Staged Haze takes Riot Fest 2024: Our Recap

After a significant delay in announcing the annual festival’s lineup and two venue changes, it might have seemed like after nearly two decades, the team behind Riot Fest might have been cracking. But even with some last minute lineup changes, they still pulled off another successful festival in Chicago’s Douglass Park. 

The annual festival, which was held Sept. 20-22, featured headliners Fall Out Boy, Beck, and Slayer, and thousands of music fans throughout the weekend. The festival’s location has always been a bit dubious: every year there’s protests and complaints from the community—it moved from Chicago’s Humboldt Park to Douglass Park in 2015 after pushback from the park’s neighbors. This year, the festival went up against the Chicago Park District, and for a while, was set to be held at SeatGeek Stadium in suburban Bridgeview, before it was ultimately approved to return to the park where it’s been held for nearly a decade.

Once the location was set, all that was left was the music, and the festival, which has its roots in punk, saw some of the most fun and energetic acts in punk rock, as well as many other rock-and-roll subgenres perform throughout the weekend.

Friday

Sum 41
I always take it with a grain of salt when bands say they’re breaking up and playing their final shows. I mean, Slayer played their final Chicago show at Riot Fest in 2019, only to come back and headline the festival again this year. So when Sum 41 announced that they were breaking up, and embarking on their final tour I was a bit doubtful, and as a fan of the band since I was an elementary student, I hoped that it wasn’t actually the case. 

If it is, the band played their final Chicago show at Riot Fest on Friday, Sept. 20. The band condensed their current touring setlist to fit within its one hour set, leaving them with just the hits, like “The Hell Song,” “Fat Lip,” “In Too Deep,” and “Landmines,” off their latest, and final, album, Heaven :x: Hell. The band’s been on their final tour throughout most of this year, and at this point have perfected their set.

While my heart tells me that we will see Sum 41 playing Riot Fest again within the next 10 years, if this is how the band goes out, it was a great ending to a longstanding career.

Public Enemy
At this point, Flavor Flav is so famous for his iconic run of television shows in the 2000’s, serving as the financial backer of many 2024 Olympic athletes and being one of the world’s biggest Swifties, some people might have forgotten how he got his start in the first place—through his role as the hype man in Public Enemy, one of the most legendary hip hop groups of the 1980’s. 

Throughout Public Enemy’s hour-long set that ran throughout the hip hop group’s lengthy discography, including some of its most beloved songs like “911 Is A Joke,” “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got,” and “Bring the Noise,” before ending their set with “Fight the Power.” The group has been going strong since the ’80s, and while many attendees who were over the age of 30 were most likely complaining about the sore feet and backs, Public Enemy never once let up on the energy throughout their set. It was an impressive feat to watch. 

Fall Out Boy
Sure, Riot Fest might be a punk rock festival at its core, but that doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift’s influence can’t spread to it. Fall Out Boy performed their own rendition of the Eras Tour throughout their opening night headlining set, impressively playing songs from all of their numerous releases during the band’s nearly two hour-long set, spanning the band’s career, from their debut in 2003 to 2023’s So Much (for) Stardust.

To help kick off the set, Fall Out Boy performed “Chicago Is So Two Years Ago,” a song off the band’s 2003 debut studio album Take This To Your Grave, in which singer Patrick Stump says “There’s a light on in Chicago, and I know I should be home,” showing that no matter how unbelievably massive Fall Out Boy’s success has been, they still remember where their home is. It was something that their hometown crowd appreciated, including Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath, a fellow Chicago native who joined the band to sing “Sugar We’re Going Down” just a few songs later. 

Fall Out Boy’s set was easily the most theatrical, and well-produced of the weekend. Personally, I’ve been attending Riot Fest since 2009, and I’ve never seen another performance like it at the festival. Normally, artists reserve extensive firework shows, confetti cannons, fire-shooting bass guitars and massive decorations that changed with every different album that the band performed from. The high production value that Fall Out Boy brought to Douglass Park is something that’s usually reserved for arena or stadium shows, and made their set all the more exciting.

Saturday

Beach Bunny
Fall Out Boy was arguably the most well-known hometown act playing at the Chicago festival throughout the weekend, but they weren’t the only ones. Beach Bunny, an indie pop/power pop band that formed in 2015, also calls the city home. The band is led by Lili Trifilio, whose obvious excitement to be performing at Riot Fest was energetic. Trifilio has a super sweet and clear voice that sounds just as good live as it does on the band’s recorded work. 

While they certainly weren’t the heaviest band to play that weekend, in a festival where Slayer was a headliner, the crowd was still extremely into the band’s set, with Trifilio repeatedly thanking the crowd for moshing as the band performed songs like “Oxygen,” off of Beach Bunny’s 2022 album Emotional Creature.

L.S. Dunes
In 2022, L.S. Dunes played their first-ever show at Riot Fest. The post-hardcore and emo supergroup, made up of members of My Chemical Romance, Circa Survive, Thursday, and Coheed and Cambria burst out onto the festival with an already passionate fanbase, determined to love the band based on their love of the other bands that the members are also a part of. The first show went off without a hitch, so did their performance at last year’s Riot Fest. 

This year, with an album under their belt, and a new single, “Fatal Deluxe,” L.S. Dunes took the stage at the festival that they’ve become regulars at without anything to prove. They confidently ran through most of the tracks on the band’s 2022 album Past Lives, as well as debuting their new single, to a passionate fanbase that wasn’t just there for the other bands, but now for L.S. Dunes themselves. 

Waxahatchee
If there was one artist on the Riot Fest lineup that stuck out to me, it was Waxahatchee. Sure, Katie Crutchfield, the voice, guitarist and songwriter behind the project has her roots in punk rock with her previous band, P.S. Eliot, but Waxahatchee, with its more Americana, alt-country and folk influences, is a far cry from what would traditionally be found on the festival’s lineup. But just as Crutchfield has branched out in her sound throughout her career, so has Riot Fest. Waxahatchee, while decidedly not a traditional pick for the festival, had a massive crowd throughout the group’s headlining set on the Radical Stage—and they weren’t even supposed to have that slot. Waxahatchee moved into the slot originally booked for Bright Eyes, who dropped out of the festival a few days before it began.

It was one of the best performances of the weekend. Crutchfield primarily performed songs off of 2024’s Tigers Blood and 2020’s Saint Cloud, and acknowledged Bright Eyes’ absence from the festival, dedicating “Right Back to It” to Conor Oberst. Crutchfield has such a distinctive and near-hypnotizing voice that was wonderful to listen to throughout the band’s one hour set, and an impressive songwriting prowess. While the star of Waxahatchee’s set was Crutchfield herself, she had an impressive backing band with her that made it all the better, including guitarist Clay Frankel, formerly of the Chicago-based band Twin Peaks (or maybe presently? Who knows that’s going on with that band?), who was so magnetic while performing, it was hard not to be consistently wowed. 

Taking Back Sunday
There are some bands and artists that are a surprise when they wind up on the Riot Fest lineup, like Waxahatchee was this year. There are others where it would be a surprise if they weren’t playing. Taking Back Sunday clearly loves Riot Fest. I can’t remember a year in recent memory where the band wasn’t playing the Chicago festival. Riot Fest, and its crowd, clearly loves the band back. 

Despite not sounding their best, Taking Back Sunday’s crowd was packed in on Saturday night, as the band ran through a score of nostalgic favorites, including “Timberwolves at New Jersey,” and their most famous hit, which was saved for last, “MakeDamnSure.”

Sunday

Slaughter Beach, Dog
There’s always a whole host of bands and artists at Riot Fest that I’ve seen multiple times, and can’t wait to see again. There’s others that I’ve heard of, and that I should have checked out a long time ago, but have never come around to doing so. Slaughter Beach, Dog, a band from Philadelphia, falls into the latter for me. The band is a side project of Jake Ewald, formerly of the emo band Modern Baseball. After Modern Baseball went on indefinite hiatus, he began crafting the songs for this side project, also recruiting fellow former Modern Baseball-member and bassist Ian Farmer. 

Slaughter Beach, Dog was able to fit eight songs into the band’s 40-minute set, leading off with their newest song, “Kick Around.” While I wasn’t familiar with their work before their impressive performance, I can’t stop listening to it now. 

Tierra Whack
Women are often underrepresented on music festival lineups, but Riot Fest had a decent amount of women in all genres performing throughout the weekend, including rapper Tierra Whack, who took the stage on Sunday for an action-packed 40-minute set. For only 40 minutes, the rapper was able to pack in 14 energetic songs, including her opener, “MOOD SWING,” “SNAKE EYES” and “Pretty Ugly.”

Less than a decade into her career, Tierra Whack has already worked with the likes of Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Tyler. the Creator. Even beyond the massive megastars that she’s worked with, Whack shines on her own, which is evident through her live performance. I feel lucky that I got to see the Philadelphia native before she inevitably blows up. 

Oliver Tree
There was no set throughout Riot Fest that was more wild than Oliver Tree’s (okay, if we’re not counting GWAR). From jokingly, yet continuously, threatening to take off all of his clothes (in front of a crowd that had plenty of children in it), to the wig mishaps, I have never been more mystified by a set at Riot Fest. Yet, through how mystifying it was, I had so much fun watching Oliver Tree perform. 

The singer-songwriter, who claimed to originally be from Chicago but his Wikipedia says otherwise, was brand new to me. I had never listened to Oliver Tree, but I knew that he toured with one of my favorite bands, FIDLAR, earlier this year, so I had a feeling that I was in for a fun show—my feeling could not have been more accurate. He ran through songs, including “Miss You,” and “Cowboys Don’t Cry,” and threatened to leave the stage and go see Rob Zombie instead several times. As Tree performed, he also had his music videos running on the screen behind him, which made the show feel more like an art piece than a traditional concert. For as silly as his persona is, Oliver Tree makes fun music, and the fun is only amplified by his onstage presence. 

Sublime
When the frontman of a band passes away, it’s almost impossible to imagine the band would ever continue after that. After Sublime’s Bradley Nowell passed away in 1996, the band ended for a long time. But they reemerged in 2009, with new singer Rome Ramirez, performing under the name Sublime with Rome. After more than a decade, Ramirez left the band earlier this year, and Sublime reformed with a different Nowell at the helm: Bradley’s son, Jakob. The new iteration of the beloved ska punk and reggae band took the stage at Riot Fest, headlining the festival’s Rise Stage on Sept. 22.

Just as with Queen recruiting Adam Lambert as their new singer, or INXS’ reality show to find a new frontman, replacing a band’s late iconic member, especially when they exemplify so much fo what the band is, as Nowell did for Sublime, always feels a bit like you’re just seeing a cover band. But Sublime’s new lineup, which features Nowell’s son, Jakob, as the band’s latest frontman, is about as close as you can get to the magic of the band’s original lineup. Jakob Nowell sounds so similar to his dad, and I was impressed with his stage presence throughout the band’s runthrough of some of their most beloved songs, like “Garden Grove,” which kicked off Sublime’s hour-long set. 

Riot Fest Pros

• One of my favorite things about the festival as it’s evolved over the past 10 years is how much the lineup has expanded, musically. What started as a straight up punk festival now has an extremely diverse lineup each year, and it’s fun to wander from stage to stage hearing so many different things. This year, it featured punk artists, of course, but also ska, reggae, hip hop, alt-country, heavy metal, indie, pop—it was such a wide range of music.
• At some music festivals, you could be anywhere in the world and have the same experience. That’s not the case at Riot Fest. You know you’re in Chicago. Not only can you see the skyline from certain parts of the festival grounds in Douglass Park, but there’s Chicago flags all over the place. This year, Riot Fest even named its Cabaret Metro stage after one of the city’s most storied and beloved music venues. 
• RiotLand was a new addition to the festival this year, and was a welcome one. Sure, it’s a music festival, but sometimes you might need a little break, and RiotLand served as the perfect place to take one. RiotLand, which took up its own section of the festival grounds was sort of like an amusement park, with some more unique offers, like a ring where National Wrestling Alliance wrestlers took the stage, an outpost of the Logan Arcade, and a punk rock museum hosted in a replica of Chicago’s famous bowling alley (and former music venue) Fireside Bowl.

Riot Fest Cons

• Year after year, Riot Fest seems to have a problem with its sound. Fall Out Boy’s headlining set on the Cabaret Metro would be extraordinarily loud at one moment, and then the sound would be so soft the next. 
• While some stages are quiet, others are blaringly loud. The festival, which has had just about the same stage setup since its move to Douglass Park, almost always has one staged (this year it was called the NOFX World) is oftentimes drowned out by the main headliner stage unless you’re standing in the right spot.

Check out more of Staged Haze’s festival coverage here.