Gregg Foreman, a musician, keyboardist, bandleader, and DJ best known for leading The Delta 72 and serving as musical director for Cat Power, died at 53. His death on April 22, 2026, closed the career of a restless underground music lifer who moved between punk, soul, indie rock, and club culture with rare ease.

Born on October 5, 1972, in Philadelphia, he was raised in Valley Forge in a family that included his mother, Vicki Foreman, a school teacher, and his sister, Abbe Foreman, who became a Philadelphia-based photographer. He attended Conestoga High School and, by the time he was 12 or 13, had already started building a life around electronic instruments, buying a second-hand TOM drum machine and, according to another biographical account, his first Roland synthesizer and Yamaha drum machine as a teenager. That early fixation on machines and sound gave his career a shape that never really left him, even as he moved through bands, clubs, studios, and tours.

After high school, Foreman played in the post-hardcore band Junction, an early stretch of touring and recording that set up the next phase of his life. In the summer of 1994, he led the formation of The Delta 72 in Washington, D.C., before the band later relocated to Philadelphia. The original lineup included Foreman, Ben Azzara, Sarah Stolfa, and Kim Thompson, and one of its first statements was the 1995 single On the Rocks, jointly issued by Dischord and Kill Rock Stars. Over the years that followed, The Delta 72 released records through Dischord, Kill Rock Stars, and Touch and Go and worked with producers and collaborators including Brendan Canty, Eli Janney, Steve Albini, Royal Trux, and Shelly Yakus.

The band lasted until 2001, releasing three studio albums and building a reputation around Foreman's flamboyant, James Brown-inspired stage presence, as noted in tributes collected by NME. He was the kind of frontman who made underground rooms feel bigger than they were, but his importance was never limited to the stage. In Philadelphia, he also worked as a freelance writer for Philadelphia City Paper, interviewing musicians including Ian McLagan of Small Faces and Bobby Byrd of the James Brown band. As a DJ, he founded the mod-and-soul night The Turnaround, which became part of the influential Philadelphia party Making Time.

That combination of scholarship, taste, and showmanship carried into the next decades. Foreman joined Cat Power in 2006 and went on to become musical director for Chan Marshall's band. In a 2016 interview with LA Weekly, he summed up the accidental longevity of that partnership with a simple line: "What was meant to be two weeks is now going on 10 years." Domino later credited him as keyboardist in Dirty Delta Blues, the touring group behind Cat Power's 2006 album The Greatest and its 20th-anniversary 2026 EP Redux, recorded in Austin with Stuart Sikes, Judah Bauer, Erik Paparozzi, and Jim White, according to Domino Recording Company.

By August 2016, he had been living in Los Angeles for about six years, a move that widened rather than narrowed his orbit. His DJ work took him well beyond Philadelphia, with sets at David Lynch's club Silencio in Paris, Le Baron in Paris, and Beat Cafe in Tokyo. He hosted The Pharmacy, a radio show devoted to underground music, and interviewed figures such as Alan Vega, Anton Newcombe, Genesis P-Orridge, and Lydia Lunch. He also played with or contributed to projects involving Pink Mountaintops, The Meek, The Black Ryder, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and The Gossip.

His later years showed the same appetite for movement and collaboration. In 2015, he worked on James Williamson's Re-Licked project alongside contributors including Alison Mosshart, Bobby Gillespie, Jello Biafra, and Mark Lanegan. In 2019, he released a recording with Suicide frontman Alan Vega, with mixes by Jim Sclavunos and JG Thirlwell and contributions from Nick Zinner and White Hills. That same year, he joined The Gossip for a European tour that included direct support for The Cure at Madrid's Mad Cool festival. By 2026, Sequential described him as a Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and the band leader and key synth player for Kat Von D after beginning work on her debut LP in 2020 and continuing through her 2024 release My Side of the Mountain.

His death was publicly reported on April 22, 2026, and the tributes that followed emphasized not just his musicianship but his reach across underground rock, DJ culture, and collaborative scenes in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Wesley Eisold captured the scale of that life in a line that felt less like praise than recognition: "For better or for worse, he lived a life that others only claim to have lived and he was one of one."

Foreman's legacy rested in that rare kind of influence that did not always announce itself loudly. He connected scenes, gave shape to bands, brought deep record knowledge into clubs and radio, and left his mark on artists whose audiences may never have known his name. From teenage drum machines in suburban Pennsylvania to stages in Europe and studios in Los Angeles, he spent his life making culture move, and the communities around him sounded different because he was there.