Riot Fest Sunday: Anti-fascist Headquarters
Sitting here today looking back at Riot Fest 2025, I realize that its final day continues to serve as a reminder that there are more of us than there are of them.
Revisit Friday's coverage here and Saturday's here.
"Life can be beautiful when you're in love with life itself," sang Josh Caterer on the hard-charging "Golden Moment", to raised eyebrows in the audience at the Rise Stage in the early afternoon. Indeed, Lovely Stuff (Anxious & Angry), the first Smoking Popes album in 7 years, is a jolly affair in comparison to the band's back catalog, a purposeful manifestation of positivity when the world around us is falling apart. Sure, there are moments of dulled feeling--the pensive, distorted guitars of glass-half-empty "When the Sun Goes Down", and the fatalistic "Never Gonna Break"--but Lovely Stuff will likely be remembered as the type of album that ends with a cover of "Over the Rainbow". "Golden Moment", especially, was a left turn at Riot Fest because it followed the band doing Born to Quit, a classic mid-90's conglomerate of arrested development dependency, pop punk heartbreak, and hooks that would make The Cars jealous. Caterer's vocals were on point throughout the performance of the 28-minute record, from mid-album soundtrack standouts "My Lucky Day" and "Need You Around" (Tommy Boy and Clueless, respectively) to the ripping "Can't Stop the Teardrops (From Getting Cried)" and smoldering "On the Shoulder".
Famously, when Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent decided to start a punk band, they did so as a duo only because they couldn't get other members to join. Judging by the chaos they inflicted upon the Radical Stage at 2:30 PM, that decision's still paying off. They walked out to Vengaboys' "We Like to Party! (The Vengabus)"; Vincent paraded through the crowd not a minute later, screaming the words to "Mirror Muscles", from Heavy Jelly (BMG), their first album as SOFT PLAY. The two would take turns entering the audience, one peacocking like the aggressive men the band pokes fun at, the other embracing their feminine side, swaying their hips and practicing body rolls. And in addition to the absurdity of songs like "Girl Fight"--played twice in a row, 13 seconds long, to a girls-only mosh pit--SOFT PLAY offered unexpected moments of tenderness, from vulnerable confessional "Isaac is Typing..." and the mandolin-imbued celebration of a late friend "Everything and Nothing", to Holman and Vincent wiping sweat off of each other between songs, the Male Friendship hat incarnate.
When Phoebe Lunny and Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez chide actually misogynistic self-described nice guys, systemic sexism, the cops, nepo babies, and gentrifiers, it's clear they have that dog in them; that Lambrini Girls play their music with the self-awareness of your favorite comedian but with the self-seriousness of the Baja Men makes Who Let The Dogs Out (City Slang) the perfect title for their full-length debut. At Riot Fest, Lunny demonstrated her penchant for embodying the very personas of her targets. "I'm one of the nice guys / So why won't you have sex with me?" she taunted on "Big Dick Energy". "When will I learn that men just do it better?" she eye-rolled on "Company Culture", prior to unleashing a side-splitting, "Michael, I don't want to suck you off on my lunch break!" Lambrini Girls know that you need a sense of humor to survive in a world that seeks to divide, that laughter is a universal language and weapon when punching up at the powers that be.
That said, the band made sure to save time for urgent messages and songs. Donning a "Fuck ICE" shirt, Lunny reminded us that there was no point in her preaching to the choir, that instead it was up to us to take care of our immigrant neighbors in grave danger. On "Bad Apple", over touring drummer Misha Phillips' skittering beat, Lunny delivered truths with the cadence of a rapper, pulling the chair out from under the idea that police can be reformed in a society that lionizes them: "Boys in blue and scars and bruises / Badges, guns, owned by abusers / Fatal harm to kids unarmed / Defended on the news." And before bringing it home with should-have-been-song-of-the-summer "Cuntology 101", the band performed the most underrated song on their debut, "Love", about toxicity disguised as affection. It sounded like pure bile. Touring bassist Kaitlin Pelkey's churning lines and Lunny's buzzing guitars soundtracked our realization that underneath it all, norms are formed and reinforced by interpersonal relationships. We walked away from Lambrini Girls' set with the desire to be better.
Squinting towards the blinding afternoon sun, Steve Hartlett let the crowd at the Radical Stage know that the members of Ovlov had stayed up till 7 AM that morning partying, so their set might be the worst they ever played. Having never seen them, I can comfortably say that if that was Ovlov at their worst, I'd love to see them at their best. Over a brisk 30-minute set--one that nevertheless maintained the patient melancholy of the Connecticut band's beloved songs--Hartlett and company burned through highlights from 2018's TRU and 2021's Buds (Exploding in Sound), like the wiry "Eat More" and an extra fuzzed-out rendition of "Strokes". For all of his apparent lethargy, Hartlett still added some spontaneity to the band's performance, at one point riffing on the managerial decisions from the prior night's White Sox-Padres game they attended. Perhaps somebody should have told Ovlov how cheap the beers are at Rate Field, but then again, maybe the hangover helped.
Count the hometown heroes as a truly consistent indie rock band in the year of our lord, 2025. Last year, DEHD followed 2020 breakout Flower of Devotion and 2022's Blue Skies with their Fat Possum sophomore effort, Poetry, doubling down on the minimalist hooks-and-harmonies philosophy that's proved successful for them thus far. At their Riot Fest debut, bassist-singer Emily Kempf, guitarist-singer Jason Balla, and drummer Eric McGrady played pretty much everything you'd want them to--"Bad Love", a sped-up "Dog Days", the pounding "Window"--in a manner both bigger and rawer than on their studio recordings. McGrady's mighty toms were the backbone to Kempf's screams on "Shake" and Balla's vocal wails and hazy guitar stabs on "Flying". Should Dehd continue to release lovelorn surf rock earworms at this pace, pencil them in for a late afternoon set at a main stage every couple years.
The Britsol quintet's raucous and blistering evening set represented the final of 135 U.S. stops on the tour for 2024 album Tangk (Partisan). IDLES showed that they still bring it live despite the subdued nature of their recent releases. Vocalist Joe Talbot and lead guitarist Mark Bowen strutted down the stage ramp like it was a fashion show walkway, microphone and axe in hand, as the rhythm section pummeled through favorites "Divide and Conquer", "Heel/Heal", and "I'm Scum". IDLES' blunt messaging is effective when shouted to a crowd of like-minded folks sharing a collective euphoria, and the audience at Riot Fest chanted back the words of tunes like pro-immigration anthem "Danny Nedelko" and feminist tribute "Mother". Most exciting, the band took advantage of their bill-mates and brought Jack White on to shred during "Never Fight a Man With a Perm" and early MVPs Soft Play to make elephant noise on "Rottweiler". You can rely on IDLES to sprint even when taking their victory lap.
Don't get me wrong: Blink-182 provided some Friday levity, and Weezer some Saturday teenage angst. Green Day, however, was the Riot Fest headliner that met the moment. As they are wont to do, they led off with "American Idiot" and "Holiday", Billie Joe Armstrong declaring, "I'm not a part of a MAGA agenda" on the former and galvanizing the crowd on the latter, asking us, "Chicago, do you want fascism in America? Do you want tanks on the streets?" It can be hard for fans of all generations to reconcile that the same band whose bassist wrote the eternal line to "Longview" while tripping acid would leave the legacy of an anti-war album so popular it was adapted into a musical. Green Day's Riot Fest closing set exemplified their ability to balance bombastic entertainment (an extended, shit-stirring "Hitchin' a Ride", the Dookie album cover's Bad Year blimp flying over the audience during "When I Come Around") with incisive social commentary ("Minority", paean of feminist solidarity "She"). The surprise pinnacle of the set was the penultimate "Bobby Sox" from the trio's most recent album Saviors (Reprise), a song about Armstrong's bisexuality that he dedicated to the LGBTQ+ people in the crowd. "Do you wanna be my girlfriend/boyfriend?" he screamed with gravel in the chorus, shards poking out of the sugary hooks, that mirrored the simultaneous brightness and struggles of queer life. Green Day may have a hell of a discography, but they refuse to rest on their laurels.
