I’ll admit, I’ve been critical of fests, especially the bigger ones. In my mind, they represent a lot of the stuff I gripe about on this blog. Corporate sponsorships, hardcore bands playing the “fest circuit”, phoned-in reunions — my list of complaints goes on. I’ve also never really been a fest-goer. I’m blessed enough to live in a big city where there’s no shortage of shows, and I don’t love the fest experience. Waiting in line, buying overpriced food and standing for twelve hours is not exactly my idea of a good time. I do love watching bands, so I’ve been to plenty of local fests. If I have to buy a plane ticket to get there, though, I’m not going. Not worth it in my opinion.
Detroit and Tied Down Festival are a four hour drive from my front door, which is the upper limit I’m willing to travel for a show unless the lineup blows me away. I went two years ago when Trapped Under Ice and Gorilla Biscuits headlined. I wanted to see damn near every band on that bill. It was also my first time in Detroit, so my then-girlfriend and I made it a getaway weekend where we stayed in a cool hotel, ate lots of pizza and explored the city. I missed last year because it fell on the weekend of my close friends’ wedding. I managed to snag tickets for headliners Have Heart in Brooklyn instead.
This year, the lineup didn’t speak to me. I also don’t have a girlfriend anymore, so any cost-effective combination of boarding and transportation for a full weekend would involve sleeping in an AirBNB with multiple other hardcore kids. No thanks. Not many Toronto folks rolled out, so there was less peer pressure and FOMO involved this year. I wasn’t planning on going, but I decided to wait until single day tickets went on sale before officially making the call.
The fest probably announced individual day schedules in late April or early May, and I impulse bought a ticket for Saturday. Looking back, I have no idea what made me do it. Headliners Foundation are a cool band but I’ve never been super invested in them. A lot of interesting stuff was on the bill, but nothing I needed to spend $100USD on in 2025. I remember thinking “this will sell out super fast and if I don’t wanna go, I’ll have no problem getting rid of my ticket.”
Wrong. I don’t think Saturday sold out in advance (please do not quote me on that) and as May 31 loomed closer and closer, the idea of finding someone to buy my ticket for anywhere near face value seemed like a bigger waste of energy than either going or eating the cost.
I made the call to go at 7AM the morning of the show. At some point I realized my thought process of “well, I bought this expensive ticket so I might as well spend a bunch more money to hit the show” was a sunk cost fallacy offset only by the fact that there were, in fact, numerous cool bands playing four hours away. I woke up early on Saturday morning, said “fuck it” and hopped in the car. I’m feeling depressed lately and a spontaneous day trip felt like a great way to preoccupy myself for 24 hours.
First thing I did when I hit the road at 9AM, as any depressed person does, is put on some Blood For Blood. Then I stopped at the bank to grab another $100USD. I almost committed seppuku in the middle of TD when the teller told me “that will be $142 Canadian”. Thanks Donald Trump. Then I headed towards Detroit, bracing myself for what I consider to be one of the most mind-numbing drives on the face of planet earth. This time I crossed the border in Port Huron, trading an hour-long trudge through the hellscape of Chatham-Kent for a somewhat novel trudge through the hellscape of suburban Michigan.
The earliest band on the lineup I wanted to see was Steamroll, but they went on at 11:30, so I considered that a lost cause. The next band I didn’t want to miss was Scarab, who took the stage at 2:15. Unfortunately, I had an unscheduled bathroom break just outside of Sarnia in a town that looked like the filming location for “Little House on The Praire”. I started doing fest schedule math in my head once I hit the outskirts of Detroit.
“Okay, I’m gonna get there right at 2:15, but I have to park. Who knows how long that will take. Last time I was here they were running a fair bit behind schedule, but I also had to stand in a massive registration line for an hour.” My deduction? I was probably fucked.
I walked through the gate of the Russell Industrial Centre at 2:20, already down $30 of my $100 thanks to parking. I heard a band playing inside as I took my spot in line. The guy beside me was bitching about how he had to stand in line every time he went in and out of the venue, which is not something I dealt with in 2023.
“Do you know what band is on?” I asked him.
“Nah, the last band I saw was Hold My Own.”
Oh shit. HMO was only two slots below Scarab on the bill and the HM2 sound coming from the wall to my right led me to believe Prize Horse’s set was probably over. How cruel would it be to hear the muffled echoes of Scarab while standing in line? I was supremely anxious, but made it through in only ten minutes and caught half the set. Then I went to the food truck area for lunch and saw two luxurious rows of picnic tables lined against the near wall. At that moment, I knew Tied Down had stepped their game up.
Tied Down started in 2022 as a relatively small regional thing, then scaled up the next year to a degree that I don’t think they were prepared for. Because of that, my first Tied Down experience was not a well organized affair. The registration/parking situation was psychotic, the show ran at least an hour over time and there was practically no seating in the entire venue, so people sat on the floor to eat. Within 30 minutes of being there this year, I noticed all those kinks were ironed out.
Another thing I noticed early this year was the fashion dichotomy. In 2023, every single person in the building was dressed the same — 5” inseam shorts, band shirt, Triple-B over the shoulder bag and dad hat w/ band logo. All the ladies wore dark denim shorts with either fishnets or knee-high black socks. Those kids were around this year, but stuck out like a sore thumb compared to the cuffed pants/Air Max crowd and the large contingent of mfs dressed more or less like normal people.
In my mind, this made it easy to delineate between the dubious distinction of “hardcore kid” and “hardcore fest kid”. If you’ve ever been to a big fest before (and you have a superiority/inferiority complex like I do) you probably know what I’m talking about. In case you don’t, here’s the rundown. There are three types of people who go to hardcore festivals: people who live in the area, deranged lunatics who travelled numerous hundreds of kilometers because they’re either part of the fest or clinically insane, and kids who have somehow seen Mindforce eight times but couldn’t drive you to the DIY spot in their town.
Let’s not spend too much time in the weeds on that, seeing as it’s probably some cognitive distortion I developed due to childhood trauma. This year’s version of Tied Down had a secret fourth option: “festivalgoers”.
I grabbed my lunch from the food truck and headed towards an open picnic bench. As I enjoyed my BBQ chicken mac n cheese from a plastic cup, a few folks sat down around me and we started talking. It quickly became clear that these weren’t run of the mill hardcore kids. At one point the guy to my right asked the people across from me what their favourite fest was. I expected them to say something along the lines of Sound & Fury or FYA, but this dude namedropped some EDM Festival in Barcelona.
To my astonishment, the people across from me not only knew what he was talking about but had opinions on their own favourite European music festivals. I was ready to whip my phone out like Randall from Recess and start the think-piece right then, but these kids were actually pretty fuckin’ cool.
They started talking about picking out their outfits for the day, which is something every hardcore kid DEFINITELY does but is too ashamed to publicly admit. They were all good looking and socially aware. The guy beside me was from some place I used to live and we talked about that for five minutes instead of trying to one-up each other over Back to Back Records knowledge.
This all happened while D-Bloc was onstage. Missing Detroit’s hometown heroes at Tied Down was probably a massive mistake on my part, but I saw them two weeks before in Toronto and if I didn’t get something to eat I was going to have a mental breakdown. I jumped up from the picnic table when I heard the next band sound-checking. It was Disgrace, Taylor Young’s death metal band that most certainly missed me when I was stage diving to Single Mothers in 2012.
The set was cool. If Taylor Young is in a band, it’s guaranteed at the very least to not suck. They played a new track, which I thought was their best song. I’m excited to check back on that when it comes out.
Next up were Lockin’ Out legends The Wrong Side, who I was cautiously optimistic about seeing. I love that band’s recorded material, but was entirely unsure how they would perform 20 years after their tenure as a band. The guitarists were also sound-checking with the most Guitar Center-coded riffs I’ve ever heard, which did not bode well for my confidence. I don’t know if they were trolling or what, but the band easily had the best set of the day in my opinion.
The vocalist came out dressed like a cast member from Entourage and they opened with a solid cover of “Would?” by Alice in Chains. The second that was over, they launched into “Feeding Time at the Zoo” and a middle aged man wearing a white denim vest (who I later discovered was Colin from COA) came into the pit swinging a 15-foot chain. It was absolutely unhinged.
After their set I walked through the venue and found my homies from Be About It Records who had a booth set up in a side room along with some other cool, smaller operations like Delayed Gratification, Total Supply and The Hardcore Therapist. That room had an exciting energy, and it’s cool to think about how the Dazes and Triple-Bs of the world probably started out vending in small rooms like that before graduating to the main merch areas of festivals.
That’s when I realized big fests are actually pretty cool. I’d only been to three out of town fests in 15 years before then, and my experience was always similar — standing around listening to bands for 12 hours, getting fleeced for food/drinks, seeing your friends for like five minutes before they disappear and having inane conversations with punishers. This time I adjusted my approach and was rewarded. Instead of watching every band for some self-flagellating reason, I hung out with friends I don’t see very often and met some of their homies as well.
The thing with fests is that for every r/hardcore poster attending his first show in six months, there’s a kid who rolled up with his homies’ band who is fucking around in the merch room and having a good time. It’s a great hardcore temp-check because a bunch of kids from a 5-6 hour radius pull up and you get to see what people are wearing, what bands they go off for, and all that. I don’t normally interact with too many Disgrace/D Bloc fans from outside of Toronto, so it’s cool to see what people from different scenes and places are into.
Even the weird festival attendee normies were good for people watching. Later in the day I saw the guy I talked to about Spanish EDM festivals and Townes Van Zandt hit a crazy stage-dive during Mindforce. It occurred to me that bro simply loves music, and the fact that he’d spend his hard earned money to come see Gridiron and Fiddlehead is kinda cool.
It’s not that deep. At the end of the night, you can get in your car, drive home, and never see those people again in your life. Speaking of that, I think the one-day pass is my move from now on. If I stayed for Sunday I would probably have come home in a way shittier mood. The one day pass allowed me to do things on my own terms. I didn’t have to worry about packing, AirBNB drama or waiting around missing bands while two morons I hardly know hold our entire group up arguing about where to get coffee.
As for the rest of the music, Foundation and American Nightmare were good but didn’t blow my socks off. It was cool to see Gridiron play somewhat of a hometown show the day after dropping their new LP. I was excited to watch both Mindforce and Fiddlehead for the second time, although I (predictably) preferred seeing them in more intimate settings. I ate pizza during Sanguisugabogg and at one point I thought I could hear the singer bitching people out for not moshing hard enough. They covered Crowbar, which would have been neat to see but my boy Lil’ Caesar was calling my name.
AN brought out John Brannon from Negative Approach for a “Ready to Fight” cover and I found it charming that Brannon’s stage banter voice is exactly the same as his singing voice (aka indiscernible). I didn’t see much of Hope Con but I did walk out just in time to see two of the normies I met outside on the picnic bench feeling each other up during the set. I didn’t mosh at all. I might have gone in for Wrong Side if some lunatic wasn’t swinging a weapon around his head like Conan the Barbarian.
All in all, I had a great time and I’m looking forward to seeing who they bring out next year. Whether or not I go will probably depend on the lineup, but I’m a lot less cynical about the whole “big fest” experience than I was this time last month. If you have the money and time, I’d suggest dropping in on one for a day. You’ll probably find something to enjoy.
I dream of a hardcore festival like this in Australia. I think we are close…