Sixty-thousand people poured into Las Vegas Fairgrounds this weekend for When We Were Young, toting tiny, clear plastic backpacks and proudly wearing the battle jackets of their scene — tour tees of years past. There were graphic remembrances of The Pop Disaster Tour to Believers Never Die back in 2009, The World Tour of 2014, and more. Others donned merchandise from the festival’s previous two years, their backs clad with lineups featuring Paramore, Green Day, and blink-182. Iconography spilled across the festival grounds reflecting the same sentiment: nostalgia for the days of jewel cases and Walkmans, shag carpets, and American Apparel sweatbands pulled tight around a swoop of hair.
And for the audience, that’s what this festival is really about, at its core — memories, and even more so, the feelings that envelop them. Whether the memory is two years back or 22, whether we’re listening to the first few notes of “Welcome To The Black Parade” in the back of our parents’ car, on someone’s blinking Myspace page, or in the arms of a tearstained crowd in Nevada, time travel exists for that piano’s guttural G note.
This year, the theme centered around album plays. A lineup that consisted of headliners My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Pierce the Veil, A Day to Remember, the Used, and many more went back to the beginning, taking us through debut and sophomore albums once again. Like every year, the sense of community rang true on the turf and the stage alike — bands jumped onstage with each other. We saw State Champs and We the Kings join Simple Plan, Wiz Khalifa saunter up for a song with Fall Out Boy, Hey Monday invite Tonight Alive, Daisy Grenade, and We Are the In Crowd to join them for a track, as well as to take a stand for more female inclusion at the festival.
Backstage in the artist compound, musicians reconnected with friends and collaborators from decades (and Warped Tours) past. While recounting stories, sharing laughs and tales of wild tour bus pranks, they, too, reflected on the concept of “nostalgia” and revisiting the past. In the AltPress tent, in collaboration with Veeps, they each stopped in to open up — about the juicy details of their tour riders, and about their conflicted emotions around the idea of looking back, while trying to move forward as creatives and people. In the stew of old and new faces, sounds, and contexts, there was a lot to celebrate, aside from just the past. We made friends with emerging artists like the viral Atlanta group the Paradox and New York’s powerful duo Daisy Grenade, witnessed iconic bands like Basement back together again, and spent time with L.S. Dunes, some of our favorite musicians, in a new and exciting configuration — all embracing change.
Across the entire weekend, the word tossed around the most was “therapeutic”, and it truly meant something different for everyone. Finding peace in the relationship between our younger selves and our present is a fraught journey. But if there’s one thing that is a cure-all, in our experience — it’s music, and the community that enshrouds it. There’s the music we’ve long loved, music that’s carried us, helped us grow up, that’s over time been carved deep in the grooves of our brains and hearts. And, there’s the music that we’re currently digesting, that sees us now, and meets us where we’re at today. Sometimes they’re two and the same, which When We Were Young 2024 taught us all.