Riot Fest returns to Chicago hotter than ever

Back for its 19th year, Riot Fest came back in a blaze of September heat to the Seat Geek Stadium…..errrr I mean, Douglas Park. Tens of thousands of rock’n’roll enthusiasts stormed into Chicago’s South Side festival for three days of music and moshing. 

Riot Fest is built different. For starter’s Douglas Park offers an expansive atmosphere second only to Lollapalooza, but with fewer fountains and pavement and more lawn for you to kick back on. Punks of all persuasions traverse the ground in what feels like a nostalgic Ren Fest of rock ’n roll. 

Local staples like The Cobra Lounge and Bar Tola have stands, and there’s more eye candy than you’ll know what to do with, from Jesus playing hacky sack, to burlesque dancers at this year’s inaugural Strip-O-Rama, to a small chapel with an ordained minister where dozens of couples tied the knot. It’s pure, beautiful chaos.

Yet it’s the music that keeps people coming back year after year, and 2024’s lineup was no exception. Big names like Fall Out Boy, Beck, Slayer, and Sublime, closed out the nights. These are our top acts from a wild weekend. 

At Riot Fest, Hot Mulligan wants to hear you scream 

At its best, emo music offers a sense of raw catharsis. It’s meant to be sung or screamed as loud as possible until maybe – just maybe – that weight on your back gets a little bit lighter. Or maybe that’s just all the air leaving your body? 

Regardless, Hot Mulligan provides exactly that. Nathan ‘Tades’ Sanville skulked onto the stage wearing the classic emo get up: a black T and even blacker jeans. With indistinguishably long dark hair and beard and a barrel chested rasp of a voice he quietly commands the spotlight. 

Their music is anything but quiet. It’s 45 minutes of pedal to the floor pop-punk emo. It’s relentlessly peppy, yet the lyrics that punch through are undeniably doleful. “Can’t stand the fact I know where you are / Ten years, I still try to spot your car” Sanville screams out over a grainy guitar hook. It’s their lead single “Shhh Golf is On” off their latest album “Why Would I Watch”. 

“Do you like yelling? He asks the crowd after the song. They roared back in the affirmative. “Prove it” he taunted them. For the rest of the set, the audience more than acquitted itself. 

A well polished Spoon

There’s a specific kind of energy that comes with an anti-establishment themed music festival. The rage against the machine aesthetic can be both exciting and alternately cloying when you’re selling self titled seltzer waters (re: Riot Pop!) 

So to see alt rock darling’s Spoon take the stage felt surprising. They’re calm. There’s very little rage here. In fact this 5 piece sounds more like pop in comparison to Riot Fest’s main fair. It’s catchy, with groovy piano hooks and a steady beat that burrows gently inside you like a second heart. 

They don’t pander to their audience; it’s not that type of show. You can get into it. You can zone out. You can do both. They’re not trying to seduce you. 

Still what’s remarkable about Spoon is that out of every band I heard that weekend, they had the best mix. I could hear the nuance of every instrument interweaving with one other. It wasn’t a strain to distinguish the lyrics.

Their music plays with enough tight turns, clever drop outs, and rhythmic mix ups to keep their audiences ear. And even if Spoon is no longer reinventing the wheel in regards to genre or sound, its less performative take on existential angst was as welcome as the clouds that hovered in front of the blistering sun for their set. It was a moment of cool in a weekend of heat.

St. Vincent is just the same but brand new

Dressed like a young Morticia Adams, a spidery St Vincent (real name Annie Clark) looked statuesque on the Metro Cabaret Stage. Framed by three large black and silver arches, St Vincent stoically murmured the second track “Reckless” from her latest album “All Born Screaming.” 

“I watched you all night til the dawn had come”  she whispered, painting a converse view of the sun setting before her over a crowd of thousands. The lyrics are evocatively elusive but they draw the audience in effortlessly, stitching them into her web, as a droning bell tolls out. It’s intoxicating in its monotony. 

“A stranger comes in my path / And I’ll eat you up. / I’ll tear you limb from limb or I’ll fall in love.” St Vincent warns. Then the beat drops, carving out a hole in your chest like a lighting bolt striking wet ground. The synth blares with an almost cosmic dissonance. It’s at once romantic and unsettling, slipping into your blood like a drug that might push you over the edge at any moment. 

After her Grammy award winning yet divisive sixth album, Daddy’s Home, her latest effort feels both like a reinvention and a return to form. There’s an esoteric quality to her production, an element of sonic chiaroscuro, that heightens the album’s emotionality in a way that feels new for the forty one year old prodigy.

Songs like “Flea” and “Broken Man” (the albums first two singles) are thundering classic rock collages to rile you up. Meanwhile the swirling “Big Time Nothing” presents a guttural anti-mantra that reads like an AI generated self-help book. The verses instruct the audience with do’s and don’ts of acceptable behaviour as a bass synth loop rumbles like a car down a video game race track.  “I look inside and,” she chants and her bandmates answer her with a choral “Nothing”. 

All Born Screaming is surprisingly personal for the often opaque St Vincent. Yet interwoven with her entire oeuvre, it still allows for all of Annie Clark’s avatars to come out to play. From the benzo beauty queen of Daddy’s Home grabbing her crotch like an absentminded child to All Born Screaming’s self-exorcising Broken Man throwing drum stands and writhing on the ground to the sound of his own mind bending guitar licks. 

A Tarantino faced cameraman dressed in a trench coat and a permanent frown gets in on the action, broadcasting it all from the stage. St Vincent all but chews on the camera, devouring the audience’s attention in an ouroboric loop. 

Cursive confounds 

“Should we start early?” The sound engineer asked over his headset. The rain had just let up on Sunday afternoon, and a sea of ponchos looked to the sky expectantly to see if it would hold. An enthusiastic fan with a kid on his shoulder turned back to the sound booth. “Yes please!” he grinned. 

Dressed in a T-shirt with a lederhosen print, Cursive lead singer Tim Kasher’s voice strains out above the crowd. It’s a voice that feels like it’s always about to crack open. “I’ll try to make this perfectly clear,” he starts out “I’m so transparent I disappear.” 

Cursive is one of the bands credited with bringing the Midwest Emo scene onto the map. Over twenty years after its emergence, you can still hear the genre’s iconic DNA in Cursive’s music. 

Unapologetic time signature changes captivate and confuse the ear.  Horns punctuate sweeping piano arpeggios like a celestial marching band sounding its dying call. Elements of math rock are overlaid with the lyricism of angst and self-loathing. “I’d like to sock my piety in the eye” Kasher belts out.

Yet beyond these basic elements, Cursive does something masterful with its arrangements – cellist Megan Siebe brings beauty to the bloodshed, as Patrick Newbery underlays a propulsive melodic synth score. The polyrhythmic precision between the drums and keys creates a time signature that confounds the heartbeat with an almost existential arrhythmia. 

I couldn’t tell if I wanted to dance or take a Xanax. And while the audience might have been confused as to whether they wanted to mosh or just stoically take it all in, Cursive had their full attention.

 Waxahatchee gives us the night sways  

 After fifteen minutes of listening to Pavement warbling, I decided it might be time to call it a night. Strolling across the grounds, guided by the light of a giant Ferris Wheel, my ears picked up a sound that brought me back to the Texas State Fair. I took a hard left and wandered over to the Radical Stage following the waves of a crystalline voice that swept out into the dark like the sound of a river at night. 

Country music is divisive these days. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about what it is or isn’t. Still listening to Waxahatchee I couldn’t help but feel transported to my Texas childhood. 

For me, country has a way of careening into affection unlike any other genre – feelings of love, loss, and longing find fluency in the steel guitar, tight harmonies, and rhythmic steadiness. Modern iterations of the genre often feel too commercial and pop oriented for my taste. So I was delighted to hear Waxahatchee (the solo project of Kathryn Crutchfield) tap Into something waxingly personal. 

A banjo picks throughout the single “Right Back to It” as Crutchfield’s sonorous voice explores the ins and outs of a long-held and healthy relationship. “Your love written like a blank check / Wear it around your neck / I was at a loss” she keens. Under the light of the Ferris wheel and the few stars not inked out by the city’s light pollution, it was impossible not to start swaying. All across the field you could see couples and friends linking up, careening into the innate affection of the genre and Waxahatchee’s earnest and heartfelt sound. 

The whole band takes turns dueting with Crutchfield, effortlessly filling the moonlight grounds with lush harmonies. The rhythm keeps a steadiness that holds you in its sway. It was the perfect night cap to a long day.  

We hope you left your poncho on for GWAR

I’d never seen or heard of GWAR before. I may never see them again. I can’t say I’ll seek them out. And yet, I write with confidence that I will never forget their performance on Sunday afternoon. GWAR is a heavy metal band. They play what you’d expect from heavy metal music: loud, distorted guitar and relentless vocal charge, all delivered with an oppressively macho flair. 

GWAR delivers all of this and more. So, so much more. 

Dressed head to toe in costume armour, they look like the cast of Thor Ragnorak woke up in a Sam Raimi movie. One of them stands on giant horse hooves like a satyr. The frontman wears a sporran made of penises and gash. They’re demonic, otherworldly barbarians here to thrash their guitars, but mostly to thrash each other. 

And to perform comedy sketches with a sprinkling of social commentary! Between every song there was a grotesque skit poking fun at current events. A pregnant Taylor Swift confronts the band member who knocked her up. P. Diddy is ridiculed for his taste in lube. Benjamin Netanyahu dances to a rock’n’roll Hora. 

Each cameo served as an elaborate set up to do the same thing. The musicians would take turns fighting the new challenger until they began hacking parts of them clean off. Hands. Heads. Bowels. Genitals. It all gets chopped off and blood (or other imaginative fluids) spray out onto the audience. 

It’s willfully offensive. A pregnant Swift is assaulted as they sing their song “Slap U Around”. A caricatured Radio DJ calls the audience faggots and losers before he’s decapitated, spraying gallons of blood out onto the audience. (Note to GWAR: it’s not the 90s anymore. No need to call me a fag, I ride the CTA.)

The satire paradox is on full display. I can’t say if the social commentary is being used as a weapon to provoke thought, or just shield them from criticism. Still there are moments when something meaningful shines through. As Netanyahu holds a baby doll over his head, the band begins their thrasher “Hail, Genocide!” 

“They show you no mercy / they just show you a line” they scream. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza. 70% are estimated to be women and children. “Call it what you will but I call it genocide.”

Magnolia Park goes hard and goofy 

A school bell rings and it’s time for a lesson in pop punk. Bounding onto the stage with red dreads, tight blue jeans, and neon kicks, Joshua Roberts of Magnolia Park grinned down on a wetter than usual audience. Sunday morning gave us a reprieve from the near ninety degree heat with a steady morning shower. Undeterred, Roberts welcomed his audience with the confidence of a millennial pop-punk Messiah. 

“Don’t be a little bitch!” he dared them. “Let me see you jump!”

Riot Fest goes hard. It can be overwhelming to have so many hype men trying to get you to match their freak. Still, some bands talk the talk, and others walk it. The enthusiasm and energetic performance of Magnolia Park did the latter and had the audience unabashedly moshing in the rain.

“Everyone get into the pit!” the bassist roared into the mic. “Throw your friend into the pit! Throw your dog into the pit! Throw your grandmother into the pit!” he joked. 

The energy was perfectly summed up by their first live performance of “I 2 I”, a rock cover off Disney’s new compilation album “A Whole New Sound”. Max of Goof Troop fame (iykyk), was projected onto the screens, bringing back a rush of nostalgia as the band resurrected the song with blaring bravado. It was undeniably goofy, and undeniably fun. 

“Raise your hands if you’ve never crowd surfed before.” Dozens of eager hands shot up. “All right then. Get up here!” Wet and laughing as Magnolia Park played yet another banger, the uninitiated got lifted.

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With over 90 bands over three days, there are just too many incredible moments to  write about in one small article. We loved Riot Fest, and can’t wait to be raging with you again next year. These are our favourites; what did we miss?