Sad Summer Festival is the proper occasion to get into your feels. This touring emo occasion goals to enhance upon the pageant expertise with a restricted quantity of exhibits, fewer lineup conflicts, and extra illustration. Kicking off July 6, this 12 months’s iteration is set to be its largest but with headliners the Maine, Taking Back Sunday, and PVRIS. Read an excerpt from the quilt story beneath, which seems in our summer season 2023 problem.
Back in 2019, the Maine based Sad Summer — the title, the idea, the branding — and for its inaugural run, enlisted pals like Mayday Parade, State Champs, the Wonder Years, Mom Jeans and Stand Atlantic (the latter two bands return to open all dates this 12 months, together with Michigan rockers Hot Mulligan). Warped’s run as a touring pageant wrapped in 2018, and the Maine eyed a comparable mannequin, with some key variations: a much less grueling quantity of exhibits for artists and fewer robust lineup choices for followers. “Warped and other festivals, your two favorite bands end up playing at the same time, and you have to miss one,” Kirch says. “The idea was one stage. Let’s partner up these bands that would be doing their own headlining tours and make something bigger than the sum of its parts.”
Read extra: The Maine break down each album of their catalog
PVRIS, the third large-print band on 2023’s Sad Summer invoice, first hit their stride on Warped Tour in 2015. “It was definitely a this is real moment,” frontwoman Lynn Gunn remembers. As momentum constructed behind their fierce debut album, White Noise, PVRIS jumped from facet levels to the Warped’s major one, however the then-21-year-old Gunn steadily felt disconnected from most of the touring get together. “I had a bicycle gang. We would ride to get coffee every day, go find parks, go find fireworks, go anywhere that wasn’t Warped Tour.” From her dwelling in Los Angeles, she speaks with the knowledge allotted from almost a decade to course of that Warped Tour summer season.
“I didn’t feel comfortable. I had to shrink myself,” Gunn says. “It was very straight, it was very white and it was very male-dominated… Any time we would try to get a certain press feature and expand outward, because we had done Warped Tour, it almost gave us this weird mark because, at the time, everything was coming out about a lot of people’s allegations [regarding incidents related to Warped Tour]. It felt unaligned with my beliefs… It was a big building period for our career, but I would have liked a lot to be better. And I hope Sad Summer can do a little bit better.”
While the reside music trade typically fumbles inclusion and illustration, Gunn’s hope is not misplaced on the band that based Sad Summer. “There’s so much that can be improved upon,” O’Callaghan says.
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