Warped Tour ’15 Spotlight: Six Veteran Acts You Can’t Miss (So Pray They Don’t All Play At The Same Time)
–Written by Kevin Madert
Vans Warped Tour, the well-established summertime mecca for all things pop-punk, metalcore, and alternative music and lifestyle writ large, is fast bearing down on the DMV. On Saturday, July 18th, over 70 bands will take to nine stages scattered around the Merriweather Post Pavilion grounds in Columbia, MD as a part of the single-day touring festival’s twentieth iteration. Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting a plurality of the musicians participating this year, starting today with a quick list of Warped veterans you’d be spitting in the face of history by missing.
August Burns Red
These guys are longtime AltFreq favorites. Their straightforward approach to metalcore & their often introspective, socially conscious lyrics have been honed to brutal precision since their inception in 2003. In the time since they’ve amassed a formidable following, which makes their fifth Warped appearance this year a pleasant non-surprise. Best of all, they just released their seventh studio effort Found In Faraway Places; this means you’ll hear a mix of new tunes and crowd favorites as your flailing body is endlessly subsumed and regurgitated by the roiling mass of sweat-drenched, dust-coated humanity otherwise known as “the crowd at an ABR show.”
Connect with August Burns Red: (Facebook / Twitter / Official Site)
Family Force 5
Remember “Love Addict”? It was one of the formative songs of my late middle school/early high school musical awakening, counting itself among the lucky 500 that could fit on my first generation iPod Nano. The half-rapped, half-screamed vocals and heavy post-production were a perfect cross-section of Family Force 5’s unabashed, crunkcore style. Lyrical content and religious affiliation aside, the band’s music spoke to me simply because it made me move. Seeing them perform live – on Warped a few years back, appropriately enough – rekindled that feeling with vigor, and it’s why they made this list. Based on sheer energy and stage presence alone these guys should make your Warped 2015 schedule.
Connect with Family Force 5: (Facebook / Twitter / Official Site)
Senses Fail
Another entrant under the “I grew up on this shit,” banner, the New Jersey post-hardcore outfit known as Senses Fail are making their sixth Warped appearance (and their first since 2012) this summer. I can picture myself in my darkened bedroom with Still Searching whirring quietly in my bright orange Walkman, saving my parents plenty of money on therapy by self-diagnosing my “issues” and then self-prescribing daily doses of emotionally-laden music as treatment.
Yep, that’s the one
Both the band and myself have come a ways since then. They’ve released four more full-lengths – including their latest, Pull The Thorns From Your Heart, out on Pure Noise Records as of this week. I’ve misplaced my Walkman and concluded somewhere in the interim that life’s not as bad as I thought it was at 13. Everybody’s happy, right?
Connect with Senses Fail: (Facebook / Twitter / Official Site)
Silverstein
One of the more intellectual and sonically diverse acts to come out of the post-hardcore/emo wave of the early to mid-2000s, Canada’s Silverstein has long been on my To-See list. They roped me in with When Broken is Easily Fixed and Discovering the Waterfront then kept me onboard by keeping it interesting – whether that meant ditching most of the sheen to record a straight rock record (Departures and Arrivals) or crafting albums with overarching concepts (three of their five most recent records fit this bill). If (read: when) you catch their set this summer, expect a little of everything from this quintet of seasoned, talented musicians.
Connect with Silverstein: (Facebook / Twitter / Official Site)
The Wonder Years
These guys are responsible for some of the most-played pop-punk in my music library, and with good reason. Their combination of no-frills, technically sound instrumentation and lyricism that hits home rather than skims the emotive surface makes it pretty hard not to bang your head and sing along. Much as some of the earlier bands on this list spoke to me at a younger age, the more mature thematic content present on works like The Greatest Generation connects with me now – songs about first loves realized and first loves gone awry are replaced by ego-bruised musings on expectations vs. reality and the looming uncertainty of the future that any 20-something can relate to. Of all the bands playing this year’s Tour, The Wonder Years owns most of my anticipation.
Connect with The Wonder Years (Facebook / Twitter / Official Site)
We Came As Romans
Blasting pure adrenaline through high-powered speakers since 2005, melodic metalcore band We Came As Romans round out this list for no reason other than because it’s ordered alphabetically. Calling Troy, Michigan home, the six-piece outfit has toured and released extensively in their ten years of existence, and have a new full-length self-titled album due out at the end of July. I’m running out of steam here, so I’ll make it simple: see We Came As Romans (and the other five acts previously listed) this summer at Warped Tour. Colloquially speaking, “they real good.”
Connect with We Came As Romans: (Facebook / Twitter / Official Site)
You can grab tickets to the 2015 Vans Warped Tour @ Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD on Saturday, July 18 right here. All other Merriweather-specific info can be found on the event page.
Connect with Vans Warped Tour: (Facebook / Twitter / YouTube / Official Site)