Warped Tour Officially Announces 2025 Return
Much like characters in comic books, nothing in punk and metal ever stays dead for very long. Following the “last” edition of Van’s Warped Tour in 2018, and the special 25th anniversary edition that took place the very next year, the iconic punk-and-sometimes-other-stuff festival officially confirmed yesterday that it will be returning, but only to three cities. So less of a Warped Tour and more of a Warped Excursion. Or maybe a Warped Outing, if you will.
Regardless, the iconic summer festival will be returning in 2025 with its first date in Washington D.C. at the RFK Campus on June 14-15, then hits the opposite coast July 26-27 at Shoreline Waterfront in Long Beach, California, and finally finishing up with the final weekend at Camping World Stadium Campus in Orlando, Florida on…November 15-16?! This is supposed to be a summer festival, and now it’s a lead-up to Thanksgiving?
In an interview with Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman in Rolling Stone, Lyman explained that he brought back the festival because, to his disappointment, no other major music festival had really stepped in to replace the gap left by Warped Tour:
“Since 1997, I said I was hoping that there was some kid in a garage that was going to come out and kick Kevin Lyman’s ass someday, and put on a better festival.”
I mean, Riot Fest is twice the festival that Warped Tour was even in its heyday, but sure, let’s go with it being that nobody put together a better festival. He went on to explain:
“People start remembering once something’s gone that it was important, it was fun — and I’m hoping to recapture a lot of that again.”
Yes, recapturing the magic of the original festival 30 years later is bound to be really easy. Like the old expression says, you can go home again. Wait, that might not be the expression.
As to why the tour is only stopping off in three cities this time, Lyman explained it simply by stating:
“My body won’t take riding around on a tour bus for 40 cities.”
I get that. I can barely make it through a single-day festival without some high-dose ibuprofen these days. Still, should the 2025 festival prove to be successful, Lyman says he’s open to expanding the tour to more dates in the future.
Lyman promised that the 2025 lineup will be a mix of classic Warped Tour artists and new ones. Hopefully by “classic” artists he doesn’t mean the types of bands that were on the last few Warped Tours, because I’ve been following punk my whole life and I didn’t recognize a single one of the pop-punk bands on that lineup. With anywhere from 70-100 bands on each stop of the tour, which will be rolled out on a weekly basis in the months to come, there’s plenty of room for Warped Tour 2025 to book some of the bands that made it great.
