Dear reader of this local music site, I assume you are familiar with the Vans Warped Tour. Kevin Lyman’s legendary “underground” touring festival historically brought abrasive, parent-bothering music to underserved markets like Kansas and Connecticut in a grueling caravan march across the country. Structured as a one-day festival, an avid concertgoer could watch 12-15 of the 80-plus bands on offer in a given day, and if you lived in one of these markets, it might be your only chance to see them all year.
I attended Warped Tour every year from 2010 to 2014, and I loved it. I loved stumbling across The Dillinger Escape Plan and having my mind blown; I loved inadvertently witnessing 3OH!3 blow the metaphorical roof off. I loved catching the eye of a fellow ska fan across multiple sets as we skanked away the day. I loved being accosted in line by a CD-selling pop-punker, and the Mad Max-esque dust cyclones that a circle pit kicked up. I loved sharing music with my friends, egging each other to crowdsurf and scarfing quarter-pounders afterward. The Tour was home for a day.
If your music annoyed older people, you were among your own thousands of freaks in miniskirts and Tripp pants and sweltering black cotton, pounding young, unsupported skate-shoe arches across the dirt lots, sweating and bumping and moshing and breathing dust until the snot ran gritty and dried up as you dehydrated. One collective scream of freedom to run and sing and buy butt-ugly merchandise until the wallets and the waters ran empty.
This June, I found myself in possession of a free two-day pass to the DC Tour (thank you Zach and Vanessa). So on a Friday, I boarded Amtrak’s Carolinian with a laptop full of entertrainment and as open a mind as I could muster. The overlaps in the Venn diagram of music I enjoy and music offered at Warped Tour are slimmer than ever. In my mid-20’s haste to cast away musical immaturity, had I discarded any babies with my bathwater? I shipped out cautiously optimistic.
It’s been ten years since my last festival experience. I know, theoretically, that I cannot walk or stand or dance the way I did then. Shuffling obediently forward Saturday morning as the mile-long mob coalesced into security lines, I wondered what had actually drawn me back. My favorite concert format is the three-band matinee; I secretly thrill when the show ends at 10. Had I signed a check my body couldn’t cash? I decided not to think about it and just bounce between the stages. I took no notes and no pictures.
Here’s every band I watched, from memory.
Saturday
Revival emo long-gamers Free Throw were finishing when I arrived. I caught “Two Beers In”, some long-dormant corner of my brain lighting up to answer the chorus’ leading “FUCK” with the refrain “everything about this”. I silenced it, cringing internally. For me, those days are gone, but good for them landing the Tour.
I half-hoped this might be the Philadelphia gem Clique, miraculously revived. It was not. This Clique is a hardcore band in the classic mush-mouth beatdown style.
Here is as good a place as any to note Warped Tour’s new format: six stages arranged in three pairs, only three bands play at once. Each double-stage is massive and commands so much open blacktop that getting between them means a quarter-mile hike, or more if you want to look at anything besides jumbotrons. Merch tents are mostly corralled into one corner, charities and services into another.
Warped Tour has always favored parking lots over stadium space, but I’ve never seen another set up entirely outside and entirely paved.
After Clique, I stuck around to check out Trxvis, who play high-pitched pop-punk with all the edges sanded off. It reminded me of car commercials. It occurs to me now that the “discovery” I treasured happened on the family laptop at my parents’ dining room table, grinding through Myspace links and iTunes previews.
The day of the event held few surprises, but few regrets. That exploration used to be standard practice, and I wonder then if I’ve made a mistake neglecting it.
Juvenile California pop-punk à la New Found Glory with a sheen of autotune. Are the adults who came to relive their youth still looking for new youthful music? Or is there a scene of youngsters entirely invisible to me discovering old bands via young bands? I am happiest believing the latter.
Unserious hardcore, but everybody’s in on the joke. As the International Superheroes of Hardcore have taught us: write intentionally derivative music, get derivative music.
The Wrecks’ LA pop-rock has an edge in person that doesn’t come through on their records. Lead vocalist Nicholas Anderson dominates the stage, often stretching his usually smooth vocals into a scream. Stripped of studio trappings, these pop-rock songs turn into straight rock bangers. The Wrecks are going places.
A fine pop band trying to also be a pop-punk band, but not quite pulling off either. I scanned the crowds sitting in sparse shade they could find, or camped at tables by the food vendors, and wondered if they had the right idea. Come for three or four bands, conserve energy in between, skip the short sets, and go hard for the big names at night.
Do they feel bad about paying so much for so little? Then again, they don’t leave with sunburn or pay $10 for a french fry lunch. They hear the best mixes on fresh ears and dance to the biggest sets on fresh feet. Could I balance my physical comfort against the regret of missing a great set, the guilt of wasting a ticket?
Some bands wear their influences on their sleeves. Others wear them like a skinsuit. The Paradox is the latest blink-182-2, slinging sophomorisms over handfuls of power chords. Will these kids in the crowd recoil in twenty years, disgusted that they had ever enjoyed this? Have I internalized shame about my pop-punk phase?
“Hell yeah brother” music. I mean that as a compliment.
A constant presence just beyond the scope of music that I listen to, and this day was no different. As I waited for two black bean empanadas to emerge from the service tent, I caught that old classic “I Don’t Want to Be An Asshole Anymore” trailing down the makeshift alley. The Menzingers have always had their act together: tight, high-energy performances, a political consciousness, a fervency to lift their peers along with them. I respect them greatly. I also find most of their songs a blur of 4/4 chords and tenor whoa-oh’s.
Daytime festival sets run about 30 minutes, which leaves little wiggle room for interruptions, changes, or surprises. It’s no wonder that most bands choose to trot out the hits from their biggest record, the crowd-pleasers and sing-alongs. Such limitations often lead to near-identical sets year after year.
In contrast, Thrice managed to represent seven records of their formidable discography without batting an eye. I like Thrice best when they’re a sludgy post-hardcore band, and this set is full of excellent choices.
Many have written more eloquently about Gwar’s space-metal antics. Their Warped Tour set features several beheadings, a dinosaur, and the ever-flowing blood hose.
Banjo-plucking, horn-blowing, four-part-harmony folk punk, Larry and His Flask is Warped Tour’s best-kept secret. They can and have played anywhere, even earning their first Warped Tour slot by following the Tour and playing in the parking lots beforehand. Onstage, the six bouncing Oregonians give the impression that they’d rather be on the floor dancing and often come down to do so.
I missed the boat on Bayside and have no desire to turn around, but “Devotion and Desire” is that good of a song.
By all rights, I should love Glassjaw. I loved letlive. and Envy on the Coast, but Glassjaw never stuck. In any case, by the time their set rolled around, my ears were too shot to make it out. It looked fun, though.
I fear that in our search for musical “heaviness” we have strayed too far. I couldn’t parse what was happening on the lowest strings. Suicide Silence is a taste I never acquired. Might as well be power tools or bees, except that I like those sounds.
At 5:30 I laid down in the shaded gravel of an underpass, a veritable beach in the sea of sun-scorched blacktop. Checking the schedule for the umpteenth time, I wondered if I’d regret leaving a couple of sets early. This year’s headliners (bands playing any of the four big stages with sets longer than 35 minutes) seemed all too familiar. 14 of 22 headline slots went to veteran acts with five-plus Warped Tour appearances, and I’d already seen nine of them in the past.
I ended up missing I Set My Friends On Fire entirely, due to a mistake in the initial schedule. In lieu of a proper write-up, the band are better songwriters than musicians. Their tunes blend metalcore and pop more honestly than most of the verse-chorus scream-sing crowd, closer to what we now call hyperpop. Their unseriousness has freed them to place a masterpiece like “Ravenous, Ravenous Rhinos” right next to a mess like “HxC 2-Step”. Even if their genius feels accidental, it’s still genius.
I caught half of L0L0’s set under the impression I Set My Friends On Fire would follow. Realizing that I’d missed a highly anticipated set put a damper on the day, already wearing long in the relentless heat. I sat down to mope and found myself comparing ISMFOF to the bands I’d dismissed earlier. Surely a debut comprising a tongue-in-cheek cover of “Crank That” and two collaborations with SMOSH was as criminally immature as some of the other acts, even with explicit self-awareness. Why did I find this generation’s acts so grating? More worryingly, was I any different in my time?
No, obviously. I was the kid rushing to see Attila and The Devil Wears Prada. I’ve seen Nickelback, and not by happenstance. I know that without gateways like I See Stars and Motion City Soundtrack, I might easily have bounced off current favorites Genghis Tron and The Sidekicks. I couldn’t understand why I felt so curmudgeonly about the kids following a similar path.
“Christian” in that all the members are Christian but not a “Christian band,” Anberlin came out swinging. Big hit “Feel Good Drag” was the tamest song of the high-energy set, a half-hour of mall emo on the level of any of their peers. It was a pleasant surprise.
Do the self-branded “elder emos” wear those shirts in public? Have they made peace with their awkward pasts, or are they still living it, every old drama just as urgent as ever? I felt alone in that crowd, half-envying their connection to their teenage selves and their willingness to inhabit nostalgia for a time of life that, musically and otherwise, sucked shit.
I looked down at my own mewithoutYou shirt and wondered if I was projecting fears about my external identity being defined by conspicuous consumption. My first tattoo was a turntable, but I don’t even have vinyl anymore. “Let those who are without cringe”, right?
I often resent my age. My hair has begun its inexorable migration away from my head. I buy New Balances two pairs at a time. I pay a man to tell me I’m not turning into my father (no offense, Dad). I felt each year of desk work torquing my spine as I watched my fifth identical Taking Back Sunday set. The returned Tour’s heavy-handed nostalgia marketing only cemented my feelings that the Warped Tour had stopped evolving in 2019 and that everything from here on out would be backward-facing; 60-year-old legacy acts playing 40-year-old songs to the same aging fans, the crowds thinning each year as age inevitably subsumes ability.
I went into this piece expecting to confirm my theory of the Tour’s stagnation. I expected the same bands returning year after year, or some pattern to justify my jadedness. I crunched the numbers (DM me if you know how to scrape set times from the Warped Tour wiki) and it turns out Warped Tour runs on a formula: 50% new bands, 30% returning bands, and 20% veterans (Bands with five-plus years on the Tour).
Unsatisfied, I checked my own records and found something more surprising: of the 11 bands that I watched for at least the second time, I had only seen five on a previous Tour In fact, I’dseen five of them before they had ever played the Tour. By that measure Warped Tour was catching up to me, not the other way around. Somewhere, during our decade of absence, in a handful of musical niches, I had surpassed the Tour’s “tastemakers”. In my teens I wanted to be the “I saw them when they were small” guy. But being that guy only exacerbated my malaise, and did nothing to improve Taking Back Sunday’s set.
At 6:55 on Saturday, Third Eye Blind takes the stage. I am sunburnt in new and interesting places and my back is killing me, but I’ve never seen them before, and I’m bouncing with excitement. As they launch into “Thanks a Lot”, one of the many bangers from their debut self-titled, my sunburn is forgotten and my aches begin to fade. By the time they reach “Graduate”, I am into it. The song’s one-line refrain, “CAN I GRADUATE?” is big enough to carry the chorus singlehandedly, bouncing into your head alongside that perfect, “just enough” riff.
While it echoes around me, I am ten years younger, shoveling snow in my grandparents’ driveway. “Can I graduate?” I had asked my undergrad advisor, one class short after nine semesters. I refused to walk, graduated quietly over the summer, and slid into a desk job like a wet turd, settling into the third floor of my grandparents’ home. I remember pausing mid-shovel to imagine my uncles doing the same before me, my grandfather before them. Did they share my complicated feelings about living so close to their childhood home? I had a constant internal nag that I was squandering my risk-taking years, “dying on the vine” as it were. “Graduate” connected me to songwriters Kevin Cadogan and Stephan Jenkins. We shared those feelings across time and space and were less alone for it. For the first time in seven hours, the magic is real again.
Eight songs of Third Eye Blind’s fourteen-song set come from the debut. These are the only songs I recognize. Would I have had as good a time if they had stuck to new material? Maybe these songs aren’t so universally worn-out, and there is value in playing the hits for those who haven’t seen them.
Faced with a good time, I finally had to reckon with my grumpiness. It’s not the Warped Tour’s fault that I’ve grown away from the scene. Warped Tour never pretended to be something it wasn’t. This was the same Tour that branded everything down to the stage water (which is now a nostalgia product), that powered through countless sexual abuse scandals, that displayed and prominently derided “no moshing” signage. Cleared of the cobwebs of time and nostalgia, Warped Tour was just as I remembered. I had changed.
Sunday
Now that we have established my capacity for change, it’s time to put it to practice. In an effort to take back Sunday, what follows is a best-of best-of’s, the sets worth both my time and yours. If you want my opinion on the other bands I saw, don’t. I’m sorry if I yucked your yum along the way.
Sunami squeezed 13 songs into a 30-minute set. I could not decipher any melody or verses or choruses, just fast breakdowns and slow breakdowns in neat, two-minute packages, unburdened by hardcore’s less interesting tropes. I enjoyed the pummeling rhythms and Sunami, in turn, never stopped pummeling.
Hoobastank had riffs, and still does! The Cali quartet came back from the dead determined to re-establish themselves as more than the “The Reason” band. From old alt-rock hits “Crawling in the Dark” and “Running Away” to the brand-new, hardcore-adjacent, politically-charged “How Do You Sleep”, Hoobastank gave this writer a reason to try them again.
I’m surprised The Academy Is’s parent-friendly-but-lyrically-rebellious pop-rock never broke through with Good Charlotte and their ilk. Beckett and company have a knack for sneaky earworms that I found myself inadvertently humming weeks after the show.
Their set included an emphatic declaration of their continued revival, though they neglected to play anything off their 2026 comeback Almost There. Impressed by their set, I checked out the new record for myself. It feels more like a question, a “can we still do this?” rather than a statement of intent for a new era. I’m hopeful that the next record swings a little ways back to the old energy, but I’m happy for them for pushing their boundaries.
I never understood how 3OH!3 landed among the perpetual Warped Tour gang, but they keep coming back and killing it. Probably the most widely known act on the Tour, and the crowd size of the crowd reaffirmed it. It didn’t matter that I was too far to see the stage; a 3OH!3 set is a party from any distance.
Joyce Manor makes a unique kind of pop-punk rooted in the round tones of 90’s alt-rock, built on a penchant for brilliant moments and unstoppable momentum. Coupled with their unerring commitment to brevity, it’s music that keeps you coming back. A real greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience.
Consummate professionals consistently crushing it. Drug Church is this year’s nod to the wave of post-hardcore bands collectively known as “the wave” — La Dispute, Touché Amore, Defeater, and the like. Whether at the Warped Tour or at a VFW, Drug Church is going to smack you with hard-hitting riffs and throaty rants nonstop until the set ends.
25 years out, Bleed American reads like any emo record of its era: angst about society and breakups, generous nods to its musical forebears, and attempts to process death and industry in neat, catchy packages. What sets this record apart is the band’s willingness to hang on a lyric or repeat a verse rather than delve into alienating specifics. “Sweetness” can be about an abusive relationship and be a goal song for a hockey team without contradiction. That’s an important instinct , and Bleed American gets it just right.
Jimmy ripped through the record with the kind of freewheeling abandon you only get with musicians who’ve been playing together for thirty years; a captivating, effortless flow. These guys are really, really good at what they do, but you shouldn’t need me to tell you that.
Will the Song Live On?
Waiting to confirm the fate of my lost earplugs on the way out, I wondered what kind of festival Kevin Lyman would put together without the baggage of the Tour. Is Warped a Sisyphean boulder, dooming him to retread his steps every year chasing more money? Would he rather feature more interesting, “mature” music? Or is he the perpetual teen, eternally enthralled by a good hook and a clever turn of phrase? We may never know. The dude has impeccable media training.
I left Sunday night with many questions but one clear answer: this would be my last Warped Tour. The weekend had felt like uncovering an old favorite shirt and realizing that not only is it too small around the waist, it’s also unabashedly ugly. I bid the crowds and the tents and the bands a fond, final farewell and limped my way to the metro.
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