraying herself as a victim of “Bro-Country” and being “kicked out of Nashville” as opposed to taking herself and her brothers down a primrose path to attempted pop stardom that imploded in their faces in one of the most dramatic falls from grace in country music history.

Lo and behind, Kimberly Perry also lied when she told Rolling Stone Country about her brothers, “I think they are very interested in the Band Perry getting landed as well. This was my family band in the living room before everything else. And so I just really feel encouraged.”

Clearly, the brothers were not contacted to corroborate this characterization, nor did anyone who has been paying attention to the doings of this band believe it for a second. But Rolling Stone Country put it in print, and clipped it and put it on the internet. Neil Perry very specifically included the clip in his Instagram rantings about the mischaracterizations.


Neil Perry also included a clip from The Bobby Bones Show. But in that one, Bobby Bones basically calls out the bullshit of the whole situation by saying to Kimberly Perry, “I think you pulled off the greatest coup ever. You were in The Band Perry with your two brothers. It’s kind of hard to be The Band Perry without your brothers. So then you come back, you, your brother, and your husband, then you drop your brother. If that was on purpose, genius level.”

Everyone in the industry seemed to know this is what happened: Kimberly Perry edged out her brothers in favor of her husband, so all the band’s financial and business assets rested under her own roof. But for whatever reason, Joseph Hudak and Rolling Stone Country did not. Kimberly Perry responded to Bobby Bones, “It just happened the way it happened .. but no, not strategic.”

Kimberly Perry has a long history of issuing lies that go unchecked in the media, including once claiming they never went pop, clearly contradicting their own on-record quotations.

How this latest iteration of “The Band Perry” landed a label deal and booking representation, ended up on the lineups of festivals like the Two Step Inn and Bristol Rhythm and Roots playing to backing tracks, and are still being taken seriously by anyone defies logic. If Kimberly Perry wants to make music with her husband (who you have to worry is also being held captive against his will and being subjected to regular peroxide treatments), she should knock herself out.

But The Band Perry died in 2015 when they released their first pop single “Live Forever” and it colossally failed to launch them into the stratosphere as planned. For the love of all things decent and holy, let this band die of death, and let everyone move on. And also, never take Kimberly Perry at her word.

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