]On the final weekend of July, the Vans Warped Tour returned to Long Beach.
After spending the better part of three decades as a traveling roadshow, making 40 or so stops a year over the dog days of summer, Warped Tour has adapted to the current state of festival culture while maintaining some of its nomadic roots, with the 2026 edition of the tour making five stops across North America versus just three in 2025.
As a result, Warped’s two-day return to Long Beach felt far more polished than last year’s highly anticipated relaunch, marking the ninth and 10th shows Kevin Lyman and company have put on under this new model. The lines were long, sure, matters made worse by scorching heat, but between multiple shaded areas, free water refill stations, and a general store of sorts selling cheap sunscreen, Tylenol, and other essentials, the show felt prepared.
As has become tradition for Warped Tour, the weekend’s lineup was announced in advance, with fans only looking to go to one day knowing which bands would be appearing on Saturday versus Sunday, but the actual set times were kept under wraps until fans were on-site, creating a big reveal before a mad dash to decide which act to see when.
Two favorite bands playing at the same time? That’s unfortunate, but once again, Lyman and company did have a solution, with two separate live streams on Amazon Prime allowing fans to watch along both in Long Beach and from around the world as their favorite bands took the stage, assuming service was available with just shy of 100,000 other alternative music fans packed onto festival grounds.
Behind the scenes, Warped Tour still maintained its punk rock roots, even if the nature of a two-day, once-a-month festival allowed for a slightly different infrastructure than the old school model of setting up in a field or parking lot for 15 hours before driving to the next one. The media area had tents, drinks, Warped Tour-themed sets, and tables with umbrellas, but it was still in a parking lot, resulting in multiple cameras overheating during interviews.
The bands that made their way through the media area were a mix of veteran acts with hundreds of Warped Tour dates under their belts and newer acts just joining the tour’s legacy for the first time.
KennyHoopla, fresh off a new song with Albert Hammond Jr. of The Strokes, commented on what it was like to be a new act in such an established tradition, thanking fans for welcoming him into the Warped world.
“Fans of Warped Tour specifically... I could go on a spiel about this," he said, "but specifically emo/alternative/pop punk fans have a lot of love for me and like, the things that I've done, and I am constantly in awe of it, how much they adopted me as much as they have when they didn't have to. So I think it's really sick they just keep asking me to come back.”
For other bands, Warped Tour served as a chance to play songs that made them household names in the first place. Set Your Goals, who recently returned with their first new song in 14 years, used the occasion to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their landmark debut album Mutiny! While the band announced a tour to celebrate the album later this year, including dates with bands like The Warriors on the East Coast and I Am The Avalanche on the West Coast, Warped Tour presented a unique opportunity for the band to really return to their roots and play a part in celebrating their legacy with the fans who have been waiting for their return.
"Honestly, just overwhelming and profound gratitude," Matt Wilson of Set Your Goals said. "Like, thank you for sticking with us. You know, we took five years off. We're back. We're playing music. We're playing shows. And we're writing. It feels good. I know we've been teasing music for a long time. We are a very dysfunctional band for a while... Just thank you for waiting."
Because Warped Tour was on hiatus for five years between 2020-24, in the return to action, albeit across limited dates, the festival has re-positioned itself from the best possible bang for your buck way to see bands new, old, and current, to a millennial escape, where those same bands from 1996-2018 were the current talk of the town. As a result, bands of that era like Thrice, The Used, and Hawthorne Heights have embraced their roles as elder statesmen of an experience where they once looked up to bands like NOFX.
"Yeah, it's a little bit weird because, like, in our minds, like, the elder statesmen are always going to be the bands that were here before us," Dustin Kensrue from Thrice said. "But it is cool to see new bands rising up and seeing our old friends at these shows and being like, 'Oh, yeah.' I remember seeing these bands that I've met maybe on the Warped Tour in the past and became friends and had this kind of, like, backstage, like, buddy, and I'm hoping that that continues."
With three more stops left on Warped Tour’s 2026 slate, fans can already look forward to a return to Long Beach in 2027, with another two-day weekend of action already on sale for July 24-25.
Peep down below for a bonus question posed to the artists!
