10 Sets That Had Us In Our Feelings At Best Friends Forever Festival 2024
Jim Larson / Stereogum
A fun game to play at Best Friends Forever: Name bands that could potentially play next year’s festival, if the fest gets a chance to come back. Judging by T-shirts alone, Jawbreaker should be absolute locks for the headliner spot. Beyond that, the game turns into a delirious exercise of remembering some guys: Pretty Girls Make Graves! Rocket From The Crypt! Slint! Sebadoh! Texas Is The Reason! Slant 6! Touché Amoré! Scowl! An Elliott Smith hologram! Bring them all!
We’ve been calling it a second-wave emo festival, but that’s not quite right. From the stage, Karate’s Geoff Farina described Best Friends Forever as a festival that could’ve happened at a Michigan VFW Hall in 1997, and there are indeed at least a few Michigan Fest veterans on the BFF bill. Maybe it’s better to think of this beautifully curated upstart festival as an extended tribute to a long-gone subcultural moment – the last time that emo, hardcore, and indie rock seemed like closely related cousins, rather than independent and relatively isolated ecosystems.
The weekend before another emo nostalgia fest comes to Las Vegas, Best Friends Forever featured plenty of stuff, like the Get Up Kids or Hot Rod Circuit, that would’ve made perfect sense in the teeming When We Were Young lineup. But even though the difference between the two festivals’ aesthetics feels like a micro-generational thing, the effect is tremendous. So is the cognitive dissonance: reunited survivors of the basement-show/dive-bar circuit, celebrated as heroes in the baking Las Vegas sun, under the lights of the Golden Nugget casino. It’s weird, but it’s the good kind of weird.
Most of the Stereogum staff gathered in Vegas to attend this inaugural edition of Best Friend Forever. Below, you’ll find our report on the best performances from each day of the fest. The team that booked Best Friends Forever did amazing work bringing together some of the best underground rock bands that the ’90s and early ’00s had to offer, along with the current bands – Mannequin Pussy, Drug Church, Fiddlehead, Momma – carrying their spirit forward. You may never see so many drummers wearing headphones or so many greybearded frontmen in the same place at the same time again. If you were around for the moment that these bands emerged, it’s a vivid memory-buffet and a beautiful excuse to reconnect with old friends that you haven’t seen in decades. If you weren’t, it’s a sign of a lineage worth preserving – one that endures in some of today’s most vital guitar-based music. As it turns out, there’s no shortage of bands, active or otherwise, that belong in that canon. Let’s keep this going forever. —Tom Breihan
American Football (Friday)
American Football’s 1999 debut became one of the sacred texts of the early 2010s emo revival — especially the sensitive shredding that came to be known as twinkly guitar — but watching the band perform the album out of sequence on Friday, I was struck by how little of the material felt stereotypically emo compared to the raw howls of Mike Kinsella’s other band, Friday night headliners Cap’n Jazz, or revival instigators Algernon Cadwallader. It felt much more like the post-rock traditionally associated with the metropolis up the road from Champaign-Urbana: moods and textures, heady rhythms and deconstructed soundscapes, vibes both figurative and literal. Don’t get me wrong; by the time they were wrapping things up with “Never Meant,” the yearning, straining sing-along left no doubt about the music’s heart-on-sleeve qualities. But at a fest where most bands are straightforward and explosive, I was impressed by the grace and subtlety on display throughout. (Less subtle, but weirdly powerful: the many, many images of the American Football house that appeared behind the band throughout their set, perhaps lifted from the Airbnb listing?) —Chris DeVille
The Dismemberment Plan (Friday)
Watching the D-Plan in 2024, it’s hard to believe that they were playing coffeeshops and dive bars in their prime. They’re just too good – too sharp, too idiosyncratic, too locked-in. The rhythm section is a machine built to explore the outer limits of wordless interpersonal communication. Travis Morrison switches up verbose cadences with a playful shrug. Everyone runs around, trading off instruments between songs, adding new layers to their topsy-turvy headrush symphonies. A decade after their last reunion run, the D-Plan sound like they never stopped. This was probably the biggest crowd I’d ever seen assembled to watch them play, and I saw them a lot of times back in the day. It’s the right size crowd for them.
They make it look so easy. On a day full of emo and indie rock veterans, it would’ve been fine if the Plan shambled a little, if they seemed just slightly more blown-away to still be playing these songs all these decades later. But that was always part of the band’s secret sauce: They knew they were good. Travis Morrison can work bits of current pop songs into the endlessly collapsing show closer “OK Joke’s Over” – it was Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” this time – because he knows his songs are as good as those ones. If this D-Plan reunion keeps going, maybe he’ll find out that the rest of the world has figured out what he always knew. —Tom Breihan
Algernon Cadwallader (Friday)
I almost packed my Algernon Cadwallader shirt. If I had, I’d have been matching with no fewer than five people I saw in the crowd during their Friday evening set, donning that same Comfort Colors-printed proclamation confirming that I saw them on their reunion tour. That tour, the Philly emo revivalists’ first in a decade, was exactly two years ago. My shirt is faded, but the excitement of their Best Friends Forever crowd was day-one fresh.
I don’t mosh often because I am a relatively small, almost-30-year-old woman who is scared of getting injured. But something about hearing Peter Helmis screeching “I bought yooooou a corsaaaaaage” makes me feel as invincible as a teenager on prom night. One of my favorite things about Algernon’s music is just how goddamn fun it sounds, and a live setting cranks that excitement up to the point where leaping a couple of feet into the air is just a knee-jerk reaction, pausing only to catch a breath or admire Joe Reinhart’s effortless finger-tapping. I wrote a book about living in paradise; it’s my memoir and I reside at an Algernon Cadwallader show. —Abby Jones
Unwound (Saturday)
I didn’t know. I mean, I had some idea. Unwound were a cultishly beloved band during their entirely ’90s run, and I liked everything that I heard. After their 2002 breakup, Unwound’s reputation only grew, and there was plenty of excitement around their 2023 reunion. But I never saw Unwound live, so I didn’t know. Unwound’s records are essential to anyone who’s remotely interested in angular-guitar music from the ’90s, but Unwound live is a different beast entirely.
At Best Friends Forever, Unwound played their 1994 album New Plastic Ideas all the way through. They could’ve honestly done the same for any other record; this was simply the round-number anniversary one. Onstage together, the band locks into one mesmeric groove after the next, their clangs and dings and gurgles melting together into a psychedelic squall much larger than the sum of its parts. The sound isn’t tethered to any particular time period or genre. Instead, it gives that old Lungfish feeling where you know you’re experiencing something mythic in the moment. With every upward surge and every howling crescendo, I felt myself drawn in deeper. At a festival that’s almost explicitly built around nostalgia, they were eternal.
To make it to this point, Unwound have been through a lot. Original bassist Vern Rumsey passed away in 2020. His contemporary Jared Warren, from Karp and Big Business, was somehow able to tap directly into that endless-elemental groove. Drummer Sara Lund is currently battling cancer, and her contemporary Janet Weiss set up a GoFundMe to help her through it. She was right back in that groove, too. In the midst of all those heartbreaks and hardships, Unwound built an all-swallowing musical universe, a place where you could get lost. Now, I know. —Tom Breihan
Mannequin Pussy (Saturday)
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react to the word “pussy,” according to Marisa Dabice. She knows this because, as she told Saturday night’s Best Friends Forever crowd, her band Mannequin Pussy have toured across numerous state lines and international borders; not all demographics are so keen on the idea of a woman who twerks to hardcore breakdowns on stage while cooing into a microphone, “We’re called Mannequin Pussy.” A decade into their career, I can only imagine that whatever backlash the band has received over the supposed vulgarity in their name has served as priceless fuel.
I’ve been lucky enough to see Mannequin Pussy a handful of times at various-sized venues, and Dabice has always had an electric stage presence. But on Saturday, Mannequin Pussy were on fire. They walked on stage to NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out 2,” and Dabice — clad in a see-through red dress — strutted with the sort of aloof nonchalance of someone acutely and rightfully aware of their own bad-bitchiness. With the rest of the band members as her hypepeople, they carried out highlights from their recent album I Got Heaven in a set that deserved to be three times as long. A Palestinian flag hung from their synth as they bemoaned the price-gouged waters in the Vegas heat.
Mannequin Pussy’s set was sandwiched between Unwound and Sunny Day Real Estate, who were each celebrating 30th anniversaries of their respective landmark albums. It’ll be a while before this group reaches that milestone, but as Dabice belted, shrieked, and shook ass alongside some of the weekend’s most killer riffs, they didn’t feel a hair out of place next to the evening’s legacy acts. It’d behoove you to start getting comfortable with the word “pussy.” —Abby Jones
Sunny Day Real Estate (Saturday)
He really sounds like that. Jeremy Enigk looks like a mere mortal, but when he opens his mouth onstage with Sunny Day Real Estate, that piercing alien intonation from the records is what comes out. It’s like bearing witness to a supernatural visitation in the midst of an otherwise straightforward rock show. On the other hand, given their history, even the presence of Sunny Day onstage together still feels like a minor miracle. Intra-band relations were famously so strained that SDRE more or less broke up after recording each of their four albums, and for years, the prospect of the second-wave emo giants returning to the road seemed impossible.
But age can sometimes mellow even gods of melodrama. By now they’ve launched a few different reunion outings, and they seem to really enjoy performing their classic material together — albeit without original bassist Nate Mendel, the half of the Sunny Day rhythm section who was not frozen out of Foo Fighters by Dave Grohl. (Improbably and hilariously, one of the auxiliary members onstage with them at Best Friends Forever, guitarist Greg Suran, was performing with Lionel Richie at the Wynn just 17 minutes before SDRE’s set began. The man has range.)
Right now Sunny Day are on the road celebrating the 30th anniversary of their iconic debut Diary. As they played through the tracklist Saturday night, looming as luminaries over Best Friends Forever despite Enigk’s self-effacing skepticism that they deserved to headline, they reaffirmed the album’s stature as an underground rock landmark. Back in ’94, SDRE mapped out the path from emo’s hardcore origins to its anthemic populist destiny. Onstage in Las Vegas, the music’s explosive qualities were nearly as impressive as that voice. From “Seven” to “Sometimes,” the songs hit hard. And when Sunny Day delved into a handful of post-Diary tracks for the encore, I was reminded that a How It Feels To Be Something On anniversary tour would hit even harder. —Chris DeVille
The Anniversary (Sunday)
The Anniversary’s set at Best Friends Forever began with a video of Beavis and Butthead asking a crucial question: “What the hell is the Anniversary?” The Kansas band never quite reached the same level of recognition as their peers in fellow BFF band/former tourmates the Get Up Kids, but even while the peak 2 p.m. Vegas sun raged on, the Anniversary gave numerous reasons to remember their name. They mostly played songs from their 2000 debut Designing A Nervous Breakdown, a record that imbues the classic emo-pop of its era with elements of caffeinated synth-pop, fuzzy power pop, and, if you’re really paying attention, flourishes of dramatic post-rock. As the Anniversary rocked on, they served as a welcome argument that Best Friends Forever isn’t just about reuniting those headliners you never stopped loving: It’s also about finally giving the underdogs their flowers. —Abby Jones
Rainer Maria (Sunday)
Many of the bands who played Best Friends Forever spoke about how they wanted to savor every moment of it, since it wouldn’t last forever. Near the end of Rainer Maria’s early-afternoon set – the Wisconsin trio’s first gig in six years – Caithlin De Marrais lamented the fact that they’d all have to go back to their day jobs all too soon. Rainer Maria said they wanted to do more shows, especially since they’ve relearned 10 of their songs. As of now, they don’t have any plans lined up. They should. They’re still incredible.
On record, Rainer Maria always tapped into huge, overwhelming feelings, their voices and instruments bouncing off each other, hungrily connecting and then angrily separating again. Live, they threw themselves into the performance of those feelings, thrashing and twirling and sliding across college rec-room stages. Decades later, they don’t bring that same desperate-whirlwind energy, and they don’t have to. The songs’ fiery intensity still burns, and now it’s enough to sweep you right back to when you first heard those songs. Rainer Maria made me feel something, and I could see that they were feeling that thing even more than me. What a feeling. —Tom Breihan
Piebald (Sunday)
“All bangers!” That was the mantra. Boston’s Piebald never suffered from a banger shortage. Their version of emo was catchy, energized, and sometimes very funny. Even when singing about American heartbreak or the merciless passage of time, they never sounded like they took themselves all that seriously. On Sunday, all bangers was exactly what they delivered. They added one new song to the set, which they called a “future banger,” giving it the Back To The Future “your kids are gonna love it” spiel. But no qualifiers were necessary. That song was a banger, too. They were all bangers.
On the same stage a little while later, Drug Church’s Patrick Kindlon made a mini-speech in tribute to Piebald, saying that the reasons they’d never become as famous as the Foo Fighters – the idiosyncrasies, the irrepressible forces of personality – are also what made them so beloved among the kinds of people who might come to Best Friends Forever. It’s probably true! As the type of guy who went to Best Friends Forever, there’s no Dave Grohl chorus that could get me howling along as loud as “Long Nights” or “American Hearts.” Maybe those songs are niche bangers, but bangers are bangers, and Piebald have so many bangers. —Tom Breihan
The Get Up Kids (Sunday)
（言葉にならない…涙）#bestfriendsforeverfes#bestfriendsforeverfest#tguk #thegetupkids #stwha25th pic.twitter.com/bu7KWMkVg2
— てらささきんせら!? (@terra_sasaki) October 14, 2024
“What became of everyone I used to know?” Matt Pryor sings with all his might at the outset of Something To Write Home About. At the time, he was questioning his friends’ convictions, but the words took on a different context on a weekend like this one. At one point during the Get Up Kids’ set performing their classic sophomore album in full, guitarist Jim Suptic said he’d hugged more people in the last two days than in the last two years. For the bands that were grinding it out together in the ’90s underground, and for many in the audience, Best Friends Forever was something like a high school reunion except way cooler.
The Get Up Kids have been out on the road celebrating Something To Write Home About’s 25th anniversary for over two months, so they’ve had plenty of time to get the material in fighting shape. You could tell. The loud parts were explosive. The quiet ones swelled with feeling. Despite the kind of subject matter I’d like to think most of us grow out of — “How could you do this to me?!” and so forth — the songwriting has stood the test of time, and that’s one crack rock ‘n’ roll band performing it. Bonus points for the moment when everything went silent and the crowd knowingly stepped in to yell “Come tomorrow, I’ll be on my way back home,” another lyric that took on fresh meaning in the waning hours of a wonderful weekend away. —Chris DeVille
