warped tour punk bands

75 Warped Tour acts that made the tour legendary

• Published: Jul. 18, 2018, 7:05 a.m.
• Anne Nickoloff and Troy Smith, Cleveland.com

Bryan Bedder

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Over 20 years, countless bands have played parking lots to amphitheaters on the Vans Warped Tour.

For much of that time, Warped has carried the torch for traveling rock festivals. Though, all good things must come to an end.

In honor of this year being the final for the Warped Tour, we look at the 75 acts that made it so hard to say goodbye.

Kevin Winter

1. Paramore

Paramore is a Warped Tour success story. The band started at the small female-fronted Shiragirl stage in 2005 with its first-ever tour and grew to become one of the biggest headliners in its subsequent five Warped Tour performances.

Paramore’s sound has undoubtedly changed over the years, but some of its most iconic releases (2005’s “All We Know Is Falling,” 2007’s “Riot!” and 2009’s “Brand New Eyes”) all arrive during the band’s punky Warped Tour years.

Johanna Leguerre

2. Simple Plan

Simple Plan has played Warped Tour a dozen times, making the trek an essential part of the Canadian band's career, from its rise in the early 2000s to its recent resurgence.

Jason Merritt

3. Blink-182

There is no band more responsible for the popularity of the music featured year after year on the Warped Tour than Blink-182. The band only played the tour four times, but you could find copycat on the bill every year that followed.

Combining elements of skate punk, ska, hardcore and punk, NOFX has been one of the steadiest presences on Warped going all the way back to its early years. The band has served as a must-see on the tour seven times.

5. New Found Glory

What would a summertime party be in the 2000s without some New Found Glory? The band’s fun pop-punk songs and exuberance earned it multiple headlining spots on Warped Tour.

6. Less Than Jake

Although Less Than Jake has performed at Warped Tour 10 times, nothing can tire out the ska-punk band. With colorful outfits, inflatable balls and boundless energy, Less Than Jake has always had a ton of fun on the summer tour.

Atilla Kisbenedek

Sum 41 has a unique Warped Tour. At its peak, the band was one of the most popular acts on the tour. Then things fell apart. But Sum 41's comeback has been staged on the tour the past few years, which has been great to see.

Marsaili McGrath

8. Motion City Soundtrack

Half of Motion City Soundtrack’s lifespan as a band existed in Warped Tour. The band was around for about 20 years and it played the tour for 10 of them, becoming a staple on the lineup.

Mauricio Santana

9. Bad Religion

As pioneers of the pop punk genre, it was essential to have Bad Religion as part of Warped. And the band delivered, performing six times, including two spots ni during important late 1990s runs.

Tina Fineberg

10. Yellowcard

When it comes to stage acrobatics, few Warped Tour bands could beat Yellowcard. Every show, audiences knew to wait for violinist Sean Mackin’s backflips.

Laura Roberts

11. All Time Low

All Time Low burst onto the Warped Tour scene in 2007, but quickly earned fans around the country with its fresh pop-punk sound. The newcomer quickly became a staple for Warped Tour, going on to perform five different fests.

12. Pennywise

Pennywise joined punk acts of Green Day, Rancid, Bad Religion and Blink-182 in gaining mainstream success during the 1990s. Pennywise spread that out over nine warped tours, more than any of those aforementioned acts.

13. Deftones

Deftones were an important addition during the Warped Tour's early run, offering up another name act as the tour was just beginning to take off.

John Davisson

14. Reel Big Fish

It’s hard not to dance at a Reel Big Fish show. The ska-punk band’s infectious, horn-driven sound fits right in with Warped Tour’s punky roots.

It's okay if you've never heard of CIV. Just know they've influenced a ton of punk acts and played Warped three of its first five years.

16. Bowling For Soup

Angsty kids had a soundtrack with Bowling For Soup in the 1990s. Songs like “1985,” “High School Never Ends” and “Girl All The Bad Guys Want” are humorous reminders of the rebellious days of ‘90s kids. The band has continued to play Warped Tour past its heyday, performing throwback tunes for eager fans.

17. Face to Face

Another early Warped pioneer, Face to Face played two of the first three years of the festival. And the California punk band was a solid draw during that time thanks to its hit "Disconnected."

Imeh Akpanudosen

18. Anti-Flag

Anti-Flag has been one of the steadiest acts on Warped during the 21st century, playing the tour no less than 10 times and giving the tour a political charge.

Robb D. Cohen

19. Silverstein

Silversten were a product (influence wise) of several popular Warped acts of the 90s. That made the Canadian post-hardcore outfit a force on the tour nine times, from 2004 to this farewell trip.

20. Katy Perry

Katy Perry played Warped Tour just one year -- 2008. But she made quite the impact. With her single "I Kissed a Girl" No. 1 on the charts, Perry routinely drew the biggest crowds. Another fact: She was dating Gym Class Heroes frontman Travis McCoy at the time and he would carry her out on stage.

Mark Metcalfe

21. Motionless In White

Goth kids can rock, too. And Motionless In White has long catered to the audience members wearing all black on a hot summer day. The gothic metal band has played its heavy, dark music on Warped Tour nine different times.

Noel Vasquez

22. Flogging Molly

Celtic punk band Flogging Molly is one of the biggest leaders of the genre in America. The band played its dancey rock songs to Warped Tour a whopping seven times.

23. The Used

There was a stretch where the emo/screamo sound of The Used was as good a draw as any act on Warped Tour. The band's early albums remain essential parts of canon.

24. The Ataris

The Ataris became the true boys of summer the six times they played Warped Tour. The emo pop band formed in 1996, but continues to tour today (and even played Warped last summer).

25. Green Day

What a treat it was to have Green Day, the band that feels like the godfather of every Warped act, on the tour in 2000.

26. Mayday Parade

Emo rock band Mayday Parade are on Warped Tour’s lineup again for 2018, and it’ll be the seventh time it has played the fest. Fans always eagerly await the band’s best-known hits like “Jamie All Over,” “Miserable At Best” and “Terrible Things.”

From the late 1990s to early 2000s, MxPx spent every other year on the Warped Tour, making itself at home and adding to the tour's skate-punk vibe.

28. Avenged Sevenfold

As Avenged Sevenfold got bigger and bigger in the early 2000s, Warped Tour became the place where fans could enjoy the act in a live setting.

Charles Sykes

29. Fall Out Boy

Fall Out Boy played Warped Tour twice, in 2004 and 2005, before it grew too large for the fest. The band’s 2005 album “From Under The Cork Tree” started snowballing fame for Fall Out Boy that continues today, creating top hits that have crossed over into mainstream success.

Scott Gries

Before Eminem took the world by storm, he played Warped Tour. Yes, you read that right. The Real Slim Shady drew massive crowds in 1999. He would soon get too big to ever return.

31. Good Charlotte

Brothers Joel and Benji Madden have led Good Charlotte into pop-punk stardom since its formation in 1996. The band only played Warped Tour four times, but often led the fest in high headlining spots.

32. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Thanks to bands like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Warped Tour always had a diverse feel to it. It wasn't just about post-hardcore or pop punk, giving ska rockers the chance to shine as well.

33. Chiodos

Chiodos were one of the defining bands of the pop-screamo subgenre, and it mashed together the energetic, melodic rhythms of emo pop, with vocalist Craig Owens’ hellish screams bringing a heavier element. The result: prime tunes for Warped Tour mosh pits.

Duane Prokop

34. A Day to Remember

Warped Tour can be a rowdy day, and that’s especially true with A Day To Remember. The metalcore band had a way of riling up its audience all five times it played the festival.

35. Dropkick Murphys

Infusing traditional Celtic songs with punk rock, Dropkick Murphys added some flavor to Warped Tour’s lineup the five times it participated.

36. We The Kings

Songs like “Check Yes, Juliet” and “Skyway Avenue” are basically Warped Tour anthems. That’s because We The Kings’ infectious, upbeat energy were a fixture in seven different tours.

Chung Sung-Jun

37. Story of the Year

Story of the Year spent most of its time on Warped Tour in the early 2000s, establishing itself as a star of the lineup. The band had just released its hit songs like “Until The Day I Die,” “Anthem Of Our Dying Day” and “And The Hero Will Drown.”

38. The Maine

The Maine formed in 2007, but its first big step into the alternative rock scene was with the 2008 and 2009 Warped Tours. The band released its first album, “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” in 2008, and has gone on to release five more successful albums since then.

Kellie Warren

39. The All-American Rejects

Only a handful of Warped Tour acts have been crossover success in the mainstream music world, and The All-American Rejects are one of them. The band’s songs “Dirty Little Secret,” “It Ends Tonight” and “Move Along” all became famous after its time on Warped Tour.

40. Sleeping With Sirens

Kellin Quinn, the singer of Sleeping With Sirens, is one of the most talented voices in emo rock, with soaring vocals and scratchy growls. He debuted on Warped Tour in 2012, just a couple of years after forming Sleeping With Sirens, and played the fest for five years straight until 2016.

Peter Kramer

Anytime Thrice was on Warped Tour, the band was a big draw. It's complex style brought solid musicianship to the tour and allowed fans to watch the evolution of a band that wasn't afraid to switch things up.

42. Taking Back Sunday

When emo music started to rise up in the 2000s, Taking Back Sunday was one of the most popular bands. Songs like “MakeDamnSure,” “Liar” and “Cute Without The ‘E’” helped to define the genre, and also to define Warped Tour’s distinct sound.

43. Sublime

Sublime co-headlined the second Warped Tour, which was the first time the tour went full-on coast to coast. The band quickly earned a reputation for its naughty behavior, but remained a huge draw.

A mainstay int he West Coast punk rock scene of the early 1990s, Fluf supported Warped during two of the the first three years and helped shape the pop-punk sound.

45. Black Veil Brides

Originally, Black Veil Brides rocked out with big hair, black makeup and tight black outfits, bringing a throwback glam metal vibe to metal music. Over the years, the band has toned down its style a bit, but continued to release heavy, dark music that’s a hit at Warped.

46. Every Time I Die

Since the early 2000s, Every Time I Die has been involved in mini Warped Tour shows. But it wasn’t until 2006 that the band took on a full summer of intense concerts. Since then, the band has played Warped Tour regularly, and is currently on the final fest tour.

47. The Starting Line

One of the most beloved pop-punk acts of all time, The Starting Line played Warped four times during the band's peak period.

Barry Brecheisen

L7 gave girl-rock a face during Warped's early years, helping set the stage for future acts like Paramore and New Years Day.

49. Senses Fail

Senses Fail has played Warped Tour six different times, and the lineup was different many of those times. Yet, despite the turbulence in the band, singer Buddy Nielsen always put on a show, leaping around on the stage with endless energy.

50. No Doubt

It can be hard for a tour to get big acts early on. Fortunately, No Doubt hadn't quite blown up when it played the festival. Gwen Stefani and company would return in 2000 for just one show.

51. Pierce The Veil

Over a decade ago, Pierce The Veil burst onto the emo rock scene, and moved its way up the ranks in Warped Tour. The band started off by playing just one date in 2007, then ended up on the fest’s main stage for the full tour in 2012.

52. Sick of It All

Hardcore rock band Sick of It All played Warped early on but didn't forget its roots. The band returned last year for a standout run.

53. My Chemical Romance

Many Warped Tour fans were hoping My Chemical Romance would reunite to play 2018’s festival. Unfortunately the band, which broke up in 2013, isn’t getting back together any time soon. Yet, MCR’s two performances on Warped Tour were impressionable enough to leave fans begging for more.

54. New Year's Day

When it comes to fans, New Years Day beats a lot of other Warped acts. The band’s fans go all-out with a massive crowd wearing mostly black. At Warped, girls and women can also be seen rocking the half-red, half-black hair pattern made famous by singer Ash Costello.

55. Gym Class Heroes

Gym Class Heroes scored a series of hits in the 2000s and played them live at Warped, giving the tour a steady hip-hop presence.

56. Quicksand

Post-hardcore act Quicksand served as one of the standouts on the first Warped Tour. However, the long trek proved too much for the band who wound up breaking up soon after.

57. Falling In Reverse

Bad-boy singer Ronnie Radke has been in the public eye for several run-ins with the law, at one point serving over two years in prison. That was where he started working on Falling In Reverse, a band that’s played Warped Tour a total of six times and has garnered one of the biggest fanbases of modern metalcore music.

58. Alkaline Trio

Stephen Shugerman

59. Something Corporate

Fronted by pianist and singer Andrew McMahon, Something Corporate put out poppy rock songs that pumped up the crowd all three times the band played Warped Tour. The band was only around regularly for six years, until McMahon continued on with his other band Jack’s Mannequin.

60. Andrew W.K.

Andrew W.K. can pretty much play any kind of festival. But when he brings his wacky set to Warped Tour, it's a one of a kind experience.

Rob Grabowski

61. Dillinger Escape Plan

Don't sleep on metal at Warped Tour. Bands like Dillinger Escape plan have brought their complex mathcore to Warped multiple times.

62. No Use For Name

As one of the most seasoned acts on Warped Tour during the 20th century, No Use For a Name transitioned from hardcore punk to a more melodic sound over the years.

As one of the essential punk rock acts of the 1990s, you knew Rancid would make this list. Tim Armstrong and his trademark guitar joined the tour just three times. But each run was memorable.

64. The Vandals

The Vandals are best known as one of the first rock bands to incorporate turntables into its sound. The band was a steady force on Warped Tour during its peak.

65. Bouncing Souls

Bouncing Souls doesn't get enough credit for its influence on various punk genres 1990s. But anyone who saw the band during at least one of its six Warped appearances knows just how good they were.

Roger Kisby

66. Coheed and Cambria

Coheed and Cambria played Warped three times. But each time the band stood out. Coheed's technical musicianship was unlike anything else at Warped but its bouncy collection of hits was enough to draw impressive crowds.

Astrid Stawiarz

67. Plain White T's

Plain White T’s only played Warped Tour twice. However, the band spiced up the loud, punky event with a softer side, with songs like “Hey There Delilah” and “Rhythm Of Love.”

Karl Walter

68. Underoath

Underoath was a huge part of Warped Tour during the mid-2000s. The band returns to say goodbye in 2018.

Matt Winkelmeyer

69. Saves the Day

Saves The Day formed while singer and guitarist Chris Conley was still in high school, but the band’s sound quickly matured in the form of two full-length albums in the late 1990s. The band’s unique hardcore sound propelled them onto Warped Tour three different times in the festival’s history.

Ethan Miller

70. Unwritten Law

Unwritten Law has toured a lot since the early 1990s and the band has managed to make Warped a part of that four times.

71. Glassjaw

Unfortunately, Glassjaw didn't play Warped Tour during its early years. But the band more than made up for it when it finally joined the tour for a raucous showcase, twice in the mid-2000s.

Katie Darby

72. Four Year Strong

Four Year Strong? More like 17 years strong at this point. The post-hardcore band puts out intense, aggressive music that gets mosh pits going at Warped Tour. Four Year Strong has played the festival six times, including this current summer.

73. Neck Deep

Neck Deep has played a huge role in the more recent pop-punk revival, creating popular albums since 2012’s “Rain In July.” It’s brought that refreshed sound to Warped Tour four different times with massive audiences full of fans.

74. Rise Against

No stranger to any kind of rock showcase, Rise Against's brand of melodic hardcore felt at home all four times the band hit the stage at Warped.

75. Bayside

Bayside has a knack for putting out the catchiest punk and emo songs, like “Sick, Sick, Sick” and “Devotion And Desire.” Those songs proved popular with the Warped Tour crowd—Bayside went on Warped Tour four different times, and frontman Anthony Raneri played the fest one additional time as a solo artist.

Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 4/4/2023), Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement , and Your Privacy Choices and Rights (updated 12/31/2023).

© 2024 Advance Local Media LLC. All rights reserved ( About Us ). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local.

Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site.

YouTube’s privacy policy is available here and YouTube’s terms of service is available here .

• All Warped Tour Lineups, Ranked
• Strange Rules at Burning Man
• People You See at Every Festival
• How Altamont Ruined Everything
• All Coachella Years, Ranked
• The World's Greatest Music Festivals
• The Timeline of Fyre Festival
• The Worst True Festival Clichés
• Firsthand Tales from Woodstock
• Tips & Tricks for Sneaking In
• What Was Woodstock Really Like?
• Tips for a Legendary Experience
• The Best EDM Festivals
• The Best Country Music Festivals
• Things to Bring to Every Festival
• Dead Musicians to See as Holograms
• Best Drugs to Take at Coachella
• The 15 Best Headliners At Coachella, Ranked
• 15 Legendary Coachella Performances, Ranked By ...
• 14 Of The Best Music Festival Band Reunions, Ra...

All 25 Warped Tour Lineups, Ranked

Warped Tour is one of the biggest names in the concert canon. Those who haven't gone want to and those who have gone wait for the day they can go again. For a majority of its run, it was the largest traveling music festival in the United States. A number of past Warped Tour lineups have been impressive, but which year was the best? Help decide below! 

Starting as an eclectic alternative rock festival in 1995 and gradually morphing into a punk rock festival by the next year, the tour gained momentum when Vans, the wildly popular shoe manufacturer, was signed on as the tour's main sponsor in 1996. As Warped Tour became increasingly popular with each passing year, more sponsors signed on, slowly growing the tour's scope of influence. Sadly, 2018 proved to be the final year of the famous tour as announced by Warped Tour's founder, Kevin Lyman. 

You'll find every Warped Tour lineup here! Vote below on the best Warped Tour lineups, keeping in mind factors like the bands performing, production value, and overall spectacle. If you're an avid concert-goer, you can also check out this list of the best Coachella lineups ! (Disclaimer - some years certain dates had slightly different lineups). 

Warped Tour 2005

Notable Peformers: My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Thrice, Billy Idol, The All-American Rejects, Bowling for Soup, Dropkick Murphys, Hawthorne Heights

Dates: June 18 to August 14

Warped Tour 2004

Notable Performers: NOFX, My Chemical Romance, The Used, Fall Out Boy, Billy Talent, Yellowcard, Motion City Soundtrack, New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, Anti-Flag, Bowling for Soup 

Dates:  June 25 to August 19

Warped Tour 1998

Notable Performers:  Bad Religion, Godsmack, Rancid, Less Than Jake, Blink-182, Beck (some dates), Unwritten Law, Reverend Horton Heat, Incubus 

Date:  July 4 to August 9

Warped Tour 1997

Notable Performers:  Blink-182, Reel Big Fish, Descendants, Less Than Jake, Sugar Ray, Pennywise, Social Distortion, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones 

Dates:  July 2 to August 5

Warped Tour 1999

Notable Performers: Cypress Hill, Blink-182, Dropkick Murphys, Pennywise, Black Eyed Peas, Suicidal Tendencies, Less Than Jake, Bouncing Souls

Dates:  June 25 to July 31

Warped Tour 2000

Notable Performers:  Weezer, Flogging Molly, Green Day, Anti-Flag, No Doubt, Papa Roach, The Muffs, Suicide Machines, NOFX, Good Riddance

Dates: June 23 to August 6

Warped Tour 2001

Notable Performers:  Pennywise, New Found Glory, Dropkick Murphys, The Vandals, Sum 41, Rancid, Less Than Jake, The All-American Rejects, Good Charlotte 

Dates:  June 29 to August 12

Warped Tour 1995

Notable Performers:  Sublime, No Doubt, Quicksand, Fluf, Deftones, No Use for a Name, Supernova, CIV, Deftones

Dates: August 4 to September 5

Warped Tour 2007

Notable Performers:  Bad Religion, Pennywise, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Killswitch Engage, Yellowcard, Ambelin, Flogging Molly, Hawthorne Heights

Dates:  June 28 to August 25

Warped Tour 2006

Notable Performers: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts,   Less Than Jake, The Academy Is..., Anti-Flag, Billy Talent, Motion City Soundtrack, Paramore, Rise Against, NOFX

Dates:  June 15 to August 13

Warped Tour 2018

Notable Performers:  Korn, Prophets of Rage, Limp Bizkit, Reel Big Fish, Pennywise, All Time Low, Taking Back Sunday, We The Kings

Dates:  June 21 to August 5

Warped Tour 2011

Notable Performers:  Paramore, Jack's Mannequin, Bowling for Soup, Relient K, MC Lars, Less Than Jake, Anti-Flag, Simple Plan 

Dates:  June 24 to August 14

Warped Tour 2003

Notable Performers:  The Ataris, Dropkick Murphys, Rancid, The Used, Pennywise, Less than Jake, Suicide Machines, Andrew W.K., Yellowcard, Glassjaw 

Dates: June 19 to August 10

Warped Tour 2002

Notable Performers: New Found Glory, Simple Plan, Flogging Molly, Anti-Flag, Reel Big Fish, Yellowcard, Goldfinger, NOFX, Jimmy Eat World, Bad Religion, Good Charlotte

Dates:  June 21 to August 18

Warped Tour 2008

Notable Performers:  Katy Perry, Amberlin, Jack's Mannequin, Angels and Airwaves, Reel Big Fish, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Broadway Calls, The Devil Wears Prada 

Dates:  June 20 to August 17

Warped Tour 1996

Notable Performers:  Fishbone, Pennywise, CIV, Rocket From The Crypt, Dance Hall Crashers, Down By Law, The Figgs, Guttermouth, Blink-182, Fluf, Red 5, Sensefield, Far 

Date:  July 4 to August 8

Warped Tour 2016

Notable Performers:  Falling In Reverse, Less Than Jake, Good Charlotte, Sleeping With Sirens, New Found Glory, Yellowcard, Ghost Town, Bad Seed Rising, We The Kings

Dates:  June 24 to August 13

Warped Tour 2013

Notable Performers: Chiodos, New Beat Fund, Gin Wigmore, MC Lars, Craig Owens, Dia Frampton, Charlotte Sometimes, Big Chocolate, Echosmith, Motion City Soundtrack, Reel Big Fish 

Dates:  July 15 to August 4

Warped Tour 2019

Warped Tour 2010

Notable Performers:  Alkaline Trio, Motion City Soundtrack, Anti-Flag, Dropkick Murphys, Andrew W.K., Penny Wise, Reel Big Fish, The All-American Rejects, Suicide Silence, We The Kings

Dates:  June 25 to August 15

Warped Tour 2012

Notable Performers:  Falling in Reverse, The Used, Yellowcard, Dead Sara, Rise Against, Yellowcard, MC Laws, Machine Gun Kelly, Anti-Flag

Date:  June 16 to August 5

Warped Tour 2009

Notable Performers:  Less Than Jake, Underoath, Bad Religion,  T.S.O.L., The Adolescents, Sing it Loud, TAT

Dates:  June 26 to August 23

Warped Tour 2014

Notable Performers:  Breathe Carolina, Falling in Reverse, Mayday Parade, Less Than Jake, We The Kings, Yellowcard, The Ghost Inside, The Mighty, Finch

Dates:  June 13 to August 3

Warped Tour 2017

Notable Performers:   Andy Black, Beartooth, Dance Gavin Dance, I Prevail, New Years Day, Falling In Reverse, Streetlight Manifesto, Neck Deep

Date: May 27 to November 1

Warped Tour 2015

Notable Performers:  As It Is, Bebe Rexha, New Years Day, Knuckle Puck, Metro Station, Candy Hearts, Motion City Soundtrack, Memphis May Fire 

Dates:  June 19 to October 18

Lists about the phenomena of the summer music festival - who to see, how to dress, and what to expect beyond heat, crowds, and bigger crowds.

Filed under:

How Warped Tour led the consumerist music festival revolution

The iconic festival was as much about brands as it was about bands.

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: How Warped Tour led the consumerist music festival revolution

Most of what I remember about being 14 involves wanting stuff: I wanted straighter hair. I wanted to seem like a grown-up (or at least like a 16-year-old). And I really, really wanted to go to Warped Tour.

It was the summer of 2004, and pop-punk was ascendant. In Canada, where I grew up, this meant listening to a steady stream of Sum 41, Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, and Billy Talent — all homegrown acts that got regular radio play thanks in part to Canadian content laws . With that as our gateway, my friends and I began our foray into skate-punk lite, memorizing Taking Back Sunday lyrics, trying (poorly) to land an ollie , and developing extremely unrequited crushes on any boy who bore a passing resemblance to Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge.

To us, Warped Tour — the traveling “misfit summer camp” that merged punk, ska, rock, and emo with extreme sports and a healthy array of corporate sponsors — was the pinnacle of cool. Unfortunately, I never got to attend, on account of being at actual summer camp.

This summer, Warped Tour celebrates its 25th birthday, making it far older than the teenagers it has courted for two and a half decades. Last year was the tour’s final cross-country run — it featured hundreds of bands over the course of 38 stops for which nearly 550,000 tickets were sold, but this impressive turnout was buoyed by the announcement that it was the event’s last hurrah. Attendance the prior year, in 2017, had been down significantly, particularly among the 14- to 17-year-old demographic that had historically been Warped’s lifeblood. The audience was getting older, production costs were rising, and bands weren’t sticking around year after year like they used to. Plus, according to founder and producer Kevin Lyman, he was just getting tired.

But in the era of reboots and remakes , it’s not surprising that organizers would want to honor the tour’s silver anniversary just one year after it shut down. The result is a three-city affair: a single-day event in Cleveland celebrating the opening of a retrospective exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and weekend shows in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Mountain View, California. While not strictly a nostalgia play — there are up-and-coming bands booked alongside veterans, and plenty of fans are first-time Warped attendees — this year, the average age of concertgoers appears to be more than a decade older than it was at the tour’s height (15 or 16, as of 2006 ), and plenty of the once-wayward youth now have kids of their own in tow, keeping them a safe distance from the mosh pit.

This is how, on a Saturday in late June, I find myself on a crowded Jersey beach sandwiched between Caesars Casino and the Atlantic Ocean, belting out Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid” with nearly 30,000 other people — many of whom, like me, were in fact kids when the song came out in 2002. High school may be a distant memory, but at least now I’ve finally made it to Warped Tour.

”Oh, my god, I am 12 years old again,” says the sunburnt guy in checkerboard Vans beside me as the crowd whines along with singer Pierre Bouvier: “Nobody cares, ’cause I’m alone and the world is having more fun than me tonight.”

The lyrics don’t exactly fit the setting — no one here is alone and everyone seems to be having fun — but the feeling’s still there. For a little while, we’re all our angsty teen selves again. Likewise, there’s a twinge of irony when Good Charlotte tear into their breakout single “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” a middle finger to celebrity culture written long before Joel and Benji Madden (the band’s lead singer and guitarist) married Hollywood it-girls (Nicole Richie and Cameron Diaz, respectively).

Warped Tour itself is a contradiction — it’s a punk rock festival that’s also a prodigious marketing machine, sponsored from top to bottom by brands hoping to win over fans in between shows. This isn’t a knock on the tour, really: if it weren’t able to bridge that gap, it probably wouldn’t exist.

The idea for Warped began germinating while Kevin Lyman was working as a stage manager for the alt-rock-focused Lollapalooza in the early ’90s — back when that, too, was a touring festival. He had been immersed in SoCal’s hardcore and ska scenes growing up and wanted to bring some of his favorite bands to audiences around the country with a back-to-basics tour that did away with the music industry’s hierarchies and out-of-control egos: no headliners, no arenas — just a few thousand fans in a parking lot and an average ticket price of less than $30.

Even for the biggest acts, that DIY spirit shone through. “You feel more like a carnie on Warped Tour than you do on any other tour or at any other festival,” says Adam Lazzara, the lead singer of Taking Back Sunday, who are currently in the midst of a 20th-anniversary tour , “just because you’re literally there setting up and breaking down into the next town.” Lyman also tapped a handful of pro skateboarders and BMX bikers to come along, recognizing the crossover between extreme sports fans and punk rock’s moshing masses, as well as the fact that both subcultures were becoming increasingly mainstream.

In 1995, the same year Warped made its debut run in the summer, ESPN aired the inaugural X Games (then called “Extreme Games”), with athletes competing in action sports such as barefoot water skiing, street luge, and skateboarding. The year prior, the Offspring and Green Day — both bands with roots in California’s underground punk scene — released best-selling albums that catapulted them into popular culture.

The time was ripe for something like Warped to exist, though in order to get it off the ground, Lyman needed to buck one of the central tenets of punk and get a few executives to break out their checkbooks. “I grew up with that whole ‘eff corporate America’ mentality,” he says. “And then, for me, I just started looking at corporate America, and no matter how punk rock we were or whatever, we were still supporting it in some way. We were buying their brands; we were using their products.” He looked at the Rolling Stones pulling in millions through sponsorships with Jovan fragrance and Budweiser, and thought: Maybe we can get some money too.

It didn’t go seamlessly at first. After the 1995 run — which featured an eclectic lineup that included the ska-reggae band Sublime, a Tragic Kingdom -era No Doubt, and the grunge pioneers L7 — the tour was in dire straits financially, as the small sponsorships Lyman had landed from brands like Converse and Spin weren’t enough to cover the significant production costs. To keep it going, he was desperate enough to consider brokering a deal with the decidedly not-punk Calvin Klein to become the title sponsor. “I don’t really think that would have worked,” he now says, matter-of-factly.

Fortuitously, the meeting with the fashion brand was delayed by the devastating East Coast blizzard of 1996, and before they could go any further with the arrangements, Lyman got a call from Vans CEO Walter Schoenfeld.

Founded in 1966 as the Van Doren Rubber Company, Vans had engendered strong ties to the skateboarding community, which was loyal to the brand’s sneakers thanks to their grippy soles. The $300,000 check the company wrote turned the Warped Tour into the Vans Warped Tour, giving Lyman some financial runway while securing the festival’s ties to corporate America. (At the time, Vans was owned by the venture banking firm McCown De Leeuw & Co., thanks to a $71 million 1988 leveraged buyout .)

The Warped partnership was led by Steven Van Doren, the company’s vice president of events and promotions and the son of Vans founder Paul Van Doren, who saw an opportunity to give the brand national exposure beyond the Sun Belt states that at the time accounted for most of its sales. He also introduced amateur skateboarding competitions to the tour, giving contestants the chance to win pro contracts with Vans. “Having Steve involved really solidified our partnership,” says Lyman, noting that he turned down bigger subsequent sponsorship offers from the shoe brand Airwalk because he felt Vans was in it for the long haul.

He was right: By 1999, Spin reported at the time, Vans owned a 15 percent stake in Warped and was paying $1 million per year “to strengthen [its] presence with ‘Generation Y’” (or, as we’d call them today, “millennials”). Two years later, it stepped up its investment, paying $5.2 million for a 70 percent controlling stake, according to Forbes .

Today, Vans is a $3 billion brand — current parent company VF Corp bought it for $396 million in 2004 — and a household name for most Americans, including those who have never set foot on a skateboard. Even as it has grown well beyond its fringier roots, though, the brand’s relationship with Warped has endured, and at the 25th-anniversary show, seemingly every other fan is wearing Vans sneakers: Sk8-Hi’s , Old Skools , the ubiquitous checkerboard slip-ons .

(Airwalk fizzled by the early 2000s and was reborn as a Payless brand; its current owners — the same company that recently acquired Sports Illustrated — are trying to stage a ’90s-nostalgia-fueled comeback .)

Even with the Vans investment, Lyman had to hustle to keep the tour afloat in the early years. “We had to raise nearly $4 million in sponsorships to make the ticket price what it was, to give you the show you wanted, to bring all those side stages that developed young artists,” he says.

In 1999, he signed a partnership with the brand new surf label Hurley and got up-and-comers Blink-182 — then still a year out from the explosively popular Enema of the State — to wear the brand’s clothes onstage in exchange for free seats on one of the Warped Tour’s buses, since the band couldn’t yet afford their own transportation. It was a turning point for both band and brand: Blink had just replaced its former drummer with Travis Barker, who’s still with the group today, and Hurley’s founder Bob Hurley had left a successful career with Billabong to start his namesake clothing line earlier that year. Four years later, Blink was selling out arenas and topping Billboard charts, and Hurley had grown into a $70 million business, which Nike acquired in 2002 .

It wasn’t just hormone-addled fans going through an adolescence of sorts at Warped. “I always said Warped was a developmental spot, not only for bands but for crew people to learn how to tour and learn how to be good citizens in the music community, as well as brands,” says Lyman. “A lot of brands got their starts in those parking lots.”

One of those was Monster Energy, which has been a tour sponsor since it launched in 2003, back when it was made by a California soda company called Hansen’s Natural Co. The company set up a portable rock wall, became “the official energy drink of the Vans Warped Tour,” and embarked on a wildly successful rebrand that has seen its stock soar more than 72,000 percent since its public debut that same year. According to Lyman, Monster also came up with the idea of “Tour Water” — specially designed cans of water that make it look like bands and crew members are chugging energy drinks all day onstage without the risk of cardiac arrest; the concept is now an industry standard, and cans from early tours go for more than $75 on eBay .

Another was Jeffree Star Cosmetics. Before Star was a beauty mogul, he was a MySpace-famous scene kid who performed on the tour as a solo artist in 2008 and 2009. In the following years, he came back to host meet-and-greets with his YouTube fans and, when he launched his makeup empire in 2014, set up shop among the merch tents.

The Warped Tour also forced more corporate brands to loosen up a little: After the PlayStation team showed up in uniform polo shirts their first year on the tour, Lyman told them they’d have to change, citing a life motto of his: “Never trust a person in a golf shirt unless you’re at a golf course.” (They’re either a douchebag or they don’t know what they’re talking about, he says.)

When the tour created a “reverse day care” for parents on-site in 2001 — complete with air conditioning and noise-canceling headphones — Lyman convinced Target to put its bull’s-eye logo on top, sans brand name, citing the symbol’s history with ’70s mod bands like the Who and the Jam. He even dug out the Ramones’ tour rider to persuade the makers of Yoo-hoo that the chocolate drink was, in fact, kinda punk rock, and by the 1998 tour, fans were climbing a rock wall shaped like a giant Yoo-hoo bottle and competing for branded skateboard decks .

Walking around the grounds in Atlantic City, there’s a near-endless array of stuff to buy at Warped this year: limited-edition Vans, commemorative 25th anniversary bracelets, T-shirts reading “Mall Goth Trash” and “SadBoy Crew,” henna tattoos, water bottles, skate decks, and beer koozies (plus $14 Pacifico). There are also plenty of freebies: branded coupon wristbands from the teen retailer Journeys, which has been the tour’s presenting sponsor since 2014; T-shirts from Truth, the anti-smoking organization; stickers from PETA.

Among the panoply of shoppable teenage rebellion are booths with a cause, like Hope for the Day , a suicide prevention organization, and A Voice for the Innocent , a nonprofit that offers resources to survivors of rape and sexual abuse, which was brought on board in the wake of a series of sexual assault and harassment allegations involving artists who had performed on the tour.

”The Warped Tour is really interesting because it jumped early on the idea that crowds could be commodified,” says Gina Arnold, a former rock journalist and the author of Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella . “They were able to widen out the notion of the festival as a marketplace — not so much of ideas, but a marketplace of actual things.”

Today, the concept of festival-as-shopping-mall is well established — so much so that this year’s Coachella attendees could have Amazon orders delivered same-day to lockers on site — but in the ’90s, it was still a novel idea. Before then, it was all “bad food and band T-shirts,” as Arnold put it. (The exception: the parking lot of any Grateful Dead concert, long a thriving marketplace of tie-dye tees , beaded jewelry, DIY taco stands, and any drug you might fancy, collectively known as Shakedown Street .)

Band T-shirts still make up the bulk of the merch at Warped, just as they do at most concerts these days. As album sales have dropped off a cliff and services like Spotify have taken their place, paying a fraction of a penny per stream, merchandise has become an increasingly essential part of artists’ income. A superstar like Taylor Swift or Kanye West can gross $300,000 to $400,000 in merch during a single show, according to a Billboard interview with licensing exec Dell Furano. Warped artists aren’t coming close to that, but especially at the tour’s peak, they were pulling in a good amount of cash.

Taking Back Sunday made a reported $20,000 to $30,000 per show on merch on the 2004 tour; My Chemical Romance set the record the next year, selling $60,000 worth of black T-shirts, sinister-looking posters, and fingerless gloves at a single stop. 2005 was also the only year Warped made money on ticket sales, according to Lyman. Headliners Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance were regulars on MTV’s TRL thanks to crossover hits “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “Helena.” Teens who hadn’t heard of most of the “authentic” punk bands the tour had booked in prior years were turning out in droves. By the end of the 48 dates, 700,000 fans had bought tickets, and the tour grossed an all-time high of $25 million .

”That was a pretty wild year, with all the bands exploding,” says Lisa Johnson, who’s been photographing Warped Tour since its first run. “I’m not gonna lie, it was a little frustrating in the photo pit because it was so jam-packed. And a little dangerous, because there were so many kids coming over the barricade constantly. But at the same time, how fantastic is that?”

Of course, not everyone agreed. From its inception, Warped provoked criticism from punk purists who argued — not without reason — that the corporate-sponsored festival was antithetical to the values of the genre. It also ruffled feathers with the bands it booked, particularly as the rise of “mall punk” and emo put bands like Good Charlotte, Blink-182, and My Chemical Romance alongside punk mainstays like Rancid, Pennywise, and Bad Religion.

”You go to the Warped Tour and walk around and you’ll hear 100 bands that try to sound like Green Day or NOFX. It’s just disgusting,” said Mike Avilez, a vocalist for the California punk band Oppressed Logic, in the book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day . “They’re missing the angst. To me, punk rock is supposed to be angry and pissed off.”

The tour has also caught flak from within over the years. In a 2004 Chicago Reader piece , “Punk Is Dead! Long Live Punk!” the music critic Jessica Hopper chronicled a clash between Lyman and a band called the Mean Reds: “It was only the sixth day of the tour, and they were already on ‘probation’ for running their mouths onstage about what a sold-out capitalist-pig enterprise Warped is, how it isn’t really punk, et cetera.”

Even Adweek, hardly a voice of the counterculture, said in 2005 that the influx of corporate cash “does somewhat undermine the legitimacy of the event, even as it introduces groups of men in tight pants to new audiences.”

Among those who’ve been along for the ride since Warped’s early days, though, ambivalence about the scene’s brushes with the mainstream is tempered by ideas both idealistic — that the tour provided a platform to bands that otherwise might not have made it, and a community for kids who didn’t always fit in elsewhere — and practical.

”There’s always going to be critics,” says Shira Yevin, who’s performed at Warped as Shiragirl since 2004, and for a decade produced a stage at the tour dedicated to promoting women-fronted bands. “But they’re the same ones bitching because they only got paid $100 for the gig and they don’t have enough money to get to the next state, you know?”

In 2019, the idea of “selling out” seems like a product of an earlier generation — one without climate change or student loans or school gun violence to worry about. And anyway, the purists may be getting their way for now, since even pop punk isn’t popular these days. Instead, the top 40 charts are ruled by Lil Nas X’s boundary-pushing country trap, genre-fluid acts like Billie Eilish , and mumble rappers like Post Malone. The loud, fast, guitar-driven sound that Warped is known for? “In top 40, it’s very rare,” says Nate Sloan, a musicologist and the co-host of Vox’s Switched on Pop podcast . “Even the bands that sort of assert that look and that style and may throw a guitar around their shoulder, the actual sound doesn’t necessarily have that.”

On the second day of the Atlantic City shows, in one of the festival’s seemingly endless meet-and-greet lines, I meet 20-year-old Sam and 14-year-old Tori, friends from Philadelphia who made the trip down for their first Warped Tour. Sam has rainbow hair and rainbow gauges in her ears; Tori’s wearing a Set It Off band tee. They met at the Hot Topic where Sam works, a store that itself has transformed from mall-goth central into a haven for geek fashion .

”I basically live there,” says Tori.

”We vibed about the music we listen to,” says Sam.

”I don’t really have any other friends that listen to this kind of stuff,” explains Tori. “I almost kind of get made fun of, because it’s like, ‘Oh, emo music, what do you do, cry all day?’”

At Sam’s high school, most guys listened to trap or rap, while “angsty music” was mostly the domain of girls or “the guys who had a bad upbringing.”

”It was just divided,” she adds. “Like the way the country is right now.”

While genres may separate fans into factions in high school, Sloan says they’re not necessarily as diametrically opposed as they seem. “A lot of the sensibility of rock ’n’ roll has gone into the sound of SoundCloud rap and mumble rap,” he says. “This genre is sort of the spiritual heir to a lot of the acts that first kicked off the original Warped Tour. Sonically, it feels like a world apart in a lot of ways, but in terms of the intense emotional affect, it’s very clearly picking up the mantle.”

Part of the transformation may be technological. “Maybe 20, 30 years ago, if you were an angsty teenager, the easiest way to express yourself would have been by installing yourself and your friends in the garage with a couple of crappy guitars and a battered drum set,” says Sloan. “Today, the easiest way to express your angst would be through a pirated copy of [the music software] FruityLoops and a USB microphone.” This evolution may also help explain why punk’s communal, anti-commercial spirit seems to have fallen out of favor while themes like alienation and disaffection (which Gen Z artists like Eilish mine extensively) have endured.

Shifting musical tastes are just one factor contributing to Warped’s decline. Most people I talked to had similar theories about what’s behind the drop-off in teen attendance: It’s not just that today’s rock bands can’t compete with the colossal forces of hip-hop and pop; they’re also up against YouTube, Netflix, TikTok , esports, and social media, all of which are pouring billions into the race for young people’s attention. Plus, parents are warier about sending their kids to live shows because of tragedies like the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas and the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England .

Lamenting the changing habits of teenagers has always been an adults’ game, though. For the current generation of fans and artists, the end of the tour is, inevitably, the beginning of whatever comes next. Not Ur Girlfrenz was the youngest touring act at Warped last year, and now at ages 13 (bassist Gigi Haynes) and 14 (lead singer and guitarist Liv Haynes and drummer Maren Alford), the trio is on the cusp of what was once the festival’s prime demographic. They also just released their first EP, the title track of which, “New Kids in America,” riffs off the Kim Wilde hit with bouncy pop-punk energy and lyrics like, “When did the trend of no one ever having fun / Spread throughout the land infecting everyone?”

Still, they’re more optimistic about the future of the kind of music they play. “Kids our age these days just aren’t really exposed to it anymore. It’s not exactly like they just don’t like it. They’re just not exposed to it,” says Maren. She’ll introduce her friends to a new band or tell them to stay and watch whoever Not Ur Girlfrenz has opened for, “And they’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is my new favorite band!’”

Plus, with early-aughts nostalgia already trending heavily among Gen Z (so much so that this year’s VidCon — a conference for online video creators and their mostly teenage fans — featured a meeting room decked out in Lizzie McGuire posters and blow-up furniture), a musical comeback seems timely. “You hear the 1975 bringing back the ’80s sounds, so I think now’s the time to bring back the 2000s,” reasons Liv.

At their Sunday set, it’s easy to see why they’re hoping for another Warped Tour next year — even if Lyman insists that, for real this time, this is the last. Fans are yelling their names and singing their lyrics back at them from the crowd.

”I did the whole thing where, you know, someone points at you and you look behind you and then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, it’s me!’” Liv says with a laugh.

At a signing at their merch tent after the set, the screaming starts again. “We were like, ‘Is somebody famous here? Oh, my god, is it Blink-182?’” recalls Gigi.

”Yeah, we saw this huge group of people,” says Maren, “and we were like, ‘Ooh, someone important is giving a signing. I wonder who it is.’”

”Nah, it was just us. Psh ,” Gigi sighs.

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

How did the cost of food delivery get so high?

Biden might actually do something about ludicrously expensive concert tickets, how should i plan for retirement when the future is so uncertain, sign up for the newsletter today, explained, thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Punk's not dead? How Vans Warped tour jumped the shark

The festival defined noughties pop-punk and united America’s outcasts – but as it shuts for ever, we ask: did it fail to champion diversity?

T he sun is blazing mercilessly in Columbia, Maryland, on a Sunday in July. It is not yet noon, and the nasal singer of a jet-black metalcore band is crying out: “Will you miss me when I’m gooone?” Already this weekend, I have seen hair-dye jobs in impossibly electric hues of bubblegum pink and highlighter-pen lime. I have seen ripped fishnets and Tim Burton mini-backpacks and earlobes stretched as big as the rims of drinking glasses. I have perused the wares of outfitters called Mall Goth Trash and Sad Boys Club. I can confirm that the campaigns to “Stay Positive and Hail Satan” and ensure that “Ska’s Not Dead!” have endured in some corners of America.

I am on my third consecutive day inside the misfit carnival that is Vans Warped tour, which, after 24 years, finished its final run as a national touring festival last week. While American festivals such as Lollapalooza have long retired their caravans and turned into annual fixed-site weekenders, Warped persevered as a roving punk-themed circus. The brand will probably continue with abbreviated tours, says Kevin Lyman, its founder. An exhibition about Warped’s history will open next year at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. But it is the end of an era for the generation who invented “mall punk”.

Now 58, Lyman says he felt like an outcast as early as junior high. He was partial to British street punk, reggae and the Clash’s Sandinista! album. Socialising with the band geeks and theatre kids – “You got food thrown at you in school,” he says. “I was always the guy who said, ‘Let’s unite and throw food back.’” After several years working behind the scenes at Lollapalooza, Lyman founded Warped in 1995.

Warped made its name packaging the more brashly commercial strains of pop-punk, emo, hardcore and ska that peaked in the early- to mid-2000s, though the tour has also featured household names including Limp Bizkit and Eminem (and, early on, Katy Perry). It had no identified headliners: the schedule changed daily and was not announced until gates opened. To ensure you would see your favourite band, you simply had to arrive by 11. “No one did things the way I did, and no one has since,” says Lyman. “This was the last festival for the people.”

Lyman sought to “put punk rock in the sunshine”, to escape the violence of clubs, which he thought distracted from the genre’s radical message. But Warped ultimately became a shorthand for an easily digested candy-coated version of rebellion. The spirit of commodified dissent was exemplified by its name – sponsored by Vans shoe company, in a checkerboarded break from punk’s historically anti-capitalist ethic. Warped’s scale meant it dealt bands like gateway drugs, which plenty of young people need. My three days following the tour evoked a complete scene of maladjusted suburban youth: the car park, the mall, the skate park, the mosh pit.

In contrast to its diverse audiences, Warped’s lineups were shockingly male and white and, at times, the tour presented worrying streaks of conservatism – in Maryland, I saw a recruiting tent for the US Marines. Warped came under fire in 2015 for allowing a performance by Front Porch Step after he had been accused of sexual misconduct and preying on young fans. This prompted Paramore’s Hayley Williams, one of Warped tour’s most renowned alumni, to tweet: “What happened to our scene?”

Lyman says: “If I look back at Front Porch Step, probably I made a mistake. With hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have let it happen.” Lyman says he’s open to criticism, though he seems allergic to the way it plays out online. “Maybe that’s why I’m ending it,” he says. “We all used to be a community that figured things out. Now people prejudge so quickly on the internet.”

Only 7% of bands on this year’s touring lineup included women, such as Australia’s Tonight Alive and ska revivalists the Interrupters. The feminist rock band Potty Mouth (incidentally once managed by Warped veterans Good Charlotte) ended up on one Californian date after tweeting about gender disparity on the tour: “We wanted access to that fan base of young girls,” says bassist Ally Einbinder. “For us, it would be breaking into a whole new audience who might not hear of us otherwise.” Lyman mentions that the production crew of Warped tour has been heavily dominated by women, and reasoned that this year’s gender disparity was due in part to the fact that he curated the festival (he still chooses the bands) as “a nostalgia tour”.

Over the years, Warped formed alliances with bands such as Less Than Jake, a Floridian ska-punk troupe who first played the tour in 1996 and have remained fixtures since. The drummer, Vinnie Fiorello, reminisces about performing, in the scrappy early days, on a stage made of plywood and cinder blocks. “Warped was supposed to be a punk rock summer camp,” he says. Less Than Jake embodied that, instigating “maximum fun” and an air of weirdness: regular mayhem at a Less Than Jake Warped set might, for instance, find “a metalhead shooting a toilet-paper gun”.

“We were never, at any point, even remotely in the cool kids’ club of punk rock,” says Fiorello. “But Warped was a common denominator among punk bands, hardcore bands, screamo and metal, ska punk. You had to play Warped tour.” Fiorello, who also co-founded the influential pop-punk and emo label Fueled by Ramen , noted that Warped was a crucial marketing tool: “Warped tour would be a huge chunk of the launch for a record or label or band. It was in the Less Than Jake marketing plan in the 90s, for sure. The end of that truly means the shrinking of some ways to market what’s out there.”

Fellow ska-punk elders Reel Big Fish have also been enmeshed in Warped since 1997. Year after year, they built their audience on the tour, though trumpeter John Christianson was not shy about the price. “There’s a lot of anxiety,” he says. “There’s five bands playing at one time. Five bands playing at one time is cacophony, and that is not any fun for me.”

Chuck Comeau is the drummer of Montreal pop-punks Simple Plan: 11 Warpeds in total. “You had this cultural movement that was happening,” he says of the scene’s 2003 peak. “And Warped had the cultural currency. If you wanted to be part of this scene, if you wanted to be respected, if you wanted to reach the audience, it was a must.”

The music of Warped has not all aged well. In Maryland, surprise guests Good Charlotte led a workmanlike singalong to Girls and Boys, their arguably sexist 2002 single about teenage materialism. Speaking backstage, Buddy Nielsen of the New Jersey post-hardcore band Senses Fail (eight-time Warped veterans, who this year performed a medley of nu-metal covers) cited childhood trauma and a bad relationship with his mother as sources of the toxic masculinity in some of his earliest material. “I don’t necessarily celebrate those songs,” Nielsen says. “I wouldn’t encourage my daughter to listen to music like that.” His self-awareness reflects a broader cultural milieu that has recently been forced to reckon with its ingrained misogyny.

I was watching a formulaic pop-punk band in matching Hawaiian shirts play a side stage when I heard a woman’s demonic roar in the distance and ran towards it. “Where my fucking ladies at?” seethed Lauren Kashan, singer of Baltimore metalcore band Sharptooth. They played Clever Girl, the title track from their 2017 debut, which culminated with a mosh-summoning breakdown and an incendiary refrain: “Dead men tell no tales,” the crowd chanted. “Dead men talk no shit.” This jolt of radical feminism felt shocking in the context of Warped tour. “The world we live in is not a safe place for too many of us,” Kashan shouted from the stage. “So this needs to be.”

Sharptooth’s sets were thrillingly righteous. Kashan issued a call to arms or systemic indictment between every song, attacking street harassment, police brutality and US border policy. She drew attention to the fact that she would be the only woman performing on that stage all day and, before a song called Left for Dead, spoke bluntly about her experiences of sexual violence. “I’ve been raped multiple times,” Kashan told the crowd. “I don’t like talking about it, but if I’m the person with the mic and I can’t talk about my trauma, how is any other survivor supposed to ask for help?”

I watched a pink-haired girl in the eye of the pit scream along with Kashan: “I can’t be silent anymore!” “Sharptooth and [2017 Warped band] War on Woman make me feel so relieved about being into music in this scene,” says Niquey, 20. “Stuff like that needs to be talked about at places like Warped tour because it’s so hypermasculine.” Niquey has come to Warped every year since she was 12 – she had only seen Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers in concert before that – and said she looked forward to it more than her birthday.

Some have welcomed the demise of Warped and the aggressively male-dominated culture it came to represent. But after witnessing Sharptooth’s set, it occurred to me that it would be a tragedy for Warped tour to simply end, not evolve, at a moment where powerful, wide-reaching platforms are increasingly rare in rock music of any kind. Potty Mouth’s Einbinder agrees: “There is so much potential to make some changes and evolve the whole culture of the festival,” she says. “But so much of that cultural shift would have to come from the top down.”

I felt optimistic watching Doll Skin, a band of women aged 18 to 21 who play pop-punk with riff-heavy nods to classic rock, and strive to be “as raw and feminine and powerful as we can”, according to singer Sydney Dolezal. They played an original song called Punch a Nazi and a cover of Fugazi’s Waiting Room, which stood out as strongly at Warped as the flower crowns in their circle pit.

Multiple times a day, Dolezal says, young girls approach Doll Skin to say they feel inspired by their set, sometimes crying. “If there’s anyone out there who feels like they can’t be in a band – they can,” she says. “It’s attainable. You don’t have to be a super shredder – you can just play guitar. You don’t have to be soloing on drums, you can just play a beat. You don’t have to be doing runs, you can just yell into a microphone.” It’s no stretch to say this was the most punk statement I heard at the 2018 Warped tour.

In Mansfield, Massachusetts, I meet 19-year-old Felice, who wants to see more bands resembling Doll Skin at Warped. “I wish we could see more intersectionality,” she says. “I wish I could hear more queer artists or artists of colour.” Her friend Felisha chimes in: “It’s a prime time to keep going if anything.” But after Doll Skin’s Long Island set, another new fan, Katie, 26, had a firmer suggestion: “Burn it to the ground and start something new.”

A pair of 23-year-old fans on Long Island, Neena and Gabrielle, tells me they had long fantasised about forming bands. Growing up, they were enthralled by fictional all-girl groups such as Josie and the Pussycats. Neena wonders whether she might have taken up drums had she seen more female instrumentalists.

“I’m such an emo kid. You feel like an outcast sometimes,” Gabrielle says. “But when you’re in this setting, you see there are thousands upon thousands of people who are just like you. It’s so comforting.” I mention how the huge number of outsiders does not quite register until you get here, and it makes you realise – Neena finishes my sentence – “how not alone you are”.

• Pop and rock
• Music festivals
• Young people

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Skip to Nav
• Skip to Main
• Skip to Footer

How 23 Years of Warped Tour Changed America

Please try again

After almost a quarter of a century, and having showcased upwards of 1700 bands, Warped Tour as we know it will come to an end when summer 2018 does. For the most mainstream of Americans who never attended, the tour always looked like an outlier -- a noisy summertime day out for the same kids that shopped at Hot Topic, wore too much eyeliner, and learned HTML by editing their MySpace profiles. Truthfully though, Warped Tour's impact on mainstream pop culture was enormous.

Warped Tour started out scrappy. It was 1995, pop punk was just starting to explode out of the underground -- thanks to Green Day's major label debut, Dookie -- and founder Kevin Lyman , having spent three years working on the Lollapalooza tour, recognized a gap in the festival market. That first Warped was 25 dates -- a breeze for bands and crews who later got used to the jaunt going on for twice as long. No one could foresee back then just how big -- or long-running -- this juggernaut would become.

While Warped's biggest impact has been taking underground culture and smearing it across America in broad daylight every summer, what is so often forgotten is that this was also the venue used by the likes of Katy Perry and Eminem to launch their careers to wider audiences. It's where Sonny Moore started out (in a band named From First to Last ) before he metamorphosed into EDM megastar, Skrillex . It's where No Doubt spent their summer the year before they exploded on a global scale.

Dominic Davi , Oakland-based bassist of  Tsunami Bomb , has been attending Warped since 1995 and playing it since 2001. "It's so easy to forget now," he says, "but when it started, and for a long time into it, the bands Warped Tour was assembling did not get played on the radio. They were not featured on festival lineups. Kevin Lyman helped shine a light onto all these bands that were drawing various amounts on their own, but together could fill a festival. That took a lot of vision."

"In the end," Davi continues, "Warped launched all these careers and was directly responsible for the punk rock explosion that happened in the early 2000s. That's quite a feat."

Warped Tour, especially in its earliest years, acted this way, year upon year, launching artists out of obscurity and into the eyeline of the mainstream. Blink 182, a band that was long considered too crude and provocative for mainstream success, appeared on three out of the four Warpeds between 1996 and 1999. It's no coincidence that by 2000, they were one of the biggest bands in the country.

Not only did Warped change how punk rock was treated by mainstream music culture, it had an indelible impact on the lives of the thousands of people who lived and worked on the tour over the years, some of whom came back annually, without fail. Along the way, it also helped to further unify a nationwide community of punks, rebels, and renegades.

Dominic Davi compares spending a summer on the tour to "running away with the circus." Photographer Lisa Johnson , whose work documenting Warped Tour has been featured on the covers of several official compilations, as well as in the book, Misfit Summer Camp: 20 Years on the Road With Vans , elaborates: "Warped Tour is a place where seemingly anything is possible. Utopia. Hard work and happiness, plus some fun in the sun. There is just always something magic in the air."

The unique spirit of Warped is precisely why hundreds of people have stepped up, year after year, to work in unbearably high temperatures, notoriously dusty environs, facing parking lot after parking lot with few views of the outside world (unless you count the occasional midnight trip to Wal-Mart) for weeks on end.

It's difficult to fathom why anybody would want to spend an entire summer in those conditions -- until you actually do it. In 2006, I joined Warped Tour for five days to write a story for a British rock magazine. Somehow, five days turned into seven weeks. I skipped my flight home to sell merch for one of the bands I had met along the way, and had zero regrets about hitting 'pause' on the rest of my life to do so.

For thousands of us, Warped has always been that way -- once you get caught in its vortex, it's hard to extricate yourself from it. "It's this huge production," Davi says, "with so many moving parts. It's hard work. You are moving all day. I think you have to be a particular personality to love that life. I always did."

The video below that Lisa Johnson took at a backstage party in 2014, effectively sums up the hilarity, unified chaos, and good-natured anarchy of Warped Tour (and also why the nightly after-show barbecues have become the stuff of legend). Take into account that the people you see in this clip are the people working the tour -- crew members, band members, merch people, stage hands. Work days may be long and conditions may sometimes be hard, but on the best nights, this is what happens once the ticket-buying public leaves:

There's no doubting that in recent years Warped Tour has, to some degree at least, lost its niche, while also weathering some damaging storms. "In many ways," Davi notes, "I think when the bands on the tour became bands that the radio and MTV embraced, it became harder to preserve that core exclusivity and unique feeling that Warped Tour had. At first it made the tour bigger, but having to chase the trends and adapt to bands with more exposure, I think made it more difficult to make the tour a special experience. By trying to please everyone they had a harder time pleasing anyone."

The summer tour's time might be drawing to a close, but Warped promises to live on in other capacities: there will be some sort of 25th anniversary celebration, and the first Warped Rewind at Sea cruise just happened last month. More than that though, the tour leaves behind a legacy. It impacted a couple of generations of punk, emo and hardcore bands, as well as their fans. Warped brought a newfound acceptance of alternative culture to all corners of the country. It was a confidence builder for teens who felt alienated in their suburban high schools; it was a training camp for small bands, and a springboard for larger ones; and, for a long while there, it fundamentally changed the fabric of alternative music in America.

Thanks for signing up for the newsletter.

• Manage Account
• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Pinit
• + additional share options added
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Email
• Print this article
• Share this article on Comment
• Share this article on Tumblr

Goodbye, Warped Tour: 21 Bands Relive Their Favorite Festival Memories in Their Own Words

New Found Glory, Yellowcard, Senses Fail and more look back on the annual cross-country trek.

By Taylor Weatherby

Taylor Weatherby

For 24 summers, the Vans Warped Tour — the traveling alternative music festival beloved by fans and artists alike for its summer-camp atmosphere — has crossed the country and created a hallowed ground for punk, metalcore, ska and everything loud.

Every year since 1995, with around 70 bands and about 40 locations to hit in a matter of weeks, Warped has allowed hundreds of thousands of fans to be themselves, meet their idols and mosh together under the hot sun — all in the name of the of the music they love. In addition to attracting the biggest names in punk and alternative music as headlines, Warped Tour has also played an integral part in breaking young bands who would become staples in the scene, including New Found Glory , Senses Fail and Yellowcard .

Blink-182's Tom DeLonge Unveils Signature Fender 'Starcaster' Guitar

As the Warped Tour prepares for its final show in West Palm Beach on Aug. 5, Billboard asked festival veterans and newbies alike to bid the tour adieu by looking back on their favorite memories and sharing what the festival has meant to them.

Trending on Billboard

NEW FOUND GLORY

Cyrus Bolooki (drums): This year will mark the 12th year that I’ve played Warped Tour, and my 14th year attending as a fan. Whether it was our first Warped Tour on the local stage in Pompano Beach, Florida, in 1999, the first time we played a main stage in 2001, or our first time playing the full tour in 2002, I will never forget things like being able to meet and hang out with bands I loved like MxPx, Less Than Jake, Rancid, NOFX, Bad Religion, and Reel Big Fish. I’ll also never forget the random times that I actually got to fill in on drums for bands on Warped, starting in 2002 when I filled in for Good Charlotte for a few shows. I kept a bunch of the daily schedules throughout the years, because it’s awesome to grab one and glance over it, just to remind myself of how many cool bands were on the tour at the same time as us. [I’ve kept] all of the Warped backstage laminates. In recent years, they started including pictures of the passholder on the back of the laminate, so it’s funny for me to go back and see how I’ve changed. 

The most important thing about Warped is the sense of community there is backstage throughout the tour. No one is allowed to put themselves above others on the tour. Everyone comes together each day to try and put on the best festival they can for all the attendees. There really is a family vibe that goes on every summer, no matter what the lineup looks like that year. We met so many of our idols and bands we looked up to on that tour and became friends with a lot of them, mainly because of how down to earth everyone is — and has to be. [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman really did a great job of establishing that from the beginning, with no tolerance for any behavior that makes one band seem bigger or more powerful than any others on the tour. To me, Warped Tour was definitely punk-rock summer camp — and a huge part of how New Found Glory got to where we are today.

THE INTERRUPTERS

Aimee Interrupter (vocals): Between the four of us, it would be hard to count how many times we went to the Warped Tour growing up. We were so inspired by all of the punk-rock bands that would go out on the tour every year that it’s safe to say there would be no Interrupters if there was no Warped Tour. 

Warped Tour can make or break an artist. After we did the whole thing in 2016, I felt like we could do anything. You find out your set time the morning of, you have to constantly be on your toes, there is dramatic weather conditions you need to adapt to — it really made us a lot stronger as a band. 

At the Columbia, Maryland show in 2016, Kevin Lyman asked us to play at the nightly BBQ after the show. We ended up learning a bunch of punk rock covers and had members of all the other bands come up, sing, and play karaoke-style. The whole night ended with us playing “Bro Hymn” by Pennywise, and Kevin Lyman was crowd surfing and hanging from the rafters of the place. It was wild! We just feel lucky to be invited on to a tour that has played such a vital role in the music that shaped us. There’s no tour harder, but there’s no tour better. Warped Tour’s legacy will live on forever.

BOWLING FOR SOUP

Jaret Reddick (vocals/guitar): We have always been hustlers, but Warped makes you hustle. We’ve done a lot — we did almost all of [the shows] in 2003 and 2004, then we have been back every few years. The biggest change is that it all started with punk-rock icons like Bad Religion and Pennywise, then Fall Out Boy and My Chemical romance blew up. In 2010 it was almost all nu-metal. It has changed a lot over the years and almost come full circle in my experience. I also learned that staying up until 9 a.m. drinking isn’t the smartest thing to do when your time slot changes daily! 

Pat Kirch (drums): Warped Tour feels like you’re in Disneyland, but for bands. As a band, it’s an opportunity to play in front of so many people, and those kinds of opportunities just don’t exist outside of this. As a fan, it’s a place to learn about new bands you’ve never heard of and see so many of your favorite bands in one show. The first time we played Warped was in 2008. That will always stick out to me, going from being a kid in the audience to then only four or five years later playing it. I was only 17 when we first played Warped Tour, and I was on the same stage as Katy Perry. It just felt like my dreams coming true.

[Warped Tour] means having a chance, you know? Kevin has given just so many bands an honest chance at trying to be heard by people, and it really built something great for us. Now I have a life where music is my career and the only thing I’ve done for the past decade, and I think a large part of that is because of this tour.

WE THE KINGS

Travis Clark (vocals/guitars/keyboards): I snuck into my first one. I didn’t have enough money to get in, so I made a fake tour pass at my middle school and laminated it with a lanyard and snuck right pass security. I don’t recommend people do that, but I got on my cell phone and I was like, “The speakers need to be on stage. The speakers need to be on stage!” I walked right past security with this fake laminate dangling from my pocket and I got to see all my favorite bands.

Coley O’Toole (keyboards/guitar): In 2008 I watched Kevin Lyman himself help people sneak over the fence. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

Clark: When he asked us to join the tour, I felt like I just had this monkey on my back. So I talked to him and was like, “I think that you should know that I snuck into my very first Warped Tour,” and he thought it was amazing. I was like, “I think I owe you 34 dollars or something,” and he was just like, “That’s the best story ever!”

Clark: Do you remember the year that Paramore came? They had come up from Mexico and had this hot sauce. Bands had to sign a waiver for this hot sauce. People were taking the end of a toothpick and just dabbing it very lightly and putting it on their tongue and dying. And this band from Mexico was like, “We are Mexican, we can handle this.” This band chugged it and…

O’Toole: Pardon my French, but if you’ve ever seen anyone shit and puke at the same time, it’s quite a mess. I have it on VHS — I was VHSing the whole thing with one of those big camcorders.

Clark: [ Laughs ] That tells you how long We The Kings has been around. But we saw that and we were just like “This is crazy.” And it wasn’t any special night, it was just another night at Warped Tour.

O’Toole: Every night, you never know what you’re going to get. It’s a crapshoot.

SILVERSTEIN

Josh Bradford (guitar): Warped Tour definitely expanded my horizons. As a young concert-goer, this is maybe one of the first concerts you’ve been to — it just gives you a real taste of the sides [of life] that are out there, and I think it’s inspiring to see people being brave enough to live whatever their truth is. Tattoos, piercings, colored hair. You just get introduced to a lot of alternative lifestyles. 

They had this tour water — it looks like a can of Monster Energy but it’s just canned water. In the earlier years, they did a specific branded can for each year, so it was like “Warped Tour 2005” and it would have a cool graphic and a little story. I’ve collected those over the years, so I have one of those from every year. And when they stopped doing that and just started doing generic branded tour water, I still kept one from every year and just wrote the date on the bottom. With Warped Tour going away I don’t know how often I will get the opportunity to drink water from a can — one thing I’m going to strangely miss. 

Cassadee Pope (vocals/guitar): Warped Tour means hard work to me. You really have to love what you do to get through Warped. It’s not easy, and if you’re not careful, you could run out of steam real quick. It really puts you through tour boot camp. It also gives you a good look at how hard the crew members work, day in and day out. Everyone’s parked in the same lot, so you see merch people, guitar techs, drum techs lugging gear from one side of the tour to the complete opposite. It makes you appreciate what keeps the whole thing running. Everyone’s on the same playing field — everyone has to wait in the catering line, you’ve gotta wait your turn to shower. It’s a very humbling experience that I’m so grateful I got to have. 

I also learned how important connecting with your fans is on Warped. Those were some of the best signings because those fans are truly dedicated. They stand out in the blistering sun to see their favorite bands play. And they don’t just stand around — they rock out.

SENSES FAIL

Buddy Nielsen (vocals): Warped Tour is my childhood and my adulthood. It’s a coming of age. I met my wife on it, so it has been a really integral part of my life. Our daughter’s first time watching me play was at Warped Tour in Philly a couple weeks ago. She’s 14 months old, so she’s never been able to stay up late enough.

Senses Fail is in a bunch of weird Warped Tour time capsules — one of them is buried at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that’s going to be opened in 2025, I think. We owe a lot to Kevin and to all the fans who have come out. It’s sort of the end of a generation. It’s cool to be a part of. I wanted to be a part of the last one.

TONIGHT ALIVE

Jenna McDougall (vocals): Warped was like the gateway to a lot of other opportunities for us. I have always described it as an incubator, because for a band like us, we started on the Kevin Says stage — which actually doesn’t exist anymore — but that stage was the upcoming “heavens giving us a chance” stage. We’ve played the main stage for two years now, so it’s the type of tour that can take you from a teenage rookie to a world-renowned internationally touring professional performer.

Whoever we met and toured with on Warped Tour that summer, we would often go out with the next fall or the next spring. This year Simple Plan is on the tour, and it’s not the first time that we’ve toured together. They’re really beautiful people, and it’s just this really amazing experience to ride the same wavelength as the people who’ve influenced your musical career. We used to watch Simple Plan DVDs when we had band practice when I was 15 years old. These bands seeped into our bloodstreams, and now we are out here touring with them. We’re still on completely different levels, but it is cool to be on the same lineup, eat together, and sit out on the back of the trailers every night.

It’s almost like being back in high school — the difference is that everyone’s got the same goal. Everyone here has the same interest, everyone here is at some level able to relate to being an outcast, a rebel, and a black sheep — but put rebels, outcasts and black sheep all in the same place and it’s a really interesting energy.

Rob Damiani (vocals): Being from England, we had never been to Warped Tour. But from watching videos of it as kids and hearing about legendary bands doing it, we very much felt a part of it despite being so far away. As soon as we started the band, this was the tour we wanted to do. It’s just been the most magical few weeks, and the best way to spend the summer.

There’s a lot of party bands on Warped Tour. The band Issues, they’ve got the reputation of having the best party bus. They’ve got these lights in their bus where it’s just normal, ambient yellow lighting, then there’s one button you press and it turns neon blue. You can all just be chilling, feeling tired, and then you press this one button and the blue lights come on and the music starts. There’s been a few nights where we just had the bus jumping. The suspension is probably fucked by now, but it’s a lot of fun. 

It all just reconfirmed our love of just going hard at shows. That energy that comes from the music that we grew up on, that is what creates an awesome live show for me. Seeing that everywhere on Warped Tour kind of gives me faith in what we do.

Tyler Carter (vocals): I had only attended one Warped as a fan prior to playing — I could never afford it growing up. But I have played it five times including this year. I’ve seen the tour fluctuate, but I’ve definitely seen some of the most magical moments in the tour’s history, including a surprise performance with Linkin Park that I was blessed with the opportunity of joining on stage. Warped has given us opportunities of growth that I don’t think anyone outside of this world could understand. There aren’t really any other festival-style tours out there aside from this that would go extensively around the country. I also have had very many important life experiences out here. I found myself several times. 

ALL TIME LOW

Alex Gaskarth (vocals/guitar): There have been a lot of bands who came up on the Warped Tour that tried to distance themselves from it for whatever reason, and we never looked at it that way. It’s something that we’ve always and respected and cherished just because it was a staple in the punk and alternative world. Warped Tour was such a big part of our band coming up — it really taught us a lot about how to be on the road and coexist with other bands, how to carry ourselves and put on a great show learning from all the other bands that were veterans there.

Warped Tour brings out the craziness a little bit. It inspires us to capture that energy and take that with us on the road whenever we’re separate of Warped Tour. And I think that’s something we’ve maintained from the first time we did it. The crowds, the energy, the moments we’re creating here — we need to translate that live everywhere else. There’s no excuse. Warped is a reminder that the energy never dies.

Cody Carson (vocals/piano/guitar): In school there wasn’t really a clique that I fell into. I was never really a cool kid, I felt like an outcast. This is where all the outcasts go to feel at home. Everyone’s a weirdo, everyone’s having a good time, and that’s how so many friendships form from shows. Everyone is so similar because obviously they have the thing in common: They love music. 

The first mosh pit I was ever in was at Warped Tour. My guitarist, Dan, we went together when we were in high school. I think it was during Avenged Sevenfold’s song “Chapter Four” — he just looks at me, grins, and pushes me in, and I was like “Alright, whatever!” There was guy in there with a lightsaber, not even kidding.

In 2004 or 2005, when Fall Out Boy was playing, I didn’t have any money for merch, so I brought a white T-shirt and a sharpie and I wrote “FOB” on it in my terrible handwriting. I brought it up to them and they signed it. I was very thankful and grateful that they were willing to sign my shirt, I still have it. They didn’t really say much about it, but they signed it and I kept it. It’s cool to look back at that and be like, “I was the kid in that line, and now these kids are in line for us.”

STATE CHAMPS

Derek DiScanio (vocals): As a fan in 2005 I had no idea who the band The Starting Line was, but they eventually became one of my favorite bands of all time [because of Warped Tour]. They were the last band I saw, and I rolled up to their last song, and I’ll just never forget it. It was the “Best of Me” and it just kind of implanted in me that this  was Warped Tour — I love this band, and I need to know everything about them and everything about this scene.

The small bands look up to larger bands, but those larger bands will do everything they can to help the smaller ones. Everyone is here for the right reasons. Simple Plan, who I have loved forever, on the first day of the tour [this year] came right up to us saying, “Hey, we love your band, will you guys come on stage and sing with us tomorrow?” So now I’m singing “I’m Just A Kid” with Simple Plan during shows, and I’m like a kid in a candy store up there. There is no room for egos on this tour, and that’s why it’s going to be sad to see it go. 

REAL FRIENDS

Dan Lambton (vocals):  The first year we played, Motion City Soundtrack also played, and I remember I was waiting to watch them on the stage, and Jesse the keyboard player was like, “Do you guys wanna come up here, like have a beer, come chill with us?” And I was like “Whoa, damn. Okay sure.” I think a lot of it is about community, because it’s one of the places you can see a lot of these bands together. Whether or not there are cliques or people that don’t like each other, everyone’s still under one roof with one common goal — just get out there and play and hopefully have a good time. That’s really all it’s about.

TAKING BACK SUNDAY

Shaun Cooper (bass): I attended in 1995 as a fan. My old band Straylight Run played two weeks in 2007. Taking Back Sunday played the whole thing in 2012. We played our final Warped show in Ventura, California, a few weeks ago. Warped Tour offered us an opportunity to play in front of tens of thousands of people every day. Early, on we had to prove the hype behind our band was real. In 2012 we got to remind people who we are. We credit the tour with the resurgence our band has been enjoying to this very day. It means the world to us.

[My favorite memory is] hanging out with Bad Religion, specifically Brian Baker, in 2007. He was very kind when he didn’t have to be. We were a little Long Island piano-rock band. and he was a punk rock legend. He offered advice and great conversation simply because our busses were parked near each other.

Ryan Key (vocals/guitar): So much of Yellowcard’s success was due to the support we received from Kevin Lyman and the tour. If he believes in you, he really gets behind you and provides you with this incredible platform to play your music for thousands of people everyday, summer after summer. I truly believe that Warped Tour will be connected to everything I do as a musician going forward on my own because it was such an integral part of my development as an artist.   In 2004, I became an honorary member of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Their guitarist, Chris Shiflet, had to leave the tour for a few days to tend to Foo Fighters duties, so they gathered up friends on the tour to fill in on different songs. Being in a band made up of some of my childhood musical heroes and sharing the stage with them playing guitar was just insane. I still have my official Gimmes Hawaiian shirt.

MAYDAY PARADE

Jeremy Lenzo (bass/vocals): One memory that stands out was going to my first Warped Tour as a fan and seeing Davey Havok from AFI walk out into the middle of the crowd on top of people’s hands holding him up. He made it look so easy and never stopped singing — lots of respect to him. Everyone is equal on Warped Tour. It doesn’t matter how old your band is, or how popular, we are all in the same boat out here. And most of the intimidating bands are actually softies.

Warped Tour is something that we have always loved playing, and I honestly don’t know if we would have had the same success without Warped Tour. Selling CDs in line back in 2005 helped kickstart our career. We owe so much to the Warped Tour and everyone involved. We are very sad to see it go, and grateful that we were asked to play the last one.

Sean Foreman: The first time I ever went, we played. They just threw us on a stage because we were kind of bubbling in Denver, and they took a recommendation from a radio station. It’s the lifeblood of our career. I literally have scars on my body — I have a gash on my leg from falling on a drum riser. But I look down fondly at that scar because it’s the hard work that we’ve put in and everyone puts in here.

Nat Motte: It’s really been an amazing tour because it really breaks down the walls between fans and bands, literally. It’s an incredible opportunity for us to see who’s allowing us to do what we want to do. Our music has always been geared and conducive to rocking a party, and I think it’s great to be able to do that out here and see a bunch of smiling faces. 

Foreman: There was one special [show] for us, just because it was pretty surreal — when we toured that first full time, Katy Perry was on the same stage as us. She dove off the stage when we were playing “Don’t Trust Me” and got carried through the crowd. 

Motte: I think a bunch of teenagers got handfuls of something that they shouldn’t.

Foreman: I don’t think she stage dove after that again.

MOTIONLESS IN WHITE

Chris Cerulli (vocals/keyboards/guitar): Warped Tour has always been known for being a tour that has had a wide array of genres, but as the years have gone on, the heavier music has gotten even heavier, and there’s a lot more dance and pop and hip-hop now than I ever remember there being. I like that there’s no fear of taking risks and putting bands out here. Warped Tour has always been a place that we can feel accepted and call home for an entire summer. Warped Tour represents an open arms, open-mind mentality, and I have always felt welcomed into this world. Getting to see that there are so many like-minded people made me feel a lot more comfortable and confident in with myself.    

We’ve played about nine different Warped Tours in 13 years, and every year we’ve played in our hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. We just played it for the last time two days ago and got to say goodbye to Warped Tour in our hometown, where we got our start. We played our song that is dedicated to our area last, to all these hometown fans — that was probably one of the most powerful experiences of my entire life.

THE STORY UNTOLD

Jessy Bergy (lead guitar): I’ve become a better person in general just because the platform it gives you. You can be anywhere in the world and have the chance to play on stage, and you get to be yourself. The best thing I learned through Warped Tour was how to be myself. Going out there and sticking to your guns. You can be anyone and still have a chance to play and express yourself. So thank you, Kevin Lyman, for this. This is one of the best things in the world.

Daily newsletters straight to your inbox

More From Pro

Inside the creative direction for phish’s sphere residency: ‘trying to design the unpredictable’.

• By Eric Renner Brown

YoungBoy Never Broke Again Arrested In Utah on Drug & Gun Charges Amid Yearslong House Arrest

• By Bill Donahue

Are New AI Voice Laws Going Too Far? Plus Jelly Roll Lawsuit, Taylor Swift On TikTok & More Legal News

From taylor swift to kiss, the bootleg music merch business is hurting artists — and it’s getting worse.

• By Steve Knopper

Pandora Hits Back at MLC Lawsuit Over Streaming Royalties: ‘Legally Incoherent’

Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Billboard Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

optional screen reader

Charts expand charts menu.

• Billboard Hot 100™
• Billboard 200™
• Hits Of The World™
• TikTok Billboard Top 50
• Song Breaker
• Year-End Charts
• Decade-End Charts

Music Expand music menu

• R&B/Hip-Hop

Culture Expand culture menu

Media expand media menu, business expand business menu.

• Business News
• Record Labels
• View All Pro

Pro Tools Expand pro-tools menu

• Songwriters & Producers
• Artist Index
• Royalty Calculator
• Market Watch
• Industry Events Calendar

Billboard Español Expand billboard-espanol menu

• Cultura y Entretenimiento

Honda Music Expand honda-music menu

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

Dreaming Up a Warped Tour 2021 Lineup

As the world spent much of 2020 inside and isolated, disco experienced a resurgence like it hadn’t seen in years , providing escapist joy when reality looked like hell. Now, as the U.S. begins to emerge from quarantine in 2021, another revival has arrived: pop-punk. While its return to the mainstream has been brewing for years, thanks to emerging artists like YUNGBLUD and nothing,nowhere., in the late 2010s, it feels like no coincidence that the new wave is reaching a critical mass as we return to social life with infinite more angst.

The country’s accelerated vaccine rollout has also brought a wave of returning festival announcements, after over a year largely devoid of live music altogether. But absent from that group is Warped Tour, the Vans–sponsored touring pop-punk festival that made its last round in 2018 , upon founder Kevin Lyman’s retirement. (It returned for two 25th-anniversary events in Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Mountain View, California, in 2019.) Rumors of a revival under new leadership have swirled since, but little has been confirmed. As of now, it looks like the closest we might get is a 20th-anniversary edition of New Jersey’s Bamboozle Festival come … 2023 .

And let’s be real, there’s still no way a massive, multi-stage festival could tour the country by this summer — and definitely not with all the moshing us touch-starved music fans would be doing. But when was the last time we needed a Warped Tour more? We can still dream, so at Vulture, we’ve made a list of 25 musicians that would play our ideal Warped Tour this summer. Call it “Varped Tour ’21.”

A few quick rules: Although Warped Tour spanned everything from ska to hip-hop, we’re focusing largely (though not exclusively) on pop-punk artists. Rather than deciding what’s emo and what’s hardcore and what’s punk rock, we’re trying our best to color within the line that is that hyphen between pop and punk. And when it comes to the Warped veterans, we’re only including those who are still making music that would fit into Warped Tour just as well now as then — so not bands like Paramore and Fall Out Boy, who’ve pivoted to poppier material. Here’s our Varped Tour ’21 lineup. Emo gods, listen up.

The Headliners

Did you ever think you’d see the day when 3OH!3 had a noticeable, good influence on music? Well, the dawn has come thanks to groups like 100 gecs, and on top of it all, the crunkcore originators themselves are back — with music that’s as chaotically fun as ever. And even if others are following in 3OH!3’s footsteps, nothing else still quite matches the energy of the group’s early hits like “DONTTRUSTME” and “STARSTRUKK.” Past lineups: 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2018 farewell Song that opens up the mosh pit: “DONTTRUSTME,” just like it did back in 2008.

All Time Low

All Time Low never really left — their last five studio albums charted in the top ten — but last year resembled the closest thing to a comeback for the group. That was thanks to “Monsters,” All Time Low’s biggest hit ever , and a damn good one too , leaning back into the band’s earlier edge after trying on poppier sounds on recent albums. After over a decade, the boys can still tap into the cathartic angst that made songs like “Dear Maria, Count Me In” and “Weightless” connect. Past lineups: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018 farewell Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Monsters,” which really did not have to go that hard.

Avril Lavigne

All signs point toward a pop-punk comeback for Avril Lavigne in 2021: her Instagram teasers, her collaboration with punk boyfriend MOD SUN, her rumored work with Travis Barker and Machine Gun Kelly. Her last album, 2019’s Head Above Water , moved from angsty rock toward inspirational adult contemporary, but her “Flames” feature shows she’s still got that punk bravado in her, too. She’s also somehow never played Warped Tour — and if Warped ever comes back, that won’t be able to slide. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Sk8er Boi,” a bonafide classic at this point.

The hero of the pop-punk revival? None other than blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, who has played some mix of drummer-producer-mentor for most of the biggest new punks, from Machine Gun Kelly to jxdn to WILLOW. Not that his own band has stopped performing, either — blink released its last album, Nine , in 2019, the second since Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba replaced Tom DeLonge. With appearances dating back to the second-ever tour in 1996, they’d bring OG Warped cred to a 2021 tour. Past lineups: 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2019 Atlantic City Song that opens up the mosh pit: “What’s My Age Again?” by which point you will also be asking yourself the same question.

Machine Gun Kelly

Machine Gun Kelly took a gamble when he decided he didn’t want to be just another white guy making subpar rap — he wanted to make full-fledged pop punk. On last year’s Tickets to My Downfall , he made it sound like what he should’ve been doing all along, with some of the most enjoyable rock songs of 2020, full stop. And while he may not have a longer tenure than some other down-bill rappers-turned-punks, like MOD SUN or blackbear, Machine Gun Kelly has become the de facto leader of pop-punk’s new generation, supporting younger artists like Maggie Lindemann and iann dior and part-time influencers like jxdn and LILHUDDY alike. Past lineups: 2012 Song that opens up the mosh pit: “I Think I’m OKAY,” the first absolute jam of the pop-punk revival.

The Can’t-Miss Sets

100 gecs, the duo of Dylan Brady and Laura Les, is everything you could’ve possibly heard in an afternoon at Warped Tour — from punk to ska to to crunk to pop — in one exhilarating barrage of sound. Just imagine the sort of crowd that’d draw. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “hand crushed by a mallet,” which cemented its Warped cred with a 2020 remix featuring Fall Out Boy, Chiodos’s Craig Owens, and Nicole Dollanganger.

Before he was blackbear, Matthew Musto got his start in a little punk band called Polaroid. While he’s made some generic blend of pop, rap, and R&B for years since, blackbear didn’t truly take off until he got pulled back into pop-punk, featuring on songs by Machine Gun Kelly, All Time Low, and MOD SUN. It really isn’t just a phase! Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Hot Girl Bummer,” because what would a Warped Tour be without a few undeniably trashy, undeniably catchy songs?

Many rappers rode the late-’10s emo-rap wave, but few stuck around quite like iann dior, a favorite collaborator of lineup-mates like Machine Gun Kelly. He slips easily into rock-leaning songs, from jxdn’s “Tonight” to 24kGoldn’s No. 1 “Mood,” but dior is potent on a trap beat too — his hit “emotions” is a prime sadboi anthem. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Pretty Girls,” one of the only iann dior songs upbeat enough to mosh to.

Like his “heavy” collaborator” blackbear, MOD SUN started out in punk bands before he pivoted toward hip-hop and eventually found his way back. Except MOD SUN did his time as a drummer, hiding the fact that he’s one of the best screamers in pop-punk right now. Come on: The chorus of “Flames” is just guttural, in the best way. Past lineups: 2012, 2014, 2015 Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Karma,” a more thrash-ready banger than the bigger Internet Killed the Rockstar hit, “Flames.”

nothing,nowhere.

Rap-rock act nothing,nowhere. might be the only musician to leverage a New York Times best album of the year into a Fueled by Ramen signing. And it was a move for the better, judging by Joe Mulherin’s latest, hardest-rocking output on new album Trauma Factory . Song that opens up the mosh pit: “fake friend,” once that totally anthemic chorus hits.

Rina Sawayama

As much as she’s drawing on Max Martin’s brand of radio-ready pop from the 2000s, Rina Sawayama is also pulling from the nu-metal and punk from the same period, for a blend that gives Katy Perry at Warped Tour in the 2020s. But Sawayama rages harder than Perry ever did in her early years, with songs like “STFU!” and “Who’s Gonna Save You Now?” arriving ready for head-banging singalongs. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “STFU!” because how could you not mosh to those riffs?

If there’s a single rapper who belongs at Warped Tour, it’s Rico Nasty , who excels when she’s shouting and snarling over a heavy synth or blaring guitar. She’s maybe one of the best rappers for shouting along to — not just because of that effortlessly brazen exterior, but because of the bubbly, infectious spirit behind it. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Smack a Bitch,” obviously.

The most charming band in pop-punk right now might be Waterparks, who’ve been releasing music since the start of the genre’s last decline, in 2011. That’s thanks to a combination of genuine love songs like “Stupid for You,” a generally playful spirit (their new album, Greatest Hits , is not a greatest hits collection), and most of all, singer Awsten Knight, whose smiling vocals can add a tinge of sweetness to otherwise sour songs. Past lineups: 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 farewell Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Turbulent,” with a drum track that runs at 100 miles per hour.

Willow Smith has rock-star blood, as she reminded the world with her special Mother’s Day performance alongside mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s band Wicked Wisdom. WILLOW’s new, Travis Barker–featuring single “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” makes good on that promise too — um, and just imagine how much “Whip My Hair” would go off at a midday Warped set. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l,” the beginning of a hopefully long-lived punk phase.

YUNGBLUD came onto the scene right as Warped Tour was leaving, just in time to snag a spot on the final 2018 lineup (and return for the 2019 Atlantic City show). Not only can the English rocker do a great whiny scream, his Yorkshire accent is also full of attitude on hits like “I Love You, Will You Marry Me” and “parents.” Past lineups: 2018 farewell, 2019 Mountain View Song that opens up the mosh pit: “acting like that,” another explosive Machine Gun Kelly collaboration.

The Rising Stars

glaive gets lumped in with the burgeoning hyperpop scene on SoundCloud and TikTok, but his music really sits somewhere between there, emo, hip-hop, and pop — in other words, perfect fare for Warped Tour. And since he started making music in the pandemic, he’s never performed live, so what better place to start than Warped? Song that opens up the mosh pit: “astrid,” a deceptively sunny song that’s full of nerve.

At the beginning of 2020, Jaden Hossler was still part of Sway House . Fast-forward over a year, and he’s performing as jxdn, catching cosigns from Travis Barker and Machine Gun Kelly while making some of the most evocative pop-punk of the past few years. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Angels & Demons,” because a song with a line about mosh pits deserves a real one.

KennyHoopla

When KennyHoopla screams, his voice nearly jumps off the recording. His 2020 EP how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?// is wonderfully gritty, but the denser guitars on his more recent songs with Travis Barker suit his baritone voice even better. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “estella//,” if the guitars and drums aren’t pummeling enough.

The Kid LAROI

Before his breakout hit “Without You,” the Kid LAROI made his name off collaborations with late emo-rap icon Juice WRLD. LAROI’s voice has more of a bite than his teacher, though — precisely what makes lyrics like “Can’t make a wife out of a ho” actually work. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Fuck You, Goodbye,” only because you can’t mosh to an acoustic song like “Without You.”

Sure, you know him as a TikTok star first , if you know him at all. But with a sneering voice like that, why not pivot to punk? Song that opens up the mosh pit: “The Eulogy of You and Me,” with a catchy one-line chorus that will never get old.

Maddie Ross

Warped Tour needs more angsty queer love songs, and Maddie Ross is just the one to fill that gap, from her teen movie-inspired album Never Have I Ever to a gender-bent cover of Lustra’s “Scotty Doesn’t Know.” Song that opens up the mosh pit: “You’re Still My Sugar,” which follows in the Radio Disney Goes Punk footsteps of predecessors like Ashlee Simpson and Aly and AJ .

Maggie Lindemann

Years after finding a global pop hit with 2016’s “Pretty Girl,” Maggie Lindemann reinvented herself as the heir to early Paramore’s throne. She sings with Hayley Williams ’s ferocity too, standing up to the strongest guitar riffs. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Crash and Burn,” which delivers on its title.

Meet Me @ The Altar

Punk may center radical acceptance, but the pop-punk of the Warped era largely centered white men. Recently-signed Fueled by Ramen band Meet Me @ The Altar make a convincing case that the future of pop-punk is Black, Latina, and female, with outspoken (and infectious) bangers like “Hit Like a Girl” and “Tyranny.” Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Hit Like a Girl” — but as the song says, “Ladies and ladies / No gentlemen!”

Pinkshift writes the sort of indelible lines that would’ve been all over Tumblr years ago: “You think I don’t see? I see clearly through all your pretty, shiny, lying teeth.” Add singer Ashrita Kumar’s acidic delivery and the rest of Pinkshift’s tight playing for a combination as winning now as it could’ve been 15 years ago. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “i’m gonna tell my therapist on you,” with a title that should make Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco jealous.

Pom Pom Squad

Mia Berrin plays into her band’s name, posing with pom-poms on her 2019 Ow EP cover and recently releasing a single called “Head Cheerleader.” Don’t think Pom Pom Squad can only make pretty pop-rock like “Head Cheerleader,” though — the band excels at heavy, messy catharsis on songs like “Heavy Heavy,” too. Song that opens up the mosh pit: “Lux,” a 99-second adrenaline shot of a song.

The Aftershows

Corpse Husband

Olivia Rodrigo

Kourtney Kardashian and Megan Fox (performing blink-182 and Machine Gun Kelly karaoke)

• summer 2021
• warped tour
• pop-punk revival
• travis barker
• machine gun kelly
• avril lavigne
• all time low
• nothing nowhere.
• rina sawayama
• kennyhoopla
• the kid laroi
• maddie ross
• maggie lindemann
• meet me @ the altar
• pom pom squad

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 38: April 17, 2024
• A Hidden Sexual-Assault Scandal at the New York Philharmonic
• Heidi Gardner Couldn’t Prepare for What She Saw
• Shōgun Recap: No Exit
• Bluey Gives Us a Sign
• Is Tom Ripley Gay?

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

• Album Release Calendar
• Festival Guide
• Heavy History

Why Did Warped Tour End?

Why did Warped Tour finally come to an end?

The annual rite of summer passage, also dubbed "Punk Rock Summer Camp" by many, was a place where many music lovers discovered new bands in the '90s, 2000s and 2010s, but in 2018, the Vans Warped Tour finished its final run.

What Was the Warped Tour?

The Warped Tour, which eventually picked up sponsorship from shoe manufacturer Vans, was a traveling rock tour that started in 1995, initially with the idea of being an alternative rock festival, but eventually finding much of its early success focusing on the punk rock music scene.

As the years passed, the festival evolved to include a wider variety of acts. From the early ska and skate punk bands to welcoming nu-metal, emo, pop-punk and eventually metalcore, there was a little something for everyone.

READ MORE: Whatever Happened to the Bands From the First Warped Tour?

When Did Warped Tour Officially End?

Though 2018 was the final year of Warped Tour as a touring festival, plans were announced that a 2019 25th anniversary would be taking place.

This turned into a three-city celebration, with shows taking place in Cleveland on June 8, 2019, Atlantic City on June 29 and 30, 2019, and Mountain View, California on July 20 and 21, 2019.

Why Did Warped Tour Come to an End?

While there had been rumors of the festival not being as profitable in prior years, Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman spoke of the traveling tour's eventual downfall and marked it up to a loss of community.

Speaking on Kerrang! 's Inside Track podcast in 2019 , Lyman stated, "Ultimately, when I started to think about winding this down after 25 years, it was, ‘I think we’ve lost the sense of community.'"

"It took a community to make Warped Tour go," he added. "Some of that was self-inflicted… I thought you addressed the fans that complain on Twitter! I was addressing everyone and tried to keep that conversation going, but you realize that you can’t really negotiate, debate, or educate on social media!"

Lyman also added that playing on Warped Tour also came with its own stigma, revealing that some bands turned down playing the festival because they didn't want to be known as "a Warped act."

"This is what kind of pissed me off," he recalled. "Because in 1997, ‘98, Pennywise couldn’t judge a band until you met ‘em in the parking lot. You’d be in line at catering because of this community setting with no dressing rooms. You’d meet these people, and they were musicians too. Then I started watching this community tear itself apart from within, with this band — not even meeting these people, just disagreeing with them or with how they look — bashing that band online."

"People would come up to me on Warped Tour, and say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be on Warped Tour because Attila are on Warped Tour,’" he continues. "Have you met the guys in Attila? We’re not here to judge each other’s music. The fans will judge each other’s music.’ Atilla brings people. Do I personally run around screaming ‘Suck my fuck?’ No. Do you? No. But they’re good musicians and they’re not bad people. I’ve never seen them do a bad thing to someone."

"Every year, I’d send offers, and just — ‘We don’t want to tour with those bands. We don’t wanna be a Warped-esque bands,'" sighs Lyman. And it’s like, dude, Warped-esque bands — you mean Bad Religion . A Day To Remember . Paramore … it got very frustrating."

Will Warped Tour Return?

Though Warped Tour wrapped in 2019, there have been rumblings in the years since about a possible return.

In 2020, Kevin Lyman suggested in a tweet responding to a fan that it could eventually return, but with one caveat .... "it might just be called something else." But, so far, there has not been a Warped Tour rehash under the old name or something different.

One other proponent of Warped Tour's return has been Chris Fronzak , the vocalist for Attila. In 2019, Fronzak reached out to Kevin Lyman with a plan to resurrect Warped Tour .

"I've honestly been thinking about this for 2 years now," he explained at the time. "In this time period I've formulated a business plan and setup that would be viable for both bands and @VansWarpedTour itself. I have a chip on my shoulder and I wanna prove to the world that rock isn't dead."

Then, in 2023, Fronzak revisited the idea of reviving the Warped Tour as part of his presidential platform , announcing that he had planned to run for President of the United States in 2024. "If you vote for me as our next president, I promise to bring back Vans Warped Tour," he responded to a fan who suggested they'd have his vote if he brought back the popular tour.

So far, the Warped Tour has not returned.

50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums of All-Time

Gallery Credit: Loudwire Staff

More From Loudwire

End of the Warped Tour: What the loss of rock’s ‘cheap, scruffy’ roadshow means for the concert biz

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Days before Andy Biersack joined his first Vans Warped Tour as an artist, the singer for the L.A. glam-metal band Black Veil Brides got a little overexuberant onstage. His band was playing a pre-Warped warm-up show in 2011 when, in a fugue state over finally making it on the bill, he stage dived off a piece of rigging.

He missed the landing. Biersack fractured several bones and had to spend the rest of his first Warped Tour wrapped in a protective body brace. But he wouldn’t have missed those dates for anything.

“When I was a kid, there was no greater dream than to be on the other side of that fence as an artist,” Biersack said. “It’s next to impossible to describe the importance of Warped Tour in my life.”

A lot of bands, fans and music-industry pros are thinking the same thing this summer. Warped Tour, the traveling punk and skate-culture festival, a teenage summertime fixture since 1995, is finally hanging up its Vans sneakers for good. This summer’s edition — with Black Veil Brides co-headlining among dozens of acts — will be its last as an annual traveling festival.

Festival pioneer

Warped arguably laid the groundwork for modern U.S. festival culture. Its influence trickled up into mainstream pop, inspiring a hit Blink-182 lyric (“I couldn’t wait for the summer at the Warped Tour…”) and landing some of Beck, No Doubt and Katy Perry’s major early tour dates. They were even among the first fests to mix hard rock and hip-hop: Eminem, Ice-T, Joan Jett and the Black Eyed Peas are all Warped alumni.

But as tastes, values and the music economy changed, Warped’s model of cheap tickets, scruffy amenities and a genre mix that waxed and waned in fashion seemed to run its natural course. Evolving standards around diversity and #MeToo led to some soul-searching behind the scenes, especially after an artist was accused of misconduct while on Warped Tour.

Founder Kevin Lyman’s legacy as a pioneer of American festival culture is indisputable, however. As preparations were underway for Warped’s final run, which begins June 21 in Pomona and concludes Aug. 5 in West Palm Beach, Fla., he was seeming relieved, melancholy and hopeful.

“I’m getting notes from people in the business saying, ‘You inspired me and showed me it was OK to be me,’ or that ‘I went to Warped where there were only 2,000 people there but I’ve never felt more energy at a show,’” he said. “We developed a way to reach youth and it’s been a groundbreaking platform. Warped inspired kids to pick up instruments and start bands, and If you look at Coachella, so many of their department heads started on Warped Tour. The spirit will live on.”

I created this fest for the other 90%. We made it close and accessible. Sweat, crowds, down and dirty.

— Kevin Lyman, founder of the Vans Warped Tour

Lyman’s vision for the show proved more durable than even he imagined: it’s closing up as the longest-running touring music festival in America. For generations of hard rockers, now with their own kids in tow at the parent chill-out zone, Warped Tour was often their first music festival or live concert (this Times reporter included).

“When Warped began, there just wasn’t a festival culture in the U.S.,” said Epitaph Records founder (and Bad Religion founding member) Brett Gurewitz. Epitaph bands like Pennywise and Bad Religion were fixtures on Warped for its entire life as a festival, and defined the sound it’s known for. “Kevin brought it to the country,” Gurewitz said. “He gave Epitaph bands a chance that they otherwise never would have had.”

For Lyman, who worked at Goldenvoice during its pre-Coachella days as an underground punk promoter, his model for the show was unheard of at the time: pack as many punk, metal and other rabble-rousing acts as he could on the bill, pay them just enough to pencil out with a notably low ticket price, and put them in front of markets (often rural or suburban) that major acts ignored. No VIP ‘influencers’ or glamping packages. Bands ate from the same backstage BBQ pit.

Lollapalooza came first, but Lyman saw something few other promoters did: that there were tons of underserved young rock fans in America, and if you brought the show to them, they’d become loyal. Festival culture would later shift toward luxury destination packages. But Warped’s unlikely success with a neglected audience was a genuine revolution in American live music.

“I created this fest for the other 90%. We made it close and accessible. Sweat, crowds, down and dirty,” Lyman said. “But festivals are like society as a whole now: it’s all changing toward that top 10%. Bands would play Warped because they knew they were replenishing their audience. Now you make all your money on touring and no one can give that up. When you look at the box office, Warped always had the lowest ticket prices. Today we judge on money in music, and Warped was never about that.”

Fast reckoning

For as much as Warped pioneered festival culture in the U.S., any concert that lasts this long will see change around it. The last few years of reckonings have come especially fast at Warped Tour.

As with many music scenes, punk had longstanding issues around sexual harassment and misconduct — most recently with Brand New’s Jesse Lacey apologizing after allegations that he’d solicited nude pictures from underage fans. In 2015, Warped Tour had its own pre-MeToo reckoning when Jake McElfresh, who performs as the folk-punk act Front Porch Step, played the festival after being accused of online sexual misconduct with fans (prompting one disappointed Warped veteran, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, to ask “What happened to our scene?”).

“I learned a lot during that period,” said Lyman. “I wasn’t an expert on all this. But I took expert advice and now I’m more educated. Even before #MeToo, Warped was run by women. But I realized it’s an issue that we can’t handle the way we used to.”

Last year, Warped gave the politically outspoken group War On Women a major slot, and incorporated singer Shawna Potter’s organization Safer Scenes into its activism programming. The gesture was well-received, but some of the dark streaks in punk emerged when the singer from the Dickies erupted with a violent, misogynist onstage rant toward a woman from Safer Spaces who held up a sign during the band’s set that read, “Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men!”

“They were brave enough to bring an outspoken band like ours out with them and not everyone is,” Potter said. “I want people to know they can ask for advice on how to make their shows safer, what proactive measures they can take, as well as how to handle specific incidents. Because we take an overtly political stance, people that are searching for that in music, or even just wanting to feel secure that a band they like has their back, they’d seek us out and express gratitude for us being there.”

For a variety of reasons, Warped Tour may not be the ideal format for reaching those young fans anymore. Even Lyman himself says that he’s seen changes in the reasons people go to festivals, and how social media has turned a nominally freewheeling staple of teenage life into an occasional viper pit — a cultural shift that other promoters should worry about too.

As tastes, values and the music economy changed, Warped’s model of cheap tickets, scruffy amenities and [an idiosyncratic] genre mix ... [has] run its course.

“Before, you’d show up and stand in line and you’d judge a band face-to-face. Now you decide you don’t like someone just based on social media,” Lyman said. “Like, acts will say, ‘I don’t wanna be a ‘Warped Tour band.’ But there are bands that have been around 25 years who are ‘Warped Tour Bands.’”

“When you’re 14 to 17, you used to come to festivals to explore, and that’s pretty much disappeared from festivals now,” Lyman added. “Now kids want to stay home, and we’re headed for dark clouds as an industry when those 15-year-olds become 18-year-olds.”

Yet for those former teens who passed through Warped’s gates every summer for nearly 25 years, Lyman’s big idea reshaped their lives and ambitions for music, which in turn transformed the entire U.S. concert industry in its influence.

“Yeah, bittersweet is apt,” Black Veil Brides’ Biersack said. “If you’re 19 to 35 today, I don’t know of anything else that’s had a similar impact. What he created will always be the best thing that could have happened to this genre and culture. I met my wife on Warped Tour, so Kevin Lyman has had a bigger impact on my life than just about anyone.”

As for Lyman himself, he’s far from retiring. He’s taken a new position as an associate professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music, where he’ll teach a new generation of promoters and artists about building a lasting concert brand in an ever-faster-evolving industry. He’s also using Warped’s platform to start a new initiative around fighting opioid addiction in youth.

He doesn’t believe that any one thing will rise to fill the void left by Warped (or even that something should). Fans have different expectations and demands for concerts today, and the music business may well not be interested in supporting a similar vision for a dusty, low-cost madcap punk festival again.

But as he prepares to wind down Warped, Lyman is confident someone will think of something brand-new instead.

“Any time anything feels too formulaic, there will always be young people who create it for themselves,” Lyman said. “Like me in 1995, I know there’s a kid out there right now thinking about how to kick Lyman’s ass.”

1999: Warped Tour charms fans with punk, hip-hop extremes

2000: Warped Tour brings music, not mayhem to rock fans

2002: Rebellion pays off for Warped Tour

2015: Warped Tour giving away free tickets to parents of under-18 attendees as the festival turns 21

2007: A Warped Tour photo gallery the year Pennywise, Bad Religion, Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks, New Found Glory and Yellowcard played

1997: Sunchild is on rise with Warped Tour

For breaking music news, follow @augustbrown on Twitter.

More to Read

The 15 best things we saw at Coachella 2024

April 15, 2024

Drake removed from lawsuit over Astroworld crowd crush that left 10 fans dead

April 12, 2024

Coachella was the gold standard of music festivals. Has it lost its shine?

April 11, 2024

The biggest entertainment stories

Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

August Brown covers pop music, the music industry and nightlife policy at the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Maynard James Keenan celebrates 60 by rocking out family-style for “Sessanta”

April 17, 2024

‘Amor Eterno’ and ‘El Cantante’ to be added to National Recording Registry

April 16, 2024

Coachella is bigger than ever. Where to find the best food spots for Weekend 2

‘Push Ups’ — by Drake? — sparks AI speculation as more players join diss-track drama

Kevin Lyman (Warped Tour)

As the mastermind behind the Warped Tour, the alternative music festival that will soon celebrate its 15th summer, Kevin Lyman has been battered with criticism from musicians and music-lovers alike. They claim his tour is oversaturated with corporate sponsors and that tickets are overpriced. They complain that musicians on the tour are too popular or that the tour has lost touch with its punk-rock roots. They say, of course, that Lyman has sold out.

In order to see what's beneath this surface, Lyman's perspective seems critical, almost mandatory. In an interview with Dane Erbach, he comments the controversial decisions he has made over the past fifteen years and the evolution of his "traveling circus," alluding to what it is that makes the Warped Tour musically and culturally significant.

If it was the just the "Kevin Lyman Tour," it’d be Bad Religion, NOFX, Flogging Molly, and the Bouncing Souls all the time.

When you think about who was on the first year—L7, No Doubt, Sublime, Quicksand, CIV, Orange 9mm, No Use for a Name—it was very reflective of what was going on at that time, but those bands can’t be placed into one category. Musically, it was pretty diverse back then. In 1996, when NOFX and Pennywise came out with me, it became recognized because of these larger bands as a punk tour. With the Warped Tour now, I want to pay homage to and recognize the roots of the tour. I think this summer’s tour is very reflective of that—with Flogging Molly, Bad Religion, NOFX, Less than Jake, Anti-Flag, Bouncing Souls and those acts.

But it also stays current with the times. In the last few years, I’ve noticed that people live life more with their iPod on shuffle; they’re listening to all different types of music. This year, I tried to appeal to the 13- to 19-year olds, like my daughter, and what they would want to listen to. The idea is to stay current and remain classic at the same time. The Warped Tour has never been for that 10 percent who considers itself completely gutter-punk.

I see this as an opportunity to help my friends, who have been touring for 20 or 25 years; it gives them an opportunity to connect with new fans. I remember when I brought TSOL about seven or eight years ago and kids ran from the stage scared because they didn’t know them. Now, the kids go research the lineup. They may know 3OH!3 and Devil Wears Prada because it’s what’s going on in their lives right now but, when they see a band’s name on the Warped Tour’s lineup that they haven’t been exposed to, they’ll go in and learn a little bit more. By the time they come to the show, they might go and check out someone like Shooter Jennings. They might not buy the ticket to see him, but they’ll check out fifteen or twenty minutes to see if they like him.

Considering that bands like 3OH!3 and Devil Wears Prada are primary draws of the Warped Tour, is it still possible to call it a punk tour?

I don’t think there’s a clear-cut definition of punk-rock anymore. Punk-rock is a genre of music—three chords, and in your face—but, thematically, it’s always been a response to the times. And during economic times like this, you see bands respond in a couple of ways. You get some bands, like Anti-Flag, respond politically because this is a very politically charged time.

But it’s also a "get up and party" time because people are trying to get away from their worries. With 3OH!3, people want to get up and go crazy; they want to have a good time. Like my daughter says, we’re really tired of hearing boys cry about their problems. You just want to tell them, "Yeah, you’ve got problems, but everyone has problems." Punk was always about attacking those problems, not crying about them.

This is an interesting interpretation of the term "punk," but the Warped Tour is often criticized for losing touch with its punk-rock roots; they say the Warped Tour has lost its punk-rock credibility. Some bands won’t play Warped because of this, and it’s funny because bands that have criticized us at some point are now playing on our tour. I’ve seen videos where UK Subs, the Adicts, DOA, or DI maybe didn’t have the best things to say about the Warped Tour, but those bands have come back, played it, and said, "Look, this is a great way to get out and play for kids."

I love the punk-rock music. That’s where I grew up; I worked in the club for 12 years. I worked with metal bands and with indie bands, but I love the energy of punk shows. That’s it’s fun for me when I can go back and get bands like Flipper, bands that I worked with in the clubs, bands that lost their outlets to play, out on the Warped Tour.

It’s also fun for me to see a dad bring his 13 year old daughter and saying, "This is the music that I went to see." He might say, "Let’s go see the band you came to see," which might be White Tie Affair, "but let’s go see my band too," which might be the Bouncing Souls. I think the Warped Tour has become cross-generational. I want to book enough so that dads and moms might want to bring their children to the Warped Tour for a day of music. Is that punk? Is it punk to go to a show with your parents? I think so, but I don’t know.

Earlier, you mentioned how access to the internet has made the Warped Tour’s audience more informed about the musicians featured on the tour. The internet has also provided fans another forum to criticize your decisions. On a recent news update on the Warped Tour’s website, you refer to these kids who sit on their computers and complain as "haters."

It’s funny because, when you put your thoughts up on a message board nowadays, you’re attacked immediately. It makes kids afraid to put their posts up or put their thoughts out.

They can attack me. That’s okay. I like when someone can criticize me, but only when they have a solution. 20 years ago, when I was in the clubs, you had to give a solution or no one was going to pay attention to you. Now, you can sit there all day long and throw things out on the internet. But, before the internet, you didn’t have a platform to complain.

My thought is this: You don’t have to like Brokencyde, or Jeffree Star, or the Millionaires, and I’m not saying that I do necessarily. But they are doing something, capturing something, stirring up controversy. Punk bands used to stir up controversy; if you’re taking that as the definition of "punk", these artists could fall under that category.

Trust me, I’m not driving down the road playing their CD in my car. If it was the just the "Kevin Lyman Tour," it’d be Bad Religion, NOFX, Flogging Molly, and the Bouncing Souls all the time.

Do you worry about alienating other bands on the tour when you ask pop acts to perform?

Anyone who feels that way doesn’t have to be on the tour. If you’re that upset that Jeffree Star is on the Warped Tour, then leave. You don’t have to be there. There are 3,000 bands I had to say no to.

It’s not that everyone has to get along and bro down. When you’re traveling with the Warped Tour, you’re traveling with 700 or 800 people; you can always find a group of like-minded people to hang out with. It’s a place where you’re getting a lot of business done, but you’re having a good time and a place where you can enjoy your summer.

How do you respond to the people who claim that including such artists on your tour is "selling out?"

What I tell those kids, to be honest, is that I really should have fucking sold out. I should have charged five dollars more a ticket and kept it for myself. Despite the rumors, the Brinks truck doesn’t pull up every day and drive away with a truck load of money for me. I make a nice living, I’m not going to lie about that, but there’s nothing wrong with making a nice living. I guess that’s selling out, though.

I’ve never fallen for that term "selling out." There are many levels of selling out. When a band gets played on the radio or signs a record deal, that’s one level. But then there’s a-whole-nother sell out. Trust me, I could sell out very quickly if I really wanted to.

How do you mean?

I could have sold to one of the big concert promoters, like Live Nation. I could have sold to one of the big entertainment conglomerates. I could have sold to one of the major record labels, but then I would have been a tool for their bands to be on my tour.

I’ve been doing this for 27 years and music is the thread in my heart. That’s why I do this. If it was the money, last year, I would have cut a stage a week into the tour, or I would have sent 25 people home. Trust me, the accountants were telling me to, and I said no. I said I’d rather make less money than put my credibility in jeopardy and tell the bands that 10 of them need to go home so we can afford to keep going down the road. I sucked it up and it came out to be an okay summer.

Some might suggest that the number of sponsors on the tour suggest the money is the more important priority.

There are a lot of corporations that we don’t work with because they don’t fit with what we do. But there are others that work very hard to support us.

Companies like AT&T are maybe as un-punk you can get; yes, their intent and everything they do is to sell you service and phones, but they do a lot to support the bands. When we started working with them, they were making posters for the bands that, at the time, were on indie labels that couldn’t afford to market their musicians. AT&T still provides this promotion; the only difference is, now, when bands are signing those posters in their booths, they’re paid to do that. The bands that play private acoustic sets for fans backstage are paid in the same way by these same sponsors.

I know that bands are having a harder time because their label can’t give them tour support. We carve out money from our corporate sponsorships that goes right to the artists. It helps these bands get down the road. I could charge fifteen or twenty bucks more per ticket and have no corporate sponsors, but I don’t know; it’s all a balancing act.

In what ways do these sponsors and advertisers affect the overall Warped Tour experience?

I think it enhances the show. The sponsors are out there sweating with the rest of us. They’re paying to be part of this, but only so the artists can benefit.

It took Vans four years before they were allowed even to put a banner on a stage. He had to earn the respect of the bands. And it was a band, I think it might have been MxPx, who actually put the Vans banner on before I allowed it. And you know why? Because Vans gave them clean socks, Steve Van Doren cooked barbecues backstage for them, Vans made those relationships.

The funniest thing is that, when a band is booked and I confirm them, the next call we get is from the band’s management to see how they can align with a company. These companies help our bands get down the road.

So the bands are benefiting from these sponsorships; how do you think your audience benefits from its Warped Tour experience?

I think kids enjoy the tents, the booths, the interaction, but I hope that the Warped Tour affects people beyond the music, that there’s at least ten or fifteen percent that walk into the Warped Tour and learn something. They sign up for PETA, they sign up for Amnesty. It took me a long time to convince Amnesty International to come to the Warped Tour, but now they say we’re one of their biggest recruiting spots. And we’ve got the whole Eco Initiative. There are fifteen or twenty kids that come to the Warped Tour the just help with the recycling.

The Warped Tour is an alternative to the county fair that comes through your town every year. You can come in and learn about companies I feel have done good things for the scene, like Hurley or Volcom. And now you’ve got this new level with companies like Babycakes or Glamour Kills; Jamie Tworkowski, who created To Write Love on Her Arms, has been able to reach lots of kids with that.

And the Warped Tour helps these nonprofits as well. It’s a jumpstart for them. You get in there and you get access to six-hundred and twenty thousand people that I think are coming to the Warped Tour with an open mind. If the Warped Tour also encourages these people to use AT&T phones, then they made a choice that was stimulated by a great day that they were having. And, if AT&T’s sponsorship fees can help us with our Eco Initiative, it’s all the better.

And you think that the Warped Tour has succeeded in reaching its audience at this level?

Every once in a while, I get these letters that reach out in more of a personal way, ones that say that going to the Warped Tour has changed their lives, helped me stay in school, encouraged me to pick up a guitar.

I got an e-mail this weekend from Judy, this quiet, shy girl from Canada who was very passionate about fanzines. I let her run the fanzine booth at the Warped Tour for a few years. We watched her learn out on the road and blossom into a young woman. She just wrote me to tell me she’s graduating law school. Apparently, she sits on a board of lawyers in Canada that helps bands get grants from the government. She also helps touring bands that have trouble with their immigration into Canada. This was from Judy, who a lot of people didn’t want to pay attention to, the shy kid who was a little goth. But she grew into this person who can deal with people on a very professional level.

I’d rather focus on that than the guy who says that I’m a sell out or that I suck.

Previous Story

This story is over 5 years old.

A feminist punk band's quest to create safer spaces at warped tour.

ONE EMAIL. ONE STORY. EVERY WEEK. SIGN UP FOR THE VICE NEWSLETTER.

By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.

@k1dneytheft/TikTok vans warped tour

‘I cannot WAIT for the documentaries to come out’: Woman reveals the real reason why the Vans Warped Tour ended

'we need a quiet on set equivalent documentary for warped tour.'.

Charlotte Colombo

Posted on Apr 13, 2024   Updated on Apr 13, 2024, 7:57 am CDT

The Warped Tour was a rite of passage for many Tumblr-era scene kids back in the day, but its history is disturbing, to say the least. In a new viral video, which has amassed just under 1 million views, user Heaven (@k1dneytheft) emphasized that the founder Kevin Lyman’s claims that Warped ended because of a “lack of community” weren’t exactly true.

In the clip, she described how Warped Tour’s core audience was within the 14 to 25 age bracket, meaning that a lot of minors attended these shows.

“When you create a music festival, featuring a lot of smaller punk bands just getting their first shine, who haven’t really gotten a lot of attention yet, and then all the attendees are mostly minors who are idolizing these men, there should be some kind of screening process to make sure that these men are allowed to be around children,” she said. “But there wasn’t.”

She then explained that after posting a recent video about the Warped Tour, a person who previously worked at the music festival got in touch with her and described some of the “terrible” encounters she’d witnessed between minors and these bands. As Heaven pointed out, numerous musicians involved with the Warped Tour had allegations levied against them.

Examples Heaven cited include Pierce the Veil Mike Fuentes’ alleged relationship with a 15-year old, Jonny Craig from Dance Gavin Dance’s domestic violence arrest as well as alleged assault , and Front Porch Step’s Jake McElfresh’s numerous alleged relationships with underage girls . Heaven also made reference to unverified rumors against now-deceased We Came As Romans’ vocalist Kyle Pavone.

As Heaven pointed out, the allegations against McElfresh were so worrisome that thousands signed an online petition for him to be removed from the 2015 Warped Tour—but this seemingly wasn’t enough for Lyman to remove him from the event. Ultimately, according to Heaven, it was Lyman’s disastrous 2017 interview with Billboard —during which he said the allegations surrounding Warped Tour were “part of the culture”—ended up being the final nail in the event’s coffin.

“Overall, I fully believe that the reason they actually shut down [Warped] was because they weren’t making any money considering all of the lawsuits they had against them, as well as the fact that the #Metoo movement was gaining traction in 2017,” Heaven concluded. “I think [Lyman] could tell that it was unsafe for this to continue, or he simply didn’t want to put up with it anymore.”

Heaven didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment via a TikTok comment. The Daily Dot reached out to a representative for Lyman via email.

In the comments section, there seemed to be a consensus among the viewers of this video: Disappointed, but not surprised.

@k1dneytheft *allegedly* #fyp #fypシ #fypage #fypシ゚viral #trend #trending #alt #alttiktok #warpedtour #kevinlyman #vanswarpedtour #xyzabc #story #music #musicfestival #punk #punkmusic #ptv #piercetheveil #emomusic #emo #allegations #warpedtourallegations ♬ original sound – Heaven

Several viewers shared their own stories about their experiences during the Warped Tour while underage, with even some alleged former event workers claiming they’ve “seen some things.”

This renewed publicity around sexual misconduct cases in the entertainment industry comes following the release of Quiet On Set , a documentary series that looks at the culture of abuse on the set of numerous Nickelodeon, child-star-led TV shows.

The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter  here  to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.

Charlotte is a regular Daily Dot contributor with bylines in Insider, VICE, Glamour, The Independent, and more. She holds a Masters's degree in Magazine Journalism from City, University of London.

Featured Local Savings

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Thursday Ends a 13-Year Break From New Music With a Pointed Song

“Application for Release From the Dream,” which the band released Friday, marks the beginning of a fresh era for a group that helped bring emo to the mainstream.

By Ian Cohen

Thursday, the band once described as the “great screamo hope” for helping break the shouty punk subgenre into the mainstream with its 2001 album “Full Collapse,” has returned with its first new song in 13 years on Friday, “Application for Release From the Dream.” The title alone underscores just how drastically things have changed for Thursday and its peers over the past two decades: Emo has evolved from a niche concern to a form of classic rock, and the artists who put it on the map are now in their late 40s, navigating a very different kind of life.

Geoff Rickly, the band’s gregarious, garrulous frontman, spent the past decade as a multitasker in Brooklyn’s art scenes before documenting his path to sobriety with his 2023 literary debut, “Someone Who Isn’t Me . ” In the past, the band’s songwriting process might start with “a Times Square hotel and a bag of coke,” he said, and would likely end with the lifelong friends barely on speaking terms.

“When we write, we fight,” Rickly, 45, explained in a video interview last week. But the band has enjoyed a détente since a 2016 reunion spurred by Atlanta’s Wrecking Ball Festival, a short-lived celebration of hardcore music. “I’ve been getting along so well with my brothers, I don’t want to fight any more.”

Thursday — Rickly, the guitarist Steven Pedulla, 49, and the drummer Tucker Rule, 45 — got its start in the New Jersey hardcore D.I.Y. scene, playing basements and VFW halls, and rose to become one of the leaders of a movement where melodies were often secondary to raw poetics. Though the genre quickly devolved into often-unintentional self-parody, over the past 15 years, emo has been undergoing both a re-examination and a resurgence. A new generation has been drawn into its emotional eruptions while purposefully pushing back on its Warped Tour stereotype of white men writing vengefully about exes — reflecting the post-#MeToo climate by holding even the biggest bands accountable for their past offenses and elevating more diverse viewpoints.

When Thursday posted a goodbye note on its website on Nov. 22, 2011, the band didn’t rule out live performances. “At the height of our thing where things are tense and there’s all this pressure, you go, ‘What would it be like to have a normal life?’” Pedulla explained. “And now all these years later, man, I’m really miserable when I’m not doing the band.”

“Application for Release From the Dream” has been a work in progress over the past year, with Rickly shuttling back and forth between New York and the band’s New Jersey studio. The track builds from moody to explosive, striking a happy medium between Thursday’s strident early work and its final full-length, “No Devolución , ” which presaged a pivot of former hardcore artists to shoegaze and dream-pop. But Thursday has no plans to make a true follow-up to “No Devolución,” describing its new model as recording and releasing singles as it writes them.

For the duration of Thursday’s first run, the band seemed magnetized toward volatility and interpersonal conflict. “Now we know how to cry in front of each other,” Rule joked. Its second album, “Full Collapse,” became a surprise hit in 2001 as the genre finally began to make inroads on alt-rock radio. The gangly, gaptoothed Rickly cut a charismatic figure during Thursday’s chaotic live sets, performing with a coiled intensity that earned comparisons to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain.

Island/Def Jam eventually won a bidding war, buying Thursday out of an indie contract. Ultimately, however, the group’s major label albums underperformed, alienating hardcore fans who shunned radio (and, increasingly, paying for music) and failing to draw in new listeners who saw “emo” as the realm of MTV-friendly bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, whose debut was produced by Rickly.

Toward the end of Thursday’s first run, touring had become a chore. Rule recalled pantomiming a clock-punching motion before taking the stage, laying bare the worst possible scenario for the band since its members dropped out of Rutgers University as teenagers: Thursday had curdled into a deadening day job that most people would still dream of occupying, leaving them feeling “both underpaid and greedy,” Rickly said.

After the band’s split, Rule kept busy as a session drummer, including a long stint with the British boy band the Wanted. Pedulla returned to a steady gig doing film work, while Rickly’s curiosity and conviviality resulted in a series of fiascoes. His puckish, conceptual hardcore supergroup United Nations was hit with a cease-and-desist from the actual United Nations. In 2013, Rickly was mugged at gunpoint, an event that plays an integral role in “Someone Who Isn’t Me ,” a surrealist, autofictional account of kicking heroin through an experimental treatment with the drug ibogaine . He worked with No Devotion, a band featuring former members of Lostprophets, whose ex-frontman was convicted of child sex abuse, and kept busy at Collect Records, an indie label that dissolved in 2015 after outrage over its benefactor Martin Shkreli.

By the time Thursday re-emerged from its hiatus in 2016, it had endured the recession of emo’s third wave and stood on high moral ground. “They went through the major label machine, but always kept their values intact,” Jeremy Bolm of the hardcore band Touché Amoré said.

“Full Collapse” had served as a sonic touchstone not just for the thriving emo revival, but for metal bands like Deafheaven. And for all of his troubles, Rickly — a spirited social media user who forged friendships with writers, musicians, artists, poets and chefs — had managed to ingratiate himself as a fixture in New York’s arts and food scenes.

Dan Ozzi, the author of the 2021 book “Sellout,” which charts how major labels chased punky bands with loyal followings, acknowledged that Rickly’s social skills have played a major role in Thursday’s sustained relevance, but said the band’s songs also simply hold up. “A lot of Thursday’s peers have aged like milk,” he said in an interview. “You go see them at these emo nostalgia festivals and realize you’re watching a 45-year-old dude sing murder fantasies about his high school girlfriend.” Thursday, by contrast, “were always on a higher, more intellectual level.”

But like so many bands of its era with bills to pay and a reputation to uphold, Thursday isn’t above indulging in emo nostalgia. “I used to get really bummed on being like, ‘We’re doing “Full Collapse” tonight,’” Rule admitted.

This wore on Rickly as well, until a conversation with Mikey Way of My Chemical Romance around the time the two bands teamed up for an anniversary tour helped put things into perspective. “We were talking about how much better things are now, not because we’re standing on the stage in an arena,” he said. “This is life after death for the band, there’s nothing to prove,” he added. “Stop worrying about like, ‘Do I even like these old songs?’ Of course you do, they’re great songs.”

Even with the obvious benefits of a traditional album release — more press, more touring opportunities — self-releasing singles makes sense in light of Thursday’s struggles with corporations. It’s also a better fit for a more fluid iteration of Thursday: Original members such as the guitarist Tom Keeley and the bassist Tim Payne are still intermittently involved, but the band is now a core trio surrounded by friends and collaborators who can come and go at will, including the bassist Stuart Richardson, of No Devotion, and the guitarist Norman Brannon, formerly of the short-lived emo icons Texas Is the Reason.

“Norman said that being in a band is like being married to five guys, and being in Thursday’s like being in an open marriage with five guys,” Rickly joked.

The band will support the new song with a run of small shows in the Northeast that it sees as part of a spiritual journey to the past when it would release 7” records and play basements with no expectations. “We’re doing it because it’s hard,” Rickly said. “We need nobody to blame but ourselves.”

Rickly had many reasons to be wary of a true reboot; his own crippling perfectionism, the expectations of Thursday fans still clinging to their copies of “Full Collapse,” even his own peers. “A lot of our friends and bands that we love have gotten back together and made reunion records that are just the worst,” he said.

But ultimately, he had to weigh his personal misgivings against the one thing the trio could unequivocally agree upon — being in Thursday is difficult, but not being Thursday is worse. “You know, we got into it all over again,” Rickly said and shrugged. “And it was painful. And it turns out it was totally worth it. Thank God.”

Find the Right Soundtrack for You

Trying to expand your musical horizons take a listen to something new..

Taylor Swift and Beyoncé  avoided a clash on the charts. (Again.)

Lost tapes from major musicians are out there. These guys find them .

Sabrina Carpenter drops a perky bop, and 10 more new songs. Hear the Playlist .

Ozempic  turned a 1970s hit into an inescapable jingle.

How the trumpeter Jeremy Pelt  chronicles Black jazz history.

• Life & Culture

Over 50 Tampa Bay concerts to see during summer 2024

• Gabrielle Calise Times staff

The weather isn’t the only thing heating up around Tampa Bay.

Not only is Megan Thee Stallion bringing her Hot Girl Summer Tour to town — there’s a sizzling slate of concerts for fans of just about every music genre.

Expect to see some fun pairings, from longtime peers (Missy Elliott with Busta Rhymes) to some wild mashups (Red Hot Chili Peppers and ... Ice Cube?). Sting, who just swung through Tampa with Billy Joel , will even return two more times to rock out with the Florida Orchestra.

Here are over 50 local shows we’re excited about.

Living legends

Diana Ross: The legendary Motown singer will bring solo hits and favorite songs from the Supremes to the BayCare Sound in Clearwater on Thursday, May 9.

Janet Jackson: The Together Again Tour comes to the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Tuesday, July 16.

Sting and the Florida Orchestra: The “Englishman in New York” joins conductor Michael Francis and the Florida Orchestra for two intimate benefit concerts. Thursday, May 9, and Friday, May 10, at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg.

Chicago and Earth, Wind and Fire: The Heart & Soul 2024 Tour features two bands that have been going since the late 1960s — and two MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre shows. Thursday, Aug. 15, and Friday, Aug. 16.

Latin stars

Bad Bunny: The Puerto Rican singer and rapper, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, will bring his irresistible blend of Latin trap and reggaeton to six Florida stops next year. Catch his Most Wanted Tour on Tuesday, May 21, at Amalie Arena in Tampa.

Peso Pluma: The 24-year-old Mexican superstar who beat both Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny’s YouTube streaming record last year announced a performance at Amalie Arena on Friday, June 21.

Pepe Aguilar: The Jaripeo Hasta Los Huesos Tour pays tribute to the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead. Sunday, June 30, at Amalie Arena.

Hip-hop and R&B

Megan Thee Stallion: Hotties, assemble. Megan Thee Stallion’s Hot Girl Summer Tour is coming to Amalie Arena on Saturday, June 8. GloRilla will open.

The Kid LAROI: Charlton Howard won’t even be 21 yet when he comes to Tampa this summer. Find the rising rap star at the Yuengling Center with glaive and Chase Shaker on Sunday, June 9.

Planning your weekend?

Subscribe to our free Top 5 things to do newsletter

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

21 Savage: The “redrum” rapper returns with his American Dream Tour on Friday, June 14, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Bryson Tiller: Tiller will share his blend of R&B and trap on Sunday, June 16, at the Yuengling Center.

Kid Cudi: Those on the “Pursuit of Happiness” can find Kid Cudi at Amalie Arena on Saturday, July 6, for the Insano World Tour. Pusha T and EARTHGANG will open.

Missy Elliott: The rap pioneer’s first ever headlining tour features some famous friends: Timbaland, Ciara and Busta Rhymes. Wednesday, July 24, at Amalie Arena.

$uicideboy$: The New Orleans rap duo, whose collab partners range from Travis Barker to the guitarist from Korn, will head to Amalie Arena on Sunday, Aug. 11.

Pop singers and songwriters

Hozier: The Irish singer-songwriter, whose songs bounce somewhere between blues, soul gospel, R&B and folk, has become something of a mystical character. He’ll take Tampa to church on Saturday, May 11, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Chappell Roan: The self-proclaimed “Midwest Princess” is coming to Jannus Live in St. Petersburg on Sunday, May 19, hot off of opening for Olivia Rodrigo. (Both singers work closely with producer Dan Nigro.) Expect campy synth pop, technicolor costumes both on stage and in the audience and perhaps an appearance from local drag queens.

Madison Beer: Hear TikTok-famous hits like “Make You Mine” at Jannus Live during the Spinnin Tour on Wednesday, May 22, at Jannus Live. Upsahl will open.

Niall Horan: One Direction’s Irish heartthrob brings the “The Show” Live on Tour to the MidFlorida Credit Union Ampitheatre on Friday, May 31.

Justin Timberlake: The pop star, now touring to support his sixth solo studio album, is bringing sexy back to Amalie Arena on Friday, June 14.

Melanie Martinez: Beach Bunny and Sofia Isella open The Trilogy Tour on Tuesday, June 18, at Amalie Arena.

Alternative and rock

Sleep Token: The masked alt-metal band from England comes to the Yuengling Center on Monday, May 6, with Empire State Bastard.

Toto: The band will bless the rains down in Africa at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater during the Dogs of Oz Tour on Wednesday, May 8.

Amon Amarth: “Heed our warning: We are gearing up for our biggest and most epic raid in North American history,” the Viking metal band posted to announce their upcoming tour. Cannibal Corpse, Obituary and Frozen Soul open the Metal Crushes All Tour on Saturday, May 18, at the Yuengling Center.

Santana and Counting Crows: Now celebrating a 50-year career, Santana will team up with Counting Crows on Sunday, June 16, at Amalie Arena for the Oneness Tour.

Alanis Morissette: The Canadian-American singer is bringing a dose of ‘90s alt-rock nostalgia to the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre on Wednesday, June 19. “You Oughta Know” that Joan Jett and the Blackhearts will be opening, along with Morgan Wade.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Catch Flea and friends on the Unlimited Love Tour, featuring special guests Ice Cube and indie rockers IRONTOM, on Friday, June 21, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Sammy Hagar: The Red Rocker — and special guest Loverboy — will perform during the Best of All Worlds Tour on Sunday, July 14, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Styx and Foreigner: Foreigner already embarked on a farewell run in 2023, but a tour with Styx seems like a good reason to return to Tampa. Catch the Renegades & Juke Box Heroes Tour on Saturday, July 20, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Dirty Heads and Slightly Stoopid: Rock, hip-hop, reggae and soul come together for this double-headliner at the BayCare Sound on Saturday, Aug. 3. Common Kings and the Elovators will open.

Beach Fossils: The Brooklyn indie rockers, whose sound ranges from lo-fi to surf rock, head to the Orpheum in Tampa on Friday, April 19.

ALVVAYS: The Canadian indie rockers will bring their dreamy indie rock hits to the Ritz Ybor in Tampa on Wednesday, May 1.

Waxahatchee: Punk rocker-turned-singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield is coming to Jannus Live in St. Petersburg on Friday, May 3. Get there early to catch Australian indie rock duo Good Morning.

Kurt Vile: The former lead guitarist for The War On Drugs is bringing his solo music to Jannus Live on Wednesday, May 8.

Still Woozy: It’s hard to describe the funky fusion of indie pop that comes out of Sven Eric Gamsky, also known as Still Woozy. Check out the Loveseat Tour, featuring MICHELLE, on Tuesday, Aug. 20, at Jannus Live.

Chris Stapleton: The country singer’s All-American Road Show comes to the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre on Friday, May 10. Nikki Lane and Grace Potter open.

Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown Band: The Sun Goes Down Tour comes to Raymond James Stadium in Tampa on Saturday, April 20.

Brooks & Dunn: Get ready to “Boot Scoot Boogie” on Saturday, May 4, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Ampitheatre.

Kane Brown: The vocalist has been called “the future of country music” by Billboard. See him with Tyler Hubbard and Parmalee on Friday, May 31, or Saturday, June 1, at Amalie Arena.

Tyler Childers: Check out Childers’ blend of country, folk and bluegrass at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheater during the Mule Pull ‘24 Tour on Wednesday, June 5.

Morgan Wallen: One of country’s highest-streamed crooners is bringing his One Night at a Time World Tour to Raymond James Stadium for, well, two nights: Thursday, July 11, and Friday, July 12.

Zach Bryan: Jason Isbell opens The Quittin Time Tour on Wednesday, Aug. 14, at Raymond James Stadium.

Tampa Bay Blues Festival: See Grace Potter, Blood Brothers, Bywater Call, Beth Hart, Tab Benoit and more from Friday, April 12, through Sunday, April 14, at Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg. See the full lineup at tampabaybluesfest.com .

Breakaway Music Festival: After years of Sunset Music Festival dominance, a new EDM event is coming to town. Breakaway Music Festival debuts at Raymond James Stadium on Friday, April 26, and Saturday, April 27. Zedd, Sofi Tukker, Illenium and Kascade will headline.

WMNF Tropical Heatwave: The “eclectic music extravaganza” takes place at the Cuban Club in Tampa’s Ybor City on Saturday, May 4. Bands include The Record Company, Ruthie Foster, Say She She, The Dollyrots, Selwyn Birchwood and more.

Sad Summer Fest: The Vans Warped Tour may not be happening anymore, but this day-to-night festival comes close. See Mayday Parade, The Maine, The Wonder Years and We the Kings at the BayCare Sound in Clearwater on Saturday, July 27. Real Friends, Knuckle Punk, Hot Milk, Daisy Grenade and Diva Bleach round out the lineup.

Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival: The Guns N’ Roses guitarist, soon releasing his blues album “Orgy of the Damned,” is coming to the BayCare Sound with ZZ Ward, Robert Randolph and more. A portion of the proceeds from this blues-themed celebration will go to organizations focused on equity and justice.

Clearwater Smooth Jazz Jam: This two-day jazz and artist celebration takes over Ruth Eckerd Hall on Friday, June 14, and Saturday, June 15. The lineup includes Jeffrey Osborne, Brian Culbertson, Sheila E. and the E-Train, Rick Braun, Richard Elliot, Gerald Albright and Peter White.

Tampa Bay International Carnival: Celebrate Caribbean culture at this two-day festival featuring Inner Circle, also known as The Bad Boys of Reggae, Kes the Band and more. Saturday, July 13, and Sunday, July 14, at Albert Whitted Park in St. Petersburg.

Nostalgic acts and covers

Emo Orchestra: Grown-up scene queens can hear their favorite MySpace-era hits performed by a live orchestra at the Nancy and David Bilheimer Capitol Theatre in Clearwater. Escape the Fate leads the festivities on Friday, May 3.

Tom Sandoval and the Most Extras: Bravo’s scandalous Tom Sandoval, of “Vanderpump Rules” fame, is heading to the Nancy and David Bilheimer Capitol Theatre on Saturday, May 18, with his cover band, the Most Extras.

Hauser: The Internet-famous Croatian cellist will return to Ruth Eckerd Hall on Saturday, June 1. Expect to hear a wide range of covers across genres, from Celine Dion to Lady Gaga.

Motion City Soundtrack: The pop-punk band celebrates the 20th anniversary of their album “I Am the Movie” with Prince Daddy & the Hyena and the Iron Roses at the Ritz Ybor on Sunday, June 2.

New Kids on the Block: The Magic Summer 2024 Tour will be a reimagining of the band’s 1990 tour of the same name. Paula Abdul and DJ Jazzy Jeff open the show on Friday, July 19, at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Barbie the Movie: In Concert: You may have seen Margot Robbie at the movie theater. But have you watched the film with an all-women, majority women-of-color orchestra playing the soundtrack live? The hybrid movie-concert experience hits the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre on Tuesday, July 2.

Amalie Arena: 401 Channelside Drive, Tampa. 813-301-2500. amaliearena.com .

The BayCare Sound: 255 Drew St., Clearwater. 727-791-7400 and 800-875-8682. rutheckerdhall.com/baycare-sound .

The Cuban Club: 2010 Avenida Republica de Cuba, Tampa. 813-248-2954. cubanclubybor.com/events .

Jannus Live: 200 First Ave. N., St. Petersburg. 727-565-0550. jannuslive.com .

MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre: 4802 U.S. 301, Tampa. midflorida.com/about-us/amphitheatre .

Nancy and David Bilheimer Capitol Theatre: 405 Cleveland St., Clearwater. 727-791-7400 and 800-875-8682. rutheckerdhall.com/plan-your-visit/the-nancy-and-david-bilheimer-capitol-theatre .

The Orpheum: 14802 N. Nebraska Ave., Tampa. 813-248-9500. theorpheum.com .

Raymond James Stadium: 4201 N. Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa. Stadium main line: 813-350-6500. Ticket office: 813-350-6502. raymondjamesstadium.com .

The Ritz Ybor: 1503 E. Seventh Ave., Tampa. 813-873-8368. theritzybor.com .

Ruth Eckerd Hall: 1111 McMullen Booth Road, Clearwater. 727-791-7400 and 800-875-8682. rutheckerdhall.com .

Yuengling Center: 12499 USF Bull Run Drive, Tampa. 813-301-2500. yuenglingcenter.com .

Gabrielle Calise is a culture reporter who covers music, nostalgia and offbeat Florida trends. Reach her at [email protected].

MORE FOR YOU

• Advertisement

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS

The Tampa Bay Times e-Newspaper is a digital replica of the printed paper seven days a week that is available to read on desktop, mobile, and our app for subscribers only. To enjoy the e-Newspaper every day, please subscribe.