Sad Summer Festival continues Pittsburgh's season of pop punk

It’s a pretty good time to be a pop punk fan in Pittsburgh. Between upcoming shows by Taking Back Sunday, Sum 41, and Green Day, the concert calendar is overflowing with familiar classics, not to mention the recent Four Chord Music Fest, which celebrated its tenth year with The Story So Far and The All-American Rejects last month.

Enthusiasts of whiny vocals, distorted power chords, and emo-adjacent choruses will be pleased to hear that Sad Summer Festival returns to Stage AE for the fifth time on Tues., Jul. 23. Headliners include repeats from the touring festival’s original 2019 lineup, such as Arizonian alt-rockers The Maine, Florida’s emo songsters Mayday Parade, and Philadelphia pop punk institution The Wonder Years.

The initial Sad Summer Festival was first imagined by Mike Marquis, Tim Kirch, and Josh Terry, three music industry lifers who realized there was a new absence of festivals that booked pop punk bands and brought them across the country. After the conclusion of the infamous Warped Tour in 2018, those three teamed up with The Maine and Mayday Parade to “make sure there was something for our fans, something that could exist for fans of the genre,” says Alex Garcia, Mayday Parade’s guitarist.

Carrying on the legacy of Warped Tour, Sad Summer Festival’s 2024 lineup includes scene mainstays like heavier occasional screamers Knuckle Puck and self-deprecating, straightforward quintet Real Friends while leaving space for rising acts like Diva Bleach and Like Roses. But every Sad Summer Festival performer will play the same stage, making sure that no band gets missed.

“[Bands] don't get lost in the shuffle here,” Garcia tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “When we first started Warped Tour, we’d play at like two o'clock on one of the amphitheater stages, not the main stage but like the side stage. It would feel like, well, what was that for?”

Since the pandemic, pop punk has been brought back into pop culture, with crossover hits from rappers-turned-rockers mgk (formerly Machine Gun Kelly) and Yungblood driving much of the conversation. Simultaneously, a more thoughtful, diverse, and catchy pop punk scene with bands like Pool Kids or Meet Me @ The Altar has emerged. In turn, Sad Summer Festival has seen a younger generation of fans arrive, thrilled to see bands that have been touring for nearly 20 years.

“We started seeing a rise in new interest in this genre that wasn't there when we started this,” says Marquis. “I think it's almost like a split audience where there's like 30-something-year-old fans that are drinking margaritas and hanging out in the back and then there's this entire population of like 16- to 21-year-olds where this is all new for them.”

The first time The Wonder Years frontman Dan Campbell played Sad Summer Festival, he was about to have his oldest son Wyatt. Campbell was uncertain but eventually the band said yes to the tour.

“I was flying in and out of the festival like every other day. We were new parents and we hadn’t yet figured out daycare or anything,” says Campbell. “I was flying home on off days to run daddy daycare.”

This year’s tour with Sad Summer Festival will be The Wonder Years’ fourth set at Stage AE, where they’ve headlined as recently as 2022. Despite The Wonder Years’ well-documented Philly roots, Pittsburgh has become one of their most loyal, growing audiences.

“There’s always going to be these minor in-state rivalries between the two major cities. But then, at the end of that, it becomes still Pennsylvania vs. the world,” said Campbell. “To see how shows have grown for us, it feels remarkable to me that after 19 years of doing this we have gone from playing church basements [in Altoona and Johnstown] to playing Stage AE consistently.”