Hit The Lights, Forever Came Calling, Fox Royale

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Pop-punk gets written off as a phase, which is accurate and also completely misses the reason it keeps working. The songs were built for a very narrow window of life, roughly ages fifteen to twenty, when everything is enormous and nobody takes you seriously. Then you leave that window and the songs do not stop being about you, they just become about who you were, which is somehow worse and much more useful. A bill stacked with three of these bands is not a nostalgia exercise so much as a room full of adults briefly agreeing to stop managing their feelings. The ratio of people singing to people watching is close to total. What surprises first-timers is how physically generous the crowd is, and how many of them appear to have driven a long way to be there on a weeknight for a band they have not thought about since a very specific car.