Celebrated punk rock music festival Riot Fest has announced the second wave of their 2021 lineup. New acts include Fath No More, Mr. Bungle, NOFX and more. The festival will take place Sept. 17-19 in Chicago’s Douglas Park. Three-day passes to the festival are currently sold out, but single-day passes will be available for purchase sometime next week.
Industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails will be taking the stage, replacing My Chemical Romance as headliners since MCR postponed their reunion tour. Earlier this month, NIN announced their “only live event shows of the year” with Pixies and released new collaborative single with noise-rock band Health titled “ISN’T EVERYONE.” After frontman Trent Reznor’s Oscar-win for Best Original Score due to his contribution to the Disney-Pixar movie Soul, the artist revealed that NIN will “‘probably’ begin working on new Nine Inch Nails music” in the near future.
Experimental NorCal group Mr. Bungle has also been added to the lineup, after revealing in April that their Halloween 2020 livestream special The Night They Came Home will be released as live album in June. In a March interview with mxdwn’s Sydney Blodgett, bassist of the band, Trevor Dunn, stated that he’s “considering just putting [his record with Sperm Church] out myself,” calling record labels “Elitist” groups.
Mike Patton, frontman of two acts announced in the second wave lineup, Mr. Bungle and Faith No More, recently sung the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song in trailer for the video game Shredder’s Revenge. Other members of Faith No More, Mike Bordin and Billy Gould, collaborated with members of groups like Mastadon, Slaves on Dope, 311 and more in April, to release a socially-distanced cover of Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero?!”
NOFX has jumped onto the lineup as well, after recently announcing that they will no longer be headlining the music festival Punk Rock Bowling due to hate messages and threats they’ve been receiving based on crude jokes that frontman Fat Mike made about the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The comments caused the band to be dropped from their own Camp Punk in Drublic music festival in 2018. The skate-punk group will also be performing at Punk in the Park this year in November. NOFX released their fourteenth studio album, Single Album, in February of this year.
Other acts announced in the second wave include 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees Devo, alt-rock band Dinosaur Jr., shock-rock act GWAR, left-wing punk rock group Anti-Flag and more. The first wave lineup announcement featured artists like The Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies, Run the Jewels, Circle Jerks, and Gogol Bordello.
UPDATE (5/27): Riot Fest has added several new names to its 2021 lineup, including punk bands like Dropkick Murphys, Rancid, The Bronx and Four Year Strong, as well as indie rock band Bleached, electro-emo band 3OH!3, experimental noise band FACS, hardcore band turned indie rockers Citizen, plus Knuckle Puck and Skating Polly. The biggest name of the announcement is rapper/rocker Machine Gun Kelly.
Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat
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