Warped Tour 2025: Highlights from D.C. Stop

There is nothing quite like the music people discover when they’re in high school. It’s these songs that soundtrack first loves and heartbreaks, and all the moments that feel like they’re the end of the world. It’s these songs that act as a salve in teen bedrooms and hit even harder live, sung with a sea of people.

This weekend, the Vans Warped Tour in Washington, D.C. transported about 40,000 festival attendees right back to those high school summer days filled with sticky pavements, sweaty mosh pits and, if you were lucky enough, crowd-surfing to the songs that mattered the most. In this brief moment of time traveling, everything else felt far away— even our increasingly alarmingly political times, marked by a paltry event disguised as a military parade that our eerily authoritarian president was hosting just a few miles from the festival. At Warped, the only thing that mattered was the music.

Many bands across the Warped Tour lineup also shared they felt like they’d been sent back to their teen years for the weekend, from Warped Tour veterans and ska-punkers Less Than Jake or mid-2010 stalwarts like State Champs. “We feel like we’re going to yet another high school reunion where we know everybody, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be invited to the party or not,” Less Than Jake vocalist Chris DeMakes told Rolling Stone. 

“I kinda feel like a senior in high school,” State Champs lead guitarist Tyler Szalkowski said.

With their headlining set on Saturday, pop-punkers All Time Low fully brought Warped Tour back to high school, complete with a marching band and cheerleading squad to join them onstage. But this wasn’t just any squad or band; the Maryland natives made sure to honor their hometown and celebrate marginalized voices by inviting the American University cheer squad and DC’s Different Drummers marching band to join their set. DCDD is a nonprofit LGBTQ+ marching band dedicated to building pride and community through music.

“We also wanted to make sure that this is a celebration of absolutely fucking everybody out there,” lead singer Alex Gaskarth told the audience. “You are safe here, you are welcome here,” he said before adding a pointed comment in reference to Trump’s military parade: “This is the place to be tonight in D.C., I’ll tell you that.”

Machine Gun Kelly closed out the first night of Warped Tour D.C., which some people didn’t seem to understand. But up onstage with his larger-than-life persona, it was clear why. MGK embodies the core principles of Warped Tour: an eclectic spirit built from the ground up. The genre-blurring musician came up on the famous Kevin Says Stage at Warped Tour, a stage meant for platforming up and coming acts that founder Kevin Lyman took a chance on. MGK ripped through his wide-ranging catalog from pop-punk tracks like the Halsey-assisted “Forget Me Too” and his rap-focused “El Diablo.” He event performed his new pop-leaning single “Cliche,” in its live debut, singing it to a little girl in the audience in a sweet moment.

During her Warped Tour debut on Sunday night, even Avril Lavigne felt that same energy as she asked the audience if they wanted to go back to high school with her. The pop-punk princess knew just how to shuttle the Warped Tour audience back to bygone years: She surprised everyone with a cameo from Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley, her friend and former partner, who played the band’s Warped staple “In Too Deep.” Whibley and Sum 41 were not on the lineup at all, making the surprise extra special. Throughout her dazzling set, Lavigne delivered a string of hits from “Girlfriend” to “Complicated,” and even included fan-favorite “I’m With You,” which hit so much harder in the rain.

One of the main elements of Warped Tour is the camaraderie between bands that roughed it out together amongst cramped vans and tents for years. This same energy was alive and well, both backstage as bands caught up with each other and during performances as multiple acts invited each other to perform fan favorites for their sets. From Machine Gun Kelly bringing out fellow Warped self-made artist Modsun up for “Concert for Aliens” to smaller acts like The Wonder Years bringing out Knuckle Puck’s Joe Taylor for the Philly emo classic “Came Out Swinging.” For those who were in high school in the mid-2000s, the highlight was when Derek Sanders from Mayday Parade joined All Time Low for the scene-defying track “Dear Maria, Count Me In.”

The best of these occurrences were when goliaths of the scene welcomed newbies: Boys Like Girls invited viral sensation Brendan Abernathy to sing the band’s hit “The Great Escape” and All Time Low pulled up new pop-punk outfit the Paradox’s lead singer Eric Dangerfield for a rendition of “Hate This Song.”

One of the most unique facets of Warped Tour has always been how the festival showcases non-profit organizations. From To Write Love on Her Arms to Fuck Cancer to Music Saves Lives and Headcount and Peta, various organizations that became synonymous with Warped Tour brought their tents back out at Warped 30. In between sets, festival-goers could sign up to vote with Headcount or write down how music had life-altering impact on them with Music Saves Lives.

At the heart of Warped Tour has always been its incredible ability to launch new acts and introduce attendees to their new favorite band. For its 30th year, the festival made sure to bring back the Warped Unplugged stage for acoustic performances from emerging artists. There was always a crowd under the Unplugged tent, and it wasn’t always to take cover from the heat. It was clear attendees were genuinely curious to learn about new musicians they might not have heard of yet. Early in the day as people flooded into the venue, smaller bands like nu-metal rockers Silly Goose were self-promoting in the same ways from Warped’s past, handing out CDs and holding up posters with their band’s set time. In the age of Spotify, live music discovery is a rare occasion and that makes warped tour that much more special.  

Something Kevin Lyman has always understood is that people are hungry for these experiences. As long as music fans exist, they will constantly want to discover new music in person. But few places are able to provide a space like that because of the challenges that exist, from ensuring attendees safety to bearing the cost of the event. It’s clear with the support of a mega live event production corporation behind them like Insomniac, Warped Tour could give it not just another go, but a successful one. There were a lot of differences: the sponsors, the locations, the DIY nature has changed with the time, but none of that made the festival feel like a corporatized shell of itself, like some competitors that have cropped up in Warped Tour’s absence.

Lyman is just as involved as ever before. If you watch the founder for five seconds, festival goers and artists alike are instantly coming up to meet the mythical man that started this all. On Sunday morning, as Lyman stood around the famed half pipe, multiple festival goers came up to speak to him. One father brought his two sons to their first Warped Tour and informed Lyman it was his 20th year going to the festival.

For their 30th anniversary, Vans Warped Tour managed to do what it envisioned: to somehow conjure up the best pieces of its past self and bring it into the future in a way that didn’t feel outdated or misplaced. And though Warped Tour 2025 was a time machine, no one’s perspective was the same. It’s a swath of different people and distinct voices. Everyone comes for a different band a different goal. Lyman acknowledged this very fact when he spoke to Rolling Stone back in October: “Everyone has their own experience when they go to Warped Tour, but they’re part of a greater community.” The D.C. edition proved he was right.