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Metallica will be seriously in your face come this Friday (March 14). The heavy metal legends announced on Tuesday (March 11) that their 2024 Mexico City show has been optimized as an immersive experience on the Apple Vision Pro headset. The concert featuring such beloved hits as “Enter Sandman,” “One” and “Whiplash” will be beamed […]
Peter Wolf has been thinking about writing a book “for a long time.” But making a new solo album is what really prompted the former J. Geils Band frontman to get serious about it.
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Wolf is “about 80 percent” finished with the album, which will be his first since 2016’s A Cure For Loneliness. “It occurred to me that my solo recordings, a lot of them went unnoticed, and I realized that if I put this out with the way things are these days, it can turn to vapor quite easily and be another lost solo effort,” Wolf — who’s just published Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses (Little, Brown) — tells Billboard. “So I thought, ‘Well, maybe now is the time to write that book I’ve been talking about for decades.’ I think if the book connects with people it would even put the wind beneath my wings to finish the record and put it out.”
Wolf also received a meaningful push from writer Peter Guralnick, best known for his acclaimed biographies of Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Sun Records founder Sam Phillips. “He read some of the things I was writing,” Wolf recalls, “and he said, ‘Y’know, Pete, you better finally do this book ’cause a lot of the people you’re gonna want to have read it might not be with us at the pace you’re going.’ That was a profound statement for me.”
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While it tracks from Wolf’s childhood to the relatively present day, Waiting on the Moon is not a standard, linear memoir. Rather, it’s a collection of stories — and a fascinating, good-humored one at that — as the New York-born Wolf regales readers with his Forrest Gump-like life of encounters with the famous, starting with a chapter titled “I Slept With Marilyn Monroe,” in which Monroe literally fell asleep on a 10-year-old Wolf while both attended a screening of the Jules Dassin film He Who Must Die at a local movie theater. (Not to worry; Monroe was with then-husband Arthur Miller and Wolf’s parents were on his other side.)
From there it’s off to the races as Wolf recounts his interactions and relationships with blues heroes such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker (sometimes in his Boston apartment) as well as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, Sly Stone, Aretha Franklin and more. He crosses paths with music biz luminaries such as Ahmet Ertegun, Bhaskar Menon, Jon Landau and Dee Anthony, gets on the wrong side of Alfred Hitchcock by declining an offer of an alcoholic drink and finds himself being courted for a part in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, Andy Warhol, onetime roommate David Lynch, Julia Child and Tennessee Williams are also among Wolf’s encounters in the pages.
“My goal was to make a book of short stories, treat each chapter like its own short story,” explains Wolf, who was an art student and radio DJ in Boston as well as a musician — first with the Hallucinations, then with the J. Geils Band starting in 1967. He fronted the latter to multi-platinum worldwide fame with Freeze-Frame in 1981, which topped the Billboard 200 in 1982 and produced the six-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Centerfold” that same year. After being asked to leave the group in 1983, Wolf kicked off a solo career with 1984’s Lights Out (its title track hit No. 12 on the Hot 100). “There was no timeline. I wasn’t concerned, in a way, about the beginning, middle and end; each story has its own beginning, middle and end. And I didn’t want this to be a kiss-and-tell book; I just wanted to write about these incredible people that I had the privilege to meet and to get to know to certain degrees and capture that.”
Wolf adds that “the two subjects I didn’t want to write about was my marriage to Faye Dunaway and the J. Geils Band,” but both are there — particularly the former, whom Wolf has been loath to discuss in this kind of detail during and after their marriage from 1974-79. “Faye was this very determined, talented person and we loved each other,” Wolf says. “I was just trying to bring her, and our relationship, somewhat to life and all the adventures we shared in it. I didn’t talk about it (before) because I would talk about my music, talk about the records, and all the other stuff was kind of private. But I was writing about the adventures in my life, and certainly she and I shared many of them. I was very surprised how quickly the stories came out.
“Of course there’s regrets; one has regrets and wishes they could do things differently, and I think I’ve expressed that in all the chapters. Some were silly, stupidities that I’ve made, and I don’t try to disguise those. It all flowed through naturally once I got into the crux of it.”
‘Waiting on the Moon’
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The J. Geils Band, meanwhile, is treated as a through-line in the book until a later chapter in which Wolf writes about explicitly about how it came apart at the peak of its career.
“It was a great shock to me, and it was a sea change for me,” says Wolf, who was part of Geils reunion tours from 1999-2015. The book also includes a vivid retelling of him being beaten up in a London pub while on his way to the band’s performance at the 1989 Pinkpop Festival in the Netherlands. “I tried to write honestly about it, my experience of it all and how I felt. I was committed to the band; it was my life, and even with my marriage to Faye our careers always came first. In other chapters you can see how hard I tried working to keep the band relevant and moving ahead, so of course when things did fall apart it was a very painful thing for me. What I didn’t add in the book that I was asked to leave the band in 1968 because they felt my vocal abilities were holding back the band.”
Wolf has recorded an audio version of Waiting On the Moon and has a handful of author appearances planned this month, starting Tuesday (March 11) at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., and including stops in New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Philadelphia and Connecticut. He did, however, cancel a planned March 21 stop at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. “due to the egregious firing of staff by the new administration.”
Wolf is also planning to get to work on the album, working with “the same cast of characters” who helped with his last few albums. “I think it’s got some really memorable songs, and I took a long time in putting it together,” he says, adding that he foresees a return to performing as well. “Yeah, that’s what I do. But the book really required a sabbatical. It’s like making a really good record that you’ve got to hunker down and commit to.” A reissue of the J. Geils Band’s 1972 concert album “Live” Full House is also slated for this year, according to Wolf.
Also on the future docket may be an induction in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which has eluded the J. Geils Band over the course of five nominations between 2005-2018. Wolf has inducted Jackie Wilson and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at previous ceremonies, and while he notes that “it’s a situation I have no control over” he makes it clear that it’s something he’d like to see happen, eventually.
“Yes, it would be a nice honor,” Wolf says. “I do feel the Geils Band contributed a lot in the AOR period of rock n’ roll. Not unlike the Stones we introduced a lot of people to (artists) like the Contours and Otis Rush and Muddy Waters and doo-wop… yet the Geils band has been looked over. I think we worked very hard for 17 and a half years, and I think we made some kind of contribution. But, to quote a Johnny Mathis song, ‘it’s not for me to say.’”
Wolf’s author appearance schedule for Waiting On the Moon includes:
Tuesday, March 11th: Harvard Bookstore at the First Parrish Church, Cambridge, MA
Wednesday, March 12th: The Strand, New York, NY
Thursday, March 13th: Bookends Bookstore, Ridgewood, NJ
Tuesday, March 18th: Writers on a New England Stage at The Music Hall, Portsmouth, NH
Thursday, March 27th: Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA
Tuesday, April 8th: RJ Julia Booksellers, Madison, CT
After co-founding Mastodon in Atlanta in 2000, guitarist/singer Brent Hinds has announced his exit from the metal band 25 years later. The group shared the news Friday (March 7) on social media, describing the decision as mutual. “Friends and Fans, After 25 monumental years together, Mastodon and Brent Hinds have mutually decided to part ways,” […]
Benmont Tench says that “life” is the reason for the 11-year gap between his two solo albums.
With The Melancholy Season out Friday (March 7), the keyboardist says that a heavy work load with both Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch kept him busy during the interim (both groups toured and released what turned out to be their final albums in the period). A nearly decade-long battle with oral cancer (which included jaw reconstruction during 2023), Petty’s death in 2017, and the birth of Tench’s first daughter, Catherine, shortly after that — not to mention the pandemic — also contributed to the gap between works.
“Life got in the way of making another record,” Tench, 71, tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Los Feliz, Calif. Already an A-list session player, he also filled some of the time after Petty’s passing playing for Ringo Starr, Jenny Lewis, Chris Stapleton, the Who and the Rolling Stones and was recently part of the Life Is a Carnival all-star tribute tour to The Band. “I would love to have made it sooner,” he says of The Melancholy Season. But, with the benefit of some perspective, he’s glad he didn’t.
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“I made a better record because I didn’t make it right away,” explains Tench, who had much of album’s songs written by, he estimates, the end of 2018 and recorded it with producer Jonathan Wilson (Dawes, Father John Misty, Margo Price) during 2020 and 2021. Unlike 2014’s Glyn Johns-produced You Should Be So Lucky, which was recorded in just 13 days, Tench lived with The Melancholy Season — to its benefit, he feels.
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“I kept fine-tuning and thinking, ‘oh no, no, no, that’s all wrong. It should be this,’” he explains. “It was great to have that opportunity. I could sit with the imagery in some songs and I could check to make sure that I said things the way I wanted do.”
The Melancholy Season’s 13 songs — whether the elegiac title track or the stripped-down “Under the Starlight,” the striding, boogie-styled “Rattle” or the more dramatically arranged “Pledge” and “The Drivin’ Man” — all share a spare and spacious sensibility. The songs are played mostly by Tench, Wilson on guitars and drums and Sebastian Steinberg on bass, with appearances by Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Jenny O and, on the closing track “Dallas,” Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins, who was part of the musical community at Los Angeles’ Largo that Tench has frequented.
“I like records with a lot of space,” says Tench, citing a lesson he learned from original Heartbreakers producer Denny Cordell while making the band’s first two albums during the ‘70s. “Denny said early on that a record is louder if it has fewer instruments. A song like ‘Breakdown’ has more layers than you would think, but the essence of the song is the guitar riff and the Wurlitzer (piano) riff. There are other layers, but there’s a lot of room in ‘Breakdown.’” Additionally, Tench says he was “profoundly affected” by Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band albums. “Each of those is, for the most part, three musicians and three instruments,” Tench explains. “They’re just a songwriter with the instruments he wrote the songs on, plus bass and drums, and they are complete.
“I think it’s great if you have a wall of sound and you do it well. There are fantastic records that use a lot of instruments; the Beatles did a lot of those. There’s Motown, of course. There’s what Brian (Wilson) did, what Phil Spector did… All of these things, and they’re wonderful. But there’s also a way to use fewer instruments and be just as effective. That’s what we did on this record; there were some songs we cut with more (instrumentation) and pulled them back to make (the songs) better.”
Tench dipped into his deeper past for a couple tracks, too. “Wobbles” was an instrumental on You Should Be So Lucky, which Tench sub-titled “Trio with Vocal Arrangement” for the new album. “Under the Starlight,” meanwhile, dates back a good 20 years to a Nashville songwriting session with Don Henry and was never released.
“I dug it and we set it aside and I went home, and years went by and I didn’t think about it,” Tench says. “And then maybe eight years ago I went, ‘What about “Under the Starlight”?’ And I didn’t want to bother Don, so I thought, ‘Lemme see if some words come up.’ I had a whisper of an inkling of what I wanted to talk about that I understood better ’cause I’ve lived a lot longer and been through a lot more and began to see how to do it.
“I got in touch with Don Henry and said, ‘Hey, I finished that song we started.’ He said, ‘That’s nice, but what do you mean finished? We finished it that day.’ (laughs) We wrote the complete song and I spaced out somehow. He sent me the lyrics that we’d originally finished and they were really good, but they made a different point. I hope somebody records it that, way, too.”
The Melancholy Season is being released by Dark Horse Records, the label the late George Harrison started in 1974 and that’s being continued by his widow, Olivia, and son Dhani. “It means a hell of a lot,” notes Tench, a teenage Beatles fan who met Harrison (who worked with Petty in the Traveling Wilburys) several times. “It’s got his vibe and it’s got their vibe, which is like amplifying George’s vibe. For them to believe in this record and want to put it out means quite a lot to me. I’ve had a blessed life in a million ways — and I intend to keep it going.”
That includes on the road as well. Tench previewed The Melancholy Season during a solo residency at the Cafe Carlyle in New York last month, and he has West Coast dates starting March 12. He hopes to hit more of the country as well.
“It’ll be smaller venues because it’s just me with a piano, and I think that the songs come across best that way,” Tench says. “For me, I don’t really ‘get’ it until I see somebody do it live, so I want to drag it around, and if anybody shows up out of curiosity or because they like what I do, or because they like the Heartbreakers, it’ll give them a chance to see what they think up close.”
Tench has “a few sketches” of other songs he’s been working on but isn’t yet focusing on a next album. It’s quite likely his playing will show up on another Petty and Heartbreakers archival set, however, and Tench — who was part of Mudcrutch first, which then morphed into the Heartbreakers during 1976 — says he’s been pleased with how that musical legacy has been handled, primarily by Petty’s daughter Adria along with Ryan Ulyate and guitarist Mike Campbell.
“I’m very happy because I don’t think (Petty) would release so much of this,” says Tench, who’s read parts of Campbell’s book Heartbreaker: A Memoir, that’s coming out March 18 and is waiting for the audio version. “They still keep me in the loop but it’s mainly Adria and Ryan who are going through everything, and I love what they’re finding. Songs that I don’t remember but, ‘Oh, yeah, I loved that song. How come we left that off?’ It isn’t inferior stuff; it’s stuff that I think, if you like the band and wish you could’ve heard more, there’s more, and it’s good. And if you haven’t heard much of the band, it’s a good way to check it out. I think they’re doing a great job.”
Tench’s upcoming concert itinerary includes:
March 12—Los Angeles, CA—Largo
March 19—Los Angeles, CA—Largo
April 2—Ojai, CA—Ojai Playhouse
April 4—Santa Cruz, CA—Kuumbwa
April 5—San Francisco, CA—The Independent
April 8—Seattle, WA—Triple Door
April 9—Portland, OR—Old Church
April 11—Grass Valley, CA—Center for the Arts
April 12—Sonoma, CA—Sebastiani Theatre
For my own music, I really like to have endless possibilities,” Spiritbox leader Courtney LaPlante says. The singer believes the metal world is too preoccupied with subgenres — helpful for listeners looking for distinct flavors of heavy music but constricting for acts that want to scribble outside their assigned hard rock lines.
LaPlante says other genres aren’t quite as strict: “Look at the first few records that Doechii made and then look at the next three — there are a lot of polar opposites,” she says. “I feel like there’s a drive for artists for each album or body of work to be its own thing.”
Although Spiritbox trades in modern metalcore, the Canadian quartet has become one of the biggest new hard rock acts of the decade by reaching beyond its sonic boundaries: On its 2021 debut, Eternal Blue, which has earned 230,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate, the band supplemented bone-crunching riffs with hints of synth-pop, prog rock and R&B. The 36-year-old LaPlante, who’s adept at guttural screaming as well as soulful crooning, drives that diverse palette.
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“She’s an encyclopedia of music in general,” says Mike Stringer, Spiritbox’s guitarist and LaPlante’s husband, a few minutes before LaPlante gushes about the latest FKA twigs album and Kate Bush’s back catalog. “We’ve always had this open-door policy of, ‘If we enjoy it and it’s catchy, we’ll probably release it.’ ”
Tsunami Sea, the band’s long-awaited second album, does indeed feature some of its biggest hooks to date as well as some of the group’s most thrash-ready moments, often in the same song. Released March 7 on Pale Chord/Rise Records, the album arrives on a wave of hype, with two consecutive Grammy Award nods for best metal performance and all three of the album’s prerelease tracks — the blistering “Soft Spine,” melodic “Perfect Soul” and electro-tinged “No Loss, No Love” — cracking the top 20 of Hot Hard Rock Songs.
The act opened for bands like Korn, Shinedown and Papa Roach over the past two years but was also tapped by Megan Thee Stallion to remix her song “Cobra” in 2023. Most importantly, manager Jason Mageau says, “They’ve spent the past few years figuring out who they are.”
Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox performs at Alexandra Palace on Feb. 13, 2025 in London.
Alex Bemis
Rising from the ashes of metal group Iwrestledabearonce in 2017, Spiritbox — whose lineup also includes bassist Josh Gilbert and drummer Zev Rosenberg — spent its first four years weathering personnel changes and gathering early singles for EP releases. While the 2020 singles “Blessed Be” and “Holy Roller” went viral online, the pandemic upended the rollout for Eternal Blue, including touring. “At that moment in time, they had played under 10 shows together,” Mageau says. “So we really took our time building that live show, taking some support opportunities and learning from them.”
Spiritbox released two more EPs, 2022’s Rotoscope and 2023’s The Fear of Fear, to tide over fans who were eager for new material as the band played hard rock tours and festivals. Tsunami Sea took roughly two years to write and complete during gaps in that touring schedule, with 30 song ideas whittled down to the most cohesive 11-track project the group could make.
“It was a very intense process near the end, but I think I had a lot more fun writing for this record than I did Eternal Blue,” Stringer says, “and I feel like it has more of an identity to it.” Because the album follows a more extensive touring history, Spiritbox finished the new songs with a better understanding of how they might translate onstage and more consideration of LaPlante’s live vocals. “We know ourselves musically, as we’re getting older and discovering more about what we can actually achieve,” she says. “For the first time now, when we write stuff, I feel confident. It [only] took 20 years.”
LaPlante
Alex Bemis
After performing some prerelease shows in Europe, Spiritbox will begin a spring global headlining tour on April 3 in Dallas and then join Linkin Park for select stadium shows in the summer. When asked about commercial goals for Tsunami Sea — considering that Eternal Blue peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, its follow-up could become the band’s first 10 entry — Mageau shrugs off anything empirical.
“I really want them to just be themselves. They’ve been a support band for two years — let’s show them what we’re made of,” he says. “It’s been all about finding new areas to insert our band into mainstream conversations and try to bring more women into the space, too. When this band first started, the female listenership on Spotify would be, like, 10%. Now we’re in the 30% range of women listening to the band, and [LaPlante] wants that to increase even more.”
For her part, LaPlante says that being among the fast-rising women in metal is a galvanizing force for a band trying to turn its expanding audiences into safe spaces. “I love the fact that I see all different ages and genders at our shows and kids presenting in any way they want,” she says. “They’re not there because I’m a woman and they’re not there despite me being a woman. They all just heard our siren call and we found each other.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
There are a few things you can count on from former and once-again Oasis singer Liam Gallagher: a sneering deliver and jokes. So many jokes. Just 120 days until the July 4 kick-off of one of the most anticipated rock reunions in ages, Gallagher hopped on X on Wednesday (March 5) to finally reveal who […]
Billie Joe Armstrong is Bay Area to the death. The Green Day frontman has long flown the flag of his hometown of Oakland, CA, and nothing has fired him up more than the heartbreaking loss over the past few years of the proud city’s professional sports franchises, the Oakland A’s and NFL’s Raiders.
Now he’s doing something about it.
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The Hollywood Reporter revealed on Wednesday (March 5) that Armstrong has joined fellow Oaktown legend rapper Too $hort as part of the ownership group of the Oakland Ballers, the new independent Pioneer League team that as of this year will be the Bay’s only professional baseball team; the A’s are playing in Sacramento for the next two years ahead of a planned move to Las Vegas in 2028 and the Raiders left in 2020 for Las Vegas.
“This is all about bringing families to a ball game,” Armstrong told THR. “After the A’s left, the town was heartbroken. The Ballers are going to bring good vibes back to Oakland and the broader East Bay.” The privately owned team played their first season in 2024 in the new 4,000-capacity Raimondi Park, which drew baseball lovers for its first season with a unique offer that allowed more than 2,200 fans to buy a share in the team and take seats on its board; the minimum buy-in is $510, a nod to the Bay Area’s area code.
$hort Dogg told THR that he thinks the Ballers are a shining example of what his city’s value proposition. “Oakland is the connection, it’s the diverse city of all walks of life and cultures. We respect each other’s originality, you can be you and with your people,” he said. “It’s ‘I f–k with you regardless.”
And, not for nothing, the “Blow the Whistle” MC — who said he worked as a vendor at the old Oakland Coliseum in high school — loves the name, too. “If I can’t brag on a big-league franchise I can brag on being a Baller,” he said of the team whose name is a pointed rejoinder to former MLB team the A’s. The two musicians bought in as part of the second round of community investment that opened this week, aimed at raising $2 million.
While the amount of Armstrong and Too $hort’s investment has not been revealed, one of the Ballers’ co-founders, Bryan Carmel, said their stake is not just another example of a celebrity swooping in to try and goose a team’s prospects, a la Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds’ purchase of revival of Welsh soccer team Wrexham, chronicled on the FX series Welcome to Wrexham.
Carmel said Armstrong’s relationship with the Ballers began when the rocker and his wife showed up at a game last year. “I looked over and there they were, sitting in front of my parents,” Carmel said. “And then I looked again and they were at the merch stand and Billie Joe was buying a T-shirt. It was crazy because we were playing Green Day songs earlier — not because he was there but just because we’re an Oakland club so we play Green Day songs.”
Armstrong spray-painted the Oakland B’s name over the Oakland A’s logo at the Rogers Center in Toronto last year.
“Sports in the Bay Area have been transforming over the last couple of years. We’ve had some emotional goodbyes to teams we grew up with, but recently there has been a major shift,” Armstrong told The Athletic. “The Oakland Ballers and the Oakland Roots and Soul represent everything I love and grew up on in the Bay Area. The welcoming atmosphere, DIY attitude and the people behind it make me proud to be an investor and support the next generation of teams kids in the Bay will be proud of.”
The Ballers hosted an open try-out last year that led to the signing of history-making right-handed pitcher Kelsie Whitmore, their first female player and, in 2022, the first woman to sign a professional contract with a Major League Baseball Partner League team. The team will kick off their second season on Mary 20.
Courtney Love delivered a surprise cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” during an event in London earlier this week, adding to her growing repertoire of unexpected live covers.
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The Hole frontwoman performed the iconic 1965 track at the Royal Geographical Society on Tuesday (March 4) while appearing in conversation with actor-writer Todd Almond. The event celebrated Almond’s new oral history collection Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl From the North Country’ and Broadway’s Rebirth.
Following their discussion, Love stepped onto the stage alongside an acoustic guitarist, delivering a raw and impassioned rendition of the classic song, with Almond providing backing vocals.
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The performance took place nearly 60 years after Dylan famously played “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Royal Albert Hall, just next door to the event venue.
During the evening, Love also addressed longstanding speculation about a Hole reunion—shutting down rumors once again. Despite previously hinting in early 2024 that the band might reunite, she reiterated that there are no current plans to bring the group back together.
Love’s choice of cover continues a recent trend of unexpected performances. In February, she appeared onstage alongside Green Day frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, who was performing at the U.K. venue The Garage with his side-project covers band, The Coverups.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Courtney Love,” Armstrong said halfway through the show according to fan video of the moment the singer unexpectedly took the stage. “Thank you, Billie Joe. My name is Courtney Love – you may not remember me. I’ve been living in a cave in Birmingham for about nine years. We’ll give this a f–king try, right?”
Love then crashed through revved-up takes on Cheap Trick’s 1977 power pop classic “He’s a Whore” and the 1979 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tune “Even the Losers” and, according to NME, came back for an encore of Cheap Trick’s iconic “Surrender.”
In 2021, she also surprised fans with a rendition of Britney Spears’ “Lucky,” and in 2017, she took on Selena Gomez’s “Hands to Myself.”
Love’s surprise cover comes as Dylan remains a focal point of discussion in music and film circles. The legendary singer-songwriter was recently reported to have declined an invitation to perform and present at the 2025 Oscars. His biopic A Complete Unknown received eight nominations but did not secure any wins.
California’s largest rock festival has released its lineup, featuring some of the biggest names in metal, hardcore and punk. 2025’s Aftershock Festival at Discover Park in Sacramento will include 115 bands, headlined by four of the biggest artists in the genre — pop-punk legends Blink 182, hard rock pioneering band Deftones, nu-metal veterans Korn and British hardcore legends Bring Me The Horizon.
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“Aftershock is the biggest rock, punk, and metal festival on the West Coast, and this year, it lined up perfectly for California fans. We’ve got legendary reunions, rare performances, and more California bands on this lineup than any Aftershock before,” said Aftershock promoter Danny Wimmer, who has staged the festival for 13 years, in a statement. “Year after year, we’ve broken attendance records, and this one is set to be the biggest yet. Trust me, you don’t want to miss it. I hope to see you there.”
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Other big names appearing at this year’s festival include pop-punkers Good Charlotte and All Time Low performing on the opening Thursday for Aftershock, Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan’s band A Perfect Circle and east coast hardcore outfit Turnstile performing Friday. Saturday will feature performances from Bad Omens and Gojira, while Sunday boasts sets by hard rock legends Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson.
This year’s festival features more than a dozen reunion shows, including the first West Coast performance for recently reunited East Coast hardcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan, as well as a 40th anniversary celebration for gross-out rock legends GWAR.
Tickets are on sale now at Aftershock’s website for both general admission and VIP. This year, Aftershock is continuing to offer layaway ticket purchases with just $1 down, as well as discounted four-day and single day passes to first responders, active duty military and medical professionals and nurses. A full lineup for this year’s festival can be found below:
Aftershock
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Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump upended the global alliance in support of Ukraine’s war against invader Russia, Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong had a few thoughts on the shocking spectacle. At the kick-off the veteran punk provocateurs’ Australian tour on Saturday (March 1) at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium, Armstrong once again switched up the lyrics to one of the band’s songs to send a unequivocal, harsh message to the current American administration.
As the band continues its year-long anniversary celebration of the 20th anniversary of their career-peak punk rock opera American Idiot, Armstrong slipped some not-at-all-subtle commentary into the lyrics of “Jesus of Suburbia.” The move came a day after Trump and Vice President JD Vance attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office during a meeting meant to announce a deal on minerals aimed at ending the three-year war launched by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
“Am I retarded or am I just JD Vance,” Armstrong sang in a tweak to the original, politically incorrect-on-purpose line, “Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed?” Offered without any additional commentary, the diss of the Hillbilly Elegy author who repeatedly lashed out at the war-time Ukrainian leader for not being solicitous and thankful enough for U.S. aid during the shocking Oval Office ambush was in keeping with Armstrong’s unabashed disdain for the MAGA universe.
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Earlier in the song, Armstrong doubled-down on the band’s support for Ukraine, tweaking another line in the song from “We are the kids of war and peace/ From Anaheim to the Middle East” to “We are the kids of war and peace/ From Ukraine to the Middle East.”
In January, Armstrong took a swipe at another member of the MAGA-verse, unelected DOGE boss Elon Musk, whose slash-and-burn march through the federal government has sparked widespread criticism and fear among longtime civil servants whose jobs have been eliminated by the tens of thousands over the past month. Performing in the Tesla boss’ home country of South Africa, during a show in Cape Town Armstrong switched a favorite “American Idiot” lyric from “I’m not part of the redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of the Elon agenda.”
The singer pulled a similar move during their New Year’s Eve show in 2024, changing the line to “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” It was just one of several times the stridently anti-fascist, anti-hate speech band has taken on Trump. In 2019, at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas, they debuted the anti-MAGA “American Idiot” line and at the 2016 American Music Awards, Green Day took aim at the then president-elect while performing “Bang Bang,” with Armstrong chanting “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” in a nod to Trump’s endorsement by white supremacist group the KKK and the rise in racist attacks following his election.
Watch Green Day’s Vance reproach below.