Alien Ant Farm is an American rock band of childhood friends formed in Riverside, California, in 1995. Their name comes from an idea original guitarist Terry Corso had about aliens and the Earth:

It was just my daydream about our planet being seeded by entities from other dimensions.

After self-releasing two EPs, AAF released their first full album Greatest Hits on Chick Music Records, featuring the original recordings of two future hits “Movies” and a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” (listed as “Slick Thief”). The album won Best Independent Album at that year’s LA Music Awards and, through a friendship with Papa Roach, AAF was signed to DreamWorks Records.

In 2001 AAF released ANThology with “Movies” as the band’s first single. It originally reached #53 in the UK and #18 on the US Alternative Chart in the first half of 2001. Next “Smooth Criminal” was released and it became an international smash hit, reaching the top 30 in fifteen countries. While “Criminal” was gaining steam, AAF toured with Linkin Park and Papa Roach, traveled with The Warped Tour, and headlined an MTV Fall Tour.

The success of “Criminal” shot “Movies” up to #5 in the UK and the top 30 in Australia & New Zealand in early 2002. The band appeared at several European festivals that year, Australia’s Big Day Out and headlined in Japan. On the way to a festival in Spain, the band’s tour bus collided with a parked truck, killing the bus driver and injuring several members of the band and their crew, one ending up in a coma.

In 2003, AAF released Truant and toured Europe with Metallica. The album’s lead single “These Days” was a minor Alternative and Rock hit in the US. The follow-up single “Glow” reached #5 in New Zealand.

DreamWorks Records was soon after sold to Universal and the band was placed under Universal’s Geffen Records, who shelved the band’s fourth album. AAF responded by bootlegging it and selling ‘a few thousand’ copies to fans.

Eventually Geffen relented and allowed the release of the album on a different label owned by Universal. The song “Forgive And Forget” was added and it was released as Up In The Attic in 2006. None of the album’s singles charted. Its lack of success led to an unannounced 2007 breakup, that would only last until 2008. The band then toured for a few years before beginning work on their fifth album Always And Forever in 2012, which found little success upon release in 2015.

Since then, the band continues to tour, taking part in 2016’s Make America Rock Again tour with Saliva, Saving Abel, Tantric, Trapt, Crazy Town and 12 Stones, as well as 2018’s Gen-X Summer Tour with Buckcherry, Lit and POD. As of summer 2018, the band had sold over 5 million units worldwide. In 2020, during their Covid-19 quarantine, AAF released another 80s cover, this time Wham’s “Everything She Wants”. Its music video features cameos by several famous musicians.