For a generation of British scene kids, Warped Tour only ever existed on a screen. Thirty years on we finally got inside, and Long Beach served up two days of slam, nostalgia and sheer sunburnt joy…
Words & header photo by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelixhc) | July 30, 2026
Right then. Warped Tour. Long Beach. California. Three words and a place name that, for a very particular breed of British teenager, only ever existed on a screen. And yet here we were, the 25th and 26th of July, stood on the Shoreline Waterfront for two days of the reborn, thirtieth-birthday version of the festival that finally coaxed the whole beautiful circus back to life.
For those of us who grew up over here in the UK, Warped was mythology. It never properly came to us, so we lived it secondhand: the annual compilation CDs passed round school like contraband, grainy YouTube clips of bands playing off the back of a lorry in some sun-blasted car park, the DVDs we wore clean out, the webisodes, the merch we could never quite justify the postage on. It was the festival that built half the bands that built the alternative scene we love, and it was always, maddeningly, an ocean away.
So forgive us the pinch-me energy. When we started Amped, it was to cover this scene from our own little corner of it. We did not exactly plan on it hauling us three-and-a-half thousand miles across the Atlantic with a press pass and a lanyard, but here we bloody well are, palm trees on one side, the Pacific on the other, watching the thing we only ever got to watch buffer.
A couple of housekeeping gripes first, because we are British and it is the law. The heat was, in strictly technical terms, biblical. “Sweltering” does not really cover two days of standing on tarmac while the California sun slow-roasts a field of elder emos in black band tees (yes, we packed entirely the wrong clothes; no, we did not learn). And the drinks. Sweet mother. You need a small mortgage and a stern word with yourself before you so much as approach a bar. But then you look up, and there are the palm trees, and the sea breeze rolls in off the water, and you remember: hey, this is Cali, baby. A dose of sunburn and a twenty-dollar beer feels like a fair toll for finally being here.
So slap on the factor 50, grab something cold and financially ruinous, and let’s get into it.
Saturday
We arrived, rather fittingly, to the sound of Escape The Fate already in full flight, and what a way to walk through the gates. Seeing this lot handed a proper main stage slot felt like a genuine full-circle moment, and they did not waste an inch of it. Craig Mabbitt sounded cleaner and more assured than we have ever heard him, the whole band locked in tight, and the sound out front was, frankly, exceptional (never a given at an outdoor festival before your ears have even adjusted). They tore through the hits with real intent: “Gorgeous Nightmare” hit like a truck, “This War Is Ours (The Guillotine II)” had the front rows roaring every word back, and closing on “One for the Money” left the pit in bits. A cracking start, and a reminder that the current version of this band is in the best shape of its life.
Over on the Off The Wall Stage, Citizen provided the perfect comedown, all fuzzy, aching Midwest emo delivered with that scrappy urgency Mat Kerekes does so well. “How Does It Feel?” remains an absolute gut-punch of a singalong, and in the mid-afternoon haze it felt like the whole crowd exhaling at once.
Hot Mulligan, back on the Vans Stage, are, and we mean this with total affection, a shambles of a good time. Between songs with titles too daft to print in full, Nathan Sanville spent about as much energy bantering with the front row as he did singing, and the crowd lobbed every ridiculous bit straight back at him. Big hooks, bigger laughs, and one of those sets where you leave grinning like an idiot without quite knowing why.
Sleeping With Sirens kept the Vans Stage rolling straight after, and Kellin Quinn brought that unmistakable voice, soaring clean over “If I’m James Dean, You’re Audrey Hepburn” before “Kick Me” had the crowd bouncing as one. Slick, confident, and a proper crowd-pleaser in the afternoon sun this was a set that was filled to the brim with new material leaving everyone awaiting a non-stop throwback setlist towards the end pulling us all the way back to 2012.
Now, pure, uncut nostalgia bait. 3OH!3, over on the Beatbox Stage, are, on paper, a ridiculous proposition in 2026, and that is precisely why the field lapped up every second. “Don’t Trust Me,” “Starstrukk” and “My First Kiss” landed like text messages from 2009, and everyone within earshot regressed to their teenage selves on cue. The genuine surprise, though, was the guitar work. Somewhere along the way this became a set carried by bloody epic, gloriously over-the-top solos, ripping through the middle of songs nobody expected to find them in. Daft? Absolutely. Also one of the most fun half-hours of the whole day.
Moving onwards Joyce Manor, on the Ghost Stage, did what Joyce Manor do, cramming a lifetime of two-minute bangers into a set that was over before you were remotely ready for it. The between-song patter was peak deadpan, including a wonderfully unhinged aside about how “Tom DeLonge was my stepdad, but we got him back with this song,” before they launched into “Constant Headache” and detonated the pit. We still have no idea what it meant. We will be quoting it forever.
Over on the Octopus Stage, we couldn’t not miss some legendary Thai hardcore. Whispers brought a short, sharp shock of pure aggression: raw riffs, driven drums, and the kind of chaotic energy that empties a barrier in seconds. Blink and you missed it, but the people down the front will be feeling it for a week.
Heading into the evening with a drink in hand I was searching for a palate cleanser with teeth, Norma Jean, on the Verizon Stage, were on hand to rearrange a few faces. Genuinely unhinged in the best possible way, all lurching mathcore chaos and Cory Brandan bellowing into the sun, “Memphis Will Be Laid to Waste” turned a decent chunk of the field into a dust cloud. Heavy, ugly, magnificent.
Then came possibly our favourite bit of comedy across the entire weekend, and it was entirely unintentional. Or was it. Back on the Beatbox Stage, midway through their set, Hoobastank frontman Doug Robb squared up to the crowd, all menace, and declared that this was going to be the heaviest thing we would see all festival, that he wanted to see pits, that he wanted carnage. The crowd braced. Fists went up. And then, completely straight-faced, the band eased into the gentle opening chords of “The Reason.” Reader, we howled. It should not have worked half as well as it did. It absolutely, gloriously did.
A personal highlight, this one, and a proper box ticked: our first ever time catching Bear Vs. Shark, closing out the Rex Stage. The Michigan cult heroes are a band we have only ever known through the records and the fervour of people who saw them the first time round, so watching Marc Paffi fling himself about in the flesh was a small pilgrimage. “Catamaran” went off exactly as we had always imagined it would. Some sets you review. This one we just stood there and enjoyed.
Jimmy Eat World, back on the Vans Stage as direct support to the headliner, then delivered a masterclass in doing the opposite of flashy and stealing a chunk of the day anyway. Jim Adkins and co. simply plugged in and played beautifully, and the songs did the rest. “Sweetness” soared, “Bleed American” bit, and “The Middle” turned into one of those mass, arms-round-strangers singalongs that reminds you exactly why these songs have outlasted every trend chucked at them. Those heading to their headline show in London are in for a treat!
And then, the closer we did not know we needed. Simple Plan, headlining the Vans Stage, are Warped Tour lifers, and they treated the stage like a homecoming, rattling through “I’d Do Anything,” “Perfect,” “Welcome to My Life” and “I’m Just a Kid” to a field of grown adults having a very public breakdown about being fourteen again. But nothing, and we mean nothing, prepared us for what happened when they hit the “What’s New Scooby-Doo?” theme. It is genuinely hard to convey the sensation of several thousand people losing their entire minds to a cartoon theme tune while a fully liveried Mystery Machine sat parked on site (the band made their long-running Scooby-Doo tie-in properly official at this very show, photo ops, Mystery Machine and all). A religious experience is the only phrase that fits. We saw the light, and the light was a Great Dane.
Sunday
Sunday began, as all the best Warped Tour days apparently must, with salvation being offered to us against our will. Assembled at the entrance was a small, committed band of religious protestors, megaphones and placards at the ready, warning the assembled sinners in band tees exactly where two days of pop-punk was going to land us. We would love to report that we stopped for a spot of theological debate. We did not. We were, at that precise moment, sprinting flat out through the gates, sunburnt and mildly hungover, in a desperate bid to catch the day’s opening acts. The gentleman with the megaphone may have had a point. We regret nothing.
A proper flash of home to kick things off on the Off The Wall Stage. Haywire have spent the last year touring like men possessed (this is a band that famously played all fifty US states inside six months), and that road-hardened tightness was all over their set. Hooky, fast, fists-in-the-air hardcore with absolutely zero fat on it. The moment of the set, though, was the cover: a full-throated run through Title Fight’s “Shed” that sent everyone who clocked it feral. Watching a Warped crowd treat a cult Kingston emo song like a lost gospel was a proper moment. Beautiful.
Next up, we had to sprint again, this time to catch a band literally called Peeling Flesh play songs about, well, peeling flesh, over on the Verizon Stage. Oklahoma’s finest purveyors of slamming brutal death metal sit about as far from the pop-punk end of this bill as it is physically possible to get, which made the whole thing gloriously funny and completely brilliant in equal measure. Guttural vocals, chugging breakdowns you could feel in your fillings, and, in a genuinely inspired touch, chopped-up nineties Southern rap samples dropped right over the top of it all. The slam pit that opened up was a thing of savage beauty. So, as of this weekend, we are formally launching our petition: more slamcore at next year’s Warped Tour. Book them all. Every stage. All day. You know it makes sense.
Keeping the tempo pinned to the floor, Xcomm, on the DoorDash Stage, ripped through a set of crossover-thrash-flecked hardcore that would make the ghost of every early-eighties skate punk very proud indeed. Suicidal Tendencies runs right through their DNA, all restless, snotty energy and songs about being young and thoroughly fed up, and the pit did precisely what you would hope. Short, fast, furious, gone.
Guilt Trip are Manchester’s own, and watching a UK metallic hardcore crew we have championed for time absolutely levelling a Californian crowd on the Rex Stage did our little patriotic hearts the world of good. Riffs like falling masonry, breakdowns engineered to end friendships, and the sort of relentless, front-footed aggression that has made their live pits infamous back home. The Long Beach lot did not entirely know what had hit them. We just stood there beaming like proud parents.
Third Eye Blind, on the Vans Stage as the evening set in, gave us “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Jumper” and “Never Let You Go” – stone-cold nineties classics that had plenty of the crowd singing every word. But if we are being honest, and this is a what-went-down so we will be, it all felt a fraction stiff and slow-paced for the manic, pit-hungry rhythm of a Warped Tour crowd. A very good set that would have felt more at home more or less anywhere else. In fairness, our judgement may have been slightly compromised, as we spent the entire thing watching from the side with our pals in South Arcade, at which point one of our number was cheerfully and comprehensively pantsed mid-song. Difficult to give a set your full attention with your trousers round your ankles and a rising-star band in absolute hysterics next to you.
Over on the Octopus Stage, Hot Milk (a little slice of British sunshine to match the actual sunshine, or rather the floodlights by this point) brought their Manchester swagger across the water and treated the stage like it owed them money. Han Mee and Jim Shaw are a brilliant double act, forever trading glances and aiming every line straight at the barrier, and “Party On My Deathbed” sent the crowd out buzzing. This lot back themselves harder than anyone else in the room, and on this evidence the rooms (and now the fields) are catching up fast.
Papa Roach, back on the Vans Stage, rolled into Warped with more momentum behind them than they have had in years, fresh off “Braindead” (their team-up with H2O’s Toby Morse) going all the way to number one on the rock charts, with a twelfth album on the way. And boy, did they play like a band that knows it. Jacoby Shaddix is still one of the most magnetic frontmen in the game, prowling and preaching and dragging the whole field into the palm of his hand, and when the opening bars of “Last Resort” hit, roughly everyone in Long Beach lost their voice at the same instant. Two-plus decades deep and still an absolute juggernaut.
Hawthorne Heights closed out the night on the Ghost Stage, and were, as ever, a lovely emotional wallow. Full disclosure: we caught them at The Dome not so long ago, and that small, sweaty, intimate setting is where this band truly lives; there is something about a low ceiling and a packed room that suits those songs right down to the ground. Under the festival lights, a touch of that magic inevitably drifts off into the night air. That said, you simply cannot deny the sheer weight a band like this carries at a festival like this. When “Ohio Is for Lovers” landed, a decent stretch of the shoreline came completely undone, and JT Woodruff stood there conducting a mass catharsis like it was 2006 all over again.
Because that, in the end, is the whole thing, isn’t it. For years, Warped Tour was the party we could only ever watch through a window from three-and-a-half thousand miles away. This weekend we finally got to stand inside it, sunburnt and skint and grinning, lanyard round our necks and our trousers (mostly) still up. To every fourteen-year-old version of us who wore out those compilation CDs waiting for a festival that was never coming: we made it, mate.
Long Beach, we love you. Same time next year?
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