For the fourth year in a row, black-clad emos descended upon the glitzy Las Vegas for the When We Were Young festival, presented by 7-Eleven, which basically functions as a big family reunion for anyone who played or attended the Warped Tour in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Over 50 bands played across four stages with a handful of tough conflicts throughout the day, and I was also busy conducting interviews backstage with several of the bands playing for a livestream on Veeps, which you can now watch on-demand. (We’re also rolling out clips all week on the BrooklynVegan Instagram.) I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to because of interviewing duties, but I did make my way to a handful of sets across the two days and here’s a list of the 7 that stuck out to me the most.
blink-182
blink-182 have been on a wild ride ever since they stormed through the gates with a surprise Coachella 2023 set that marked the first Mark, Tom, and Travis show since 2014. In the time since then, they released their new album One More Time, then they released a deluxe edition with eight more new songs, and they played over 160 shows with various surprises built in to each individual trek. Mark Hoppus said on stage at When We Were Young night two (10/19) that the tour is over (they survived), so now we wait to find out what’s next for blink-182.
Meanwhile, they closed this last trek-dubbed the Missionary Impossible Tour–out with a bang. I saw them both nights of WWWY (same setlist but, impressively, entirely different stage banter) and they were in classic form. Just like I said when I first caught the tour in 2023, the show was a beautiful, irreverent thing. From the juvenile humor to a crappy punk rock performance style that’s noticeably stripped back for a festival/stadium headliner to 30 years of crowd-pleasing songs, this was everything you’d want from blink-182. This tour saw the band re-introducing Take Off Your Pants and Jacket deep cuts “Online Songs” and “Roller Coaster” into their setlist for the first time since the year that 2001 album came out, playing their cover of Descendents’ “Hope” for the first time since 2003, and playing “Wishing Well” from their 2011 post-hiatus album Neighborhoods for the first time since Tom rejoined, and those were huge treats. blink of course play the hits but they clearly draw crowds who get just as (or even more) excited for non-singles from every era of the band. The oldest song on the setlist (“M+Ms,” which just turned 30) got just as good of a crowd reaction as new ones like “Turpentine,” “Dance With Me,” and “More Than You Know.” The band is actually even more popular now than they were when they were all over TRL, and wrapping up their big comeback tour by co-headlining a festival made up almost exclusively of bands influenced by blink-182 is one hell of a victory lap. As Tom said on stage at night 2, “It took us a long time to tell dick jokes at this level.”
Alexisonfire
#1 favorite set of the fest is hard to pick, but most intense set? That award definitely goes to Alexisonfire. The short set lengths of the side stages meant the Ontario post-hardcore heroes could only play six songs, and that was enough to leave one of the biggest impacts on me that any band left all weekend. Even with a short set, they touched on every era of their career except their 2002 self-titled debut LP (but including their too-often-overlooked 2010 EP Dog’s Blood), and even as they opened their set with the 21-year-old Watch Out! opener “Accidents,” nothing about Alexisonfire’s set had anything to do with nostalgia. Alexisonfire have become a heavier, beefier, more overwhelming band than they were in 2004, and they turned “Accidents” into the kind of knockout gut-punch that could only come from the seasoned band that Alexisonfire are now. From there, they went right into two songs from their most recent album, and the energy levels both on stage and in the crowd only seemed to rise. Their set wasn’t just a series of cathartic singalongs; it was a sensory overload.
Taking Back Sunday
Taking Back Sunday have played hundreds of shows over the years, but they’ve quite literally never played a show like this. I caught them at their WWWY sideshow on Friday night (10/17) before the fest, and it was their first-ever full set with both of their secondary vocalists/guitarists, John Nolan (who was on Tell All Your Friends and every album from the 2011 self-titled onward) and Fred Mascherino (who was on Where You Want To Be and Louder Now), alongside lead vocalist Adam Lazzara, bassist Shaun Cooper, and touring members Nathan Cogan (guitar) and Mitchell Register (drums). It followed the brief appearance of the John and Fred lineup at the end of Taking Back Sunday’s 2024 Holiday Spectacular, and then Fred returning to the band for the first time in 17 years to fill in for John on the band’s recent tour with Coheed & Cambria as John recovered from surgery. “This thing that was near disaster, to be even better and more than the sum of its parts is shocking and you could feel it,” Shaun told me during our interview at the fest. “It was a really miraculous moment.”
More than the sum of its parts is exactly what it felt like in the crowd too. After years of seeing shows where either John sang Fred’s parts or Fred sang John’s parts, now you could hear all of Taking Back Sunday’s most classic songs sung by the people who recorded the album versions. But it was even more than that; it was also an opportunity to hear John and Fred play and sing together, and breathe new life and chemistry into these songs that never could’ve existed before. It injected a new spirit into the band and it felt like every person on stage was playing with a new boost of energy. It really was a special moment.
Drain
I wasn’t sure how Drain’s set would go over at When We Were Young. It’s a festival that largely celebrates the emo and pop punk of the early 2000s, and Drain are neither of that genre or that era. And on top of that, they only got added to the fest a week before it took place. But any doubts I might’ve had were erased as soon as I ran over to catch their 1:35 PM set. As you’d hope from a Drain show, it was going off. The inflatable sharks were out, the early-afternoon side stage crowd was massive and going nuts–vocalist Sammy Ciaramitaro said on stage at one point that he saw three pits going at once–and the band was as explosive as I’d ever seen them. They played the singles from their upcoming third album Is Your Friend, and the reactions to those songs were some of the best reactions of the set. The new songs instantly feel like some of Drain’s catchiest yet, and I don’t just mean the clean-vocal skate punk of “Who’s Having Fun?”. Even the Santa Cruz hardcore band’s heaviest moments on those new songs made for some of the brightest, most welcoming moments of their set at When We Were Young.
Avril Lavigne
It’s nice to have Avril Lavigne back in her pop punk era. After the “Sk8er Boi” hitmaker embraced the straight-up pop direction that she once was an antidote to, she looped back around to her roots on 2022’s Travis Barker-assisted Love Sux and she recently finished up her Greatest Hits Tour with support from other pop punk bands before returning to When We Were Young for the second time. In the pop world, Avril doesn’t have the dominance that she once did, but at When We Were Young, she’s immortal. Her crowd seemed as big as the headliners’ crowds, and her singalongs might’ve been the loudest and most passionate I heard all weekend. She played banger after banger (“Girlfriend,” “What the Hell,” “Complicated,” “Here’s to Never Growing Up,” “My Happy Ending,” “I’m With You,” and “Sk8er Boi” included), plus a fiery rendition of “Bite Me” from Love Sux and two different collaborations with fellow Canadian pop punk giants across the festival’s two nights. At night one, she played her new collab with Simple Plan (“Young & Dumb”) that was released alongside Simple Plan’s stint on Avril’s latest tour, and on night two she brought out her ex-husband Deryck Whibley to perform his former band Sum 41’s classic hit “In Too Deep,” something you might’ve seen them do together back when they were married. It’s a perfect example of those full-circle moments that WWWY is all about.
Straylight Run
When we were young, the concept of a John + Fred lineup of Taking Back Sunday would’ve seemed like fan fiction, and maybe the only way to make that seem even weirder was if Straylight Run opened the show… with Adam Lazzara playing in Straylight too. But that’s exactly what happened at TBS’ Friday night sideshow, and then Straylight did it two more times with help from Adam at the fest proper. To back up, Straylight Run is the piano-driven band that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper formed in 2003 after leaving Taking Back Sunday–with John’s sister Michelle DaRosa as co-vocalist/pianist/guitarist and Fred’s former Breaking Pangaea bandmate Will Noon on drums–and they existed until 2010, when John and Shaun rejoined TBS. They remained on hiatus until putting on some triumphant comeback sets at Taking Back Sunday’s 2021 holiday shows, and then they went back into hibernation until this past weekend. Seeing them was just as much of a treat as it was in 2021, and this time their short-but-sweet set was enhanced by Adam helping out with acoustic guitar and backing vocals on “Existentialism On Prom Night,” plus their first new song in 15 years, “Anthem.” The song was written for the John Nolan-curated ACLU benefit compilation Music For Everyone Volume 2, and it fit right in with the fan faves they played from their early years.
Knocked Loose
“We’re the scariest band on this whole fucking fest,” Knocked Loose’s Bryan Garris told the crowd before playing “Mistakes Like Fractures.” “Act accordingly.” That’s one hell of a mosh call, and it rang especially true in the context of WWWWY’s main stage. They played the fest before on a smaller side stage, but this year they were the sole heavy band to share the festival’s largest area with the likes of blink-182, Weezer, Avril Lavigne, and Panic! at the Disco. And in what honestly came as no surprise given Knocked Loose’s unlikely-but-at-this-point-well-established versatility, they killed it. A lot of people yelled along, and I’m sure a lot of other people were hearing them for the first time as they waited for All Time Low or The Used to take the stage. And Knocked Loose reminded us once again that, as scary as they are, their music is for everybody. They thrive in the environments where they stick out like a sore thumb, and they just get better and better with each new album and tour. It’s been just over a year since I saw them last, and they blew me away all over again.
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When We Were Young 2025, presented by 7-Eleven, took place October 18 & 19 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Stream our backstage interviews for free at Veeps.