Music

I Wanna Riot

Where's the big LA punk festival?

Once upon a time, there was a really big festival in Southern California for punk and alternative music, but unfortunately that festival no longer exists.

For Gen X, the festival in that sentence is Coachella. For Millennials, it’s more likely FYF. Coachella is something entirely different now. FYF is dead.

Plain and simple, Southern California deserves better.

Don’t get me wrong. There are still some great local festivals of the punk-rock variety. Sound and Fury at Expo Park is generally (and rightly) considered the best hardcore festival in the country, and the new Fight to Unite festival certainly seems like it’ll bring a familiar vibe to the Belasco next month. But neither of those has the scale of a major music festival.

With Punk Rock Bowling’s Las Vegas gathering taking the year off, there’s really only one top-tier punk festival happening in 2026 America: Chicago’s Riot Fest. (Furnace Fest is probably the next-best thing, but it’s really closer in scale to Sound and Fury, and it means you have to go to Alabama.)

As a lifelong punk rock fan, as well as a band member and music journalist, I’ve been making an annual pilgrimage to Riot Fest since 2022, alongside hundreds of other SoCal punks on the handful of LAX-ORD flights on the middle Thursday of every September. Weather notwithstanding — it’s pretty much guaranteed to rain at least one day of Riot Fest, with this year not breaking that trend — Riot Fest feels like I wish all festivals felt. Sure, prices for everything are too high and monetization is rampant everywhere you look, but the commercialization is way less offensive than any festival even remotely close to its scale.

Part of that is because it’s still DIY in a lot of ways. Riot Mike and his surprisingly small crew run the fest from top to bottom, rather than selling it out to a giant like Live Nation or AEG (or even Insomniac, like Warped Tour did). Frankly, it’s impressive that they’re able to pull it off year after year despite the late-capitalism corporate hellhole we all live in.

But a lot of what makes Riot Fest feel right every September is the sense of community in the punk scene. Sure, there are always outliers on the lineup, as last year saw acts like Weird Al Yankovich and ‘90s pop sensations James and Hanson perform (with Taylor Hanson wearing a John Stamos shirt, which I helped provide, but that’s a story for another time) and this year featured everyone from William Shatner to Tool to Twenty One Pilots, but the core of it remains based in punk rock, much like the original Warped Tours.

While there will always be a subsection of any festival crowd who is primarily there be seen, Riot Fest — and punk shows in general — doesn’t really cater to the influencers and selfie-chasing types. Outside of the annual butter statue of John Stamos (if you’re wondering about the John Stamos references at Riot Fest, just Google it) and a couple of displays, there are no grand art installations or intentionally iconic backdrops at Riot Fest. The carnival rides look like standard county-fair-level attractions (unlike Coachella’s prominent ferris wheel), the stages and vendors favor function over fashion, and even the sideshows (professional wrestling, a John Stamos lookalike contest) are there more for entertainment than appearances.

We should all want a festival like that for Los Angeles.

You could argue that nowhere has had a stronger punk scene over the last 40 years than Southern California, and the region deserves a festival to match.

The super early punk days of the ’70s were largely dominated by New York City and the UK, but by the ’80s, punk rock had firmly taken hold in LA and Orange County. This year alone, local punk legends Bad Religion, Social Distortion, Descendents and Pennywise all featured prominently on Riot Fest’s lineup, with numerous others from across the decades (from Guttermouth to Thrice) dotting the lineup once again.

It’s not like the SoCal influence on Riot Fest was particularly strong this year. It’s just effectively impossible to host a punk rock festival that size without including tons of Los Angeles-based bands. Riot Fest depends on the LA and OC scenes to exist, and yet we have to fly literally halfway across the country to experience it.

I’m damn glad that Riot Fest keeps rolling on every year and I plan to keep going, but I can’t help but think there’s a prime opportunity for a massive LA punk festival (preferably not put on by a giant corporation) that we’re all missing out on.

So I guess there’s only one question left: Who’s going to start it?