VANS WARPED TOUR BROUGHT TOGETHER MORE THAN 51,000 FANS AT PARC JEAN-DRAPEAU!
Full review by Mathieu Perrier and Maxime Le Huidoux
Warped Tour is back in Canada! 2026 marked the first time in 12 years that the iconic touring alternative music festival stopped by the great city of Montreal. After a few years of hibernation, the festival as a whole has made its post-pandemic comeback with an adopted “fewer stops, longer stays” approach, leading to a weekend full of good people, and equally good music. My last and only Warped Tour appearance was in 2016, in Syracuse, NY. In the years prior, I found Warped Tour’s lineups leaned way more emo and metalcore than what my adolescent tastes cared for, but this time around, the lineup was diverse, absolutely stacked, and encapsulated all eras of the Vans Warped Tour. Fans of pop-punk, hardcore, ska, emo, metalcore, and skate punk all poured into Parc Jean-Drapeau for two perfectly sunny days of nostalgic music, and immaculate atmosphere.
Shortly after getting in early, I quickly fell in love with the festival layout. Two main stages side-by-side, separated by a massive half-pipe, greeted attendees as they entered. A quick detour through a heavily shaded area led folks to the three smaller stages, with plenty of food trucks, merch tents, an amateur wrestling ring, toilets, and water stations in between. As the curtain dropped at 11 a.m. to reveal the day’s lineup, I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of conflicts. I went on to watch some old favourites, and make new discoveries, all while running into people I knew at almost every turn. Warped Tour felt like a family reunion within the scene. I was bumping into everyone from friends who live out of town, to other musicians in the local scene, to colleagues and managers from day jobs’ past and present. Everyone was kind, in good spirits, and above all, grateful to experience Warped Tour’s triumphant return to Canada. The energy on the grounds felt special from Friday’s first moments, straight through until Saturday’s curtain call.
As I was doing my stage hopping, seeing as many acts as I could, the lineup felt perfectly varied and diverse. You had the likes of Pennywise, MXPX, and Strung Out for the old-school punks, repping the earliest days of Warped Tour. Comeback Kid and Counterparts in particular were a treat for Canadian hardcore lovers, while the likes of Initiate and Peer Pressure repped the genre’s frontwomen. illScarlett and Mad Caddies made an excellent case for ska music’s presence on those perfect summer days, with the former of the two giving the best performance I’ve seen them do, including a surprise cover of Korn’s Blind, which popped off just as hard as their heavier original material. Jutes, LØLØ, The Paradox, and Origami Angel were also among those representing the new generation of high-energy alternative music, proving that this is much more than a nostalgia fest. Origami Angel in particular performed in Montreal for the first time ever. Their 2024 album, Feeling Not Found, was one of my favourite releases that year, and it was a treat to witness the two-piece’s virtuosic blend of pop-punk, midwest emo, jazz, and metalcore at the expense of some poorly mixed low end. My biggest gripe of the weekend was that the sound quality, specifically on the smaller stages, left much to be desired. I don’t often think to myself during a live show that the balance is off, or that a specific channel could use a compressor, but I found myself wishing I could make audio tweaks more often than not all weekend. Even still, the crowd was loving every moment of the festival. Varied in age, gender identity, and fashion choices, we all came together to mosh, two-step, form circle pits, and sing along to the soundtrack of our past, present, and future.
Mathieu Perrier
Five stages. One body. That’s not a complaint, that’s just how a festival works, and at Warped it’s most of the fun.
Montreal got the only Canadian date of Warped’s 2026 run, two days at Parc Jean-Drapeau, eighty-odd bands across the Vans Stage, Off the Wall, Ghost, Le Castor and Le Paget. So you pick. A Day To Remember means no Sleep Theory. Staying for the end of one set means missing the start of the next one. Everybody on that site was doing the same math, and what you walk out with on Saturday night isn’t the lineup, it’s your lineup.
This was my fourth Warped Tour. The last one I did here was 2014, and roughly a third of this bill was on that one too, which did something strange to my sense of time and also to my lower back. More on the back later.
Maxime Le Huidoux
Day 1 – Friday, August 21
Got in through the VIP line and spent the first stretch just walking the site, which I’d recommend. Food stands everywhere, merch stands everywhere, bathrooms actually distributed rather than clustered in one miserable corner, and of course the inflatable Warped Tour setlist board, the one and only, the thing that tells you the day’s schedule on the day of and not a minute earlier. There’s an app now too, and I used it, but I still went and stood in front of the inflatable thing squinting like everybody else. It’s a bit annoying. It’s also non-negotiable.
The weather held, which matters more at a two-day outdoor festival than any amount of programming. 23 to 25 degrees on the Friday, warm but never punishing, and Brita being a sponsor turned out to mean something real: clean water and enough refill stations that I never once queued to fill a bottle. Small thing. Not a small thing when you’re out there nine hours.
Right in front of the main stages they’d built an extreme sports area with a half-pipe, so between sets you could watch pro skateboarders and a few BMX riders throw tricks instead of staring at your phone. There was a wrestling stage too. I did not expect wrestling to be a highlight of my weekend and here we are.
Somewhere in all that I did a pass through the media tent, caught the tail of Joyce Manor on a side stage, then got a couple of songs in the middle of Madball before heading over to catch the end of Atreyu. Madball and Atreyu overlapped by about forty minutes, so that was the weekend’s first real fork in the road. It will not be the last.
I’m not deep in Atreyu’s catalogue, I mostly know Become the Bull, so I walked over to the Vans Stage with low expectations and came out revising them. Big riffs, dual-guitar harmonies that actually landed outdoors where harmonies usually go to die, and a vocalist moving between melody and aggression without either one collapsing into the other.
Then Silverstein at Off the Wall. They played the hits, they were as good as always. Despite how many times I’ve seen them, more than I can count honestly, there still isn’t a single time I’d skip them.
Thrice was controlled in a way that stood out on a bill like this. Big atmospheric stretches, then tight aggressive bursts, no wasted motion anywhere in it. I only know a handful of their songs and they opened on both of them, Under a Killing Moon and Silhouette, which meant I got my whole Thrice experience in the first eight minutes and then just enjoyed being lost for the rest.
Drug Church was the discovery of day one, and I knew nothing about them going in. The frontman was chaotic in the best possible way, never standing still for a second, constantly reaching into the crowd, and the sound was punchy and clear in a way side stages usually don’t manage. That’s the actual point of a festival, that thing where you wander over to a stage out of curiosity and leave with a new band.
Microwave were the opposite kind of good. Emotionally heavy, all songwriting, no theatrics.
Boston Manor, though. Boston Manor was very sick. The frontman was asking the crowd to open a pit, get the f up, all of it, and I’d wanted to see them live since Trapped Nerve got into my head over ten years ago. Ten years is a long time to wait for a band to come to you.
All Time Low
They opened on Suckerpunch, went straight into Weightless, and then brought LØLØ out for PMA, which was a preview of her weekend since she had her own slot the next day and one more guest spot after that. Damned If I Do Ya (Damned If I Don’t) followed.
By Falling for Strangers, Alex was asking for more energy from a crowd that had been standing in the sun since noon. Bold ask. It worked anyway. Jump. Jump. Somewhere in that stretch there was one of those songs where even the security guards along the barricade were singing the words and clapping. It’s the only crowd metric I trust.
They closed on Dear Maria, Count Me In, obviously. There is no other option and everybody knew it forty minutes in advance.
They talked about Jack being off the tour with an injury, and the set felt a little different for it, but not lesser.
Here’s my bias, stated plainly: I grew up on this band, along with Taking Back Sunday, A Day To Remember and Fall Out Boy, in middle school and high school. I saw All Time Low at Warped Tour here in 2014 and they were one of the highlights of that weekend too. Twelve years later the fanboy in me was screaming again, and I’ve long since stopped being embarrassed about him.
Taking Back Sunday
What’s It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?, Liar (It Takes One to Know One), Cute Without the ‘E’ (Just Like Strangers), and MakeDamnSure to finish. No deep cuts, no arguing with the crowd about what they came for.
Adam is still an odd presence on a stage and he looked happy to be up there, though we didn’t get him strangling himself with the mic cable this time. I’ll take it as a sign of maturity.
I know the discourse about them sounding rough live these last few years. This wasn’t one of those nights. They were halfway decent, which given what I’d been braced for felt like a win, and I’ve got good memories of them from Warped 2014 and a Montreal show a couple of years after.
Sublime
Ska has been in Warped’s DNA since long before I started going, and this weekend was no exception, with The Planet Smashers and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes on the Friday and Mad Caddies on the Saturday. It isn’t my lane and I won’t pretend otherwise, but it’s about as much of an outlier here as a breakdown is. People were skateboarding on the stage. Inflatable dogs. Jakob Nowell has taken his dad’s spot and taken it well, and that’s not a small thing to say about a job like that. There was a tribute to Bradley in there too, old photos up on the screen, and the crowd went quiet for it in a way a festival crowd usually doesn’t.
Fletcher Dragge from Pennywise came out for the last song and said he grew up on Sublime and that this isn’t a money grab. Coming from him it lands. I only know a couple of their songs, so I was mostly watching the crowd on this one, and the crowd was in.
A Day To Remember
The one I’d been building toward all day, and the one I gave something up for.
Right Back At It Again got the pyrotechnics and a sky full of bouncing beach balls. Paranoia came with a request for the biggest circle pit of the weekend, and got it. Bad Blood, Miracle, Have Faith in Me, Mr. Highway’s Thinking About the End, A Shot in the Dark. A field full of people who knew every word to all of it.
There were contest winners on stage behind the band, an Evenko thing, and they looked appropriately stunned. Down on the floor, a group of people had come dressed as bananas. I have no follow-up question. During All My Friends a guy dressed as Mario was firing t-shirts into the crowd.
I was standing next to the middle barricade between the two main stages. Turns out that’s the best seat in the house for watching crowd surfers get funnelled back into the pit, and there were a LOT of them. At one point the band asked the crowd to crowd surf the crowd surfers, then pointed out from the stage that it doesn’t look safe but it looks incredibly cool. Hard to argue with either half of that.
Fireworks for the last song. A properly magical way to end a day.
And the cost: Sleep Theory were playing at almost exactly the same time, and I gave them up for this. It’s the one trade from the whole weekend I’m still annoyed about. I hope to catch them somewhere.
By the time I got to the exit my legs and back were already gone. I know it’s not a phase, mom, but I’m an old millennial now and I can feel it.
Maxime Le Huidoux
Day 2 – Saturday, August 22
Got in right on time for Four Year Strong, which I was afraid I’d miss. We All Float Down Here, tick tock tick tock, it’s ticking away. I’ve seen them a few times, including Warped 2014 when they closed out the night, and at Le Ritz a couple of years after that. Still a classic to me.
Walked into nothing,nowhere. mid-cover of Smash Mouth‘s All Star, which is either the best or worst way to meet a band and I’ve decided it’s the best. Remember that one, it comes back. The set had a lot in it: blood, Pieces of You, a cover of Incubus doing Wish You Were Here, and Hammer to close with a request for a hundred crowd surfers. Vermont band, first time seeing them, and I didn’t expect them to go this hard. Pleasantly ambushed.
Caught the end of The Devil Wears Prada, and here’s where the weekend’s other story starts. Their bass got lost in transit and Comeback Kid lent them one so they could play. I think the last two songs were Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over and Hey John, What’s Your Name Again? but I arrived late enough that I’m hedging. Another pick-and-choose casualty. I know how good this band is and I got less than ten minutes of them, and I still don’t regret it, because nothing,nowhere. were one of the two or three acts I actually came that day to see.
Hawthorne Heights
This Is Who We Are, and then they talked about exactly that. About how we’re all emo or metal or punk rock here, and this is one of the few places where people who feel a bit different get to feel like they belong. Outcasts unite.
They’re right, and they knew they were right. Then they turned their own most famous line inside out: Warped Tour is for lovers, Montreal is for lovers. Very lovey dovey, entirely earned. Love those guys.
Jutes
This one was a bet. I’ve seen Of Mice & Men plenty of times over the years, with and without Austin Carlile, and I already know exactly how good they sound. Jutes I’d never seen, and I wanted to know whether he could actually deliver it live.
He can. He sounds as good as he does on record and better in person, great energy, knows how to work a crowd that’s been baking for hours. I knew some of the songs and I still couldn’t name one of them for you, and it didn’t matter at all. Bet paid off.
3OH!3
The most fun I had all weekend, and I say that as someone who spent the rest of it watching hardcore bands.
Someone was crowd surfing in a full Jesus costume. The band saw him, and one of them said Jesus loves that shit, and the whole thing became a bit. Their backdrop was a run of parodies: Ford, Nickelodeon, 007, Seinfeld, Minesweeper, Snake. Nathaniel Motte explained, in French, that his mom is French and his kid is Canadian, which is why he speaks it. If you want a Montreal crowd on your side, that’s the cheat code, and he used it.
They played all the classics and then some. I saw them in Toronto in 2015 and they were already this fun. There’s apparently a 2021 album I know nothing about, so I’m not going to pretend I’ve followed them closely, but the experience of being in a 3OH!3 crowd is about the same as being in an Electric Callboy crowd, which is to say a large group of people deciding at the same moment to stop being self-conscious.
Chiodos
Thin crowd, which they didn’t deserve, and no interaction with the people who did show up. That’s the honest note. They were good and it felt like a set happening in a slightly empty room. Some of that is five stages and a schedule, some of it isn’t.
I’ll also be honest about this stretch of the afternoon: this is where I went and got food and sat down. Two days of standing had caught up with me and I let the next hour or so happen as background music rather than as something I was reviewing. Which is its own kind of festival experience, and probably the one most people there were having. Ghost were handing out energy drinks around then, and at 4pm on day two that is not nothing.
Worth knowing what the day costs once you’re through the gates, and I’ll disclose that my access came through Evenko: fries at $7.75, a slice of pizza at $12, a beer at $15 or so, and t-shirts running $50 to $60. Festival pricing is festival pricing anywhere in this city, but budget for it before you go rather than after.
Mayday Parade
Jersey second, with the red umbrella up on the screen behind them. Derek still barefoot, still long-haired, still doing it.
Then a straight greatest hits run and I stopped taking notes and started shouting. Kids in Love, Anywhere But Here, Jamie All Over, all of it at the top of my lungs with a few hundred other people doing the same. Twenty-one years as a band and they still brought a new one, Weekend Music, which is a confident thing to do at a nostalgia festival.
They’ve aged. So have I. They still sound great, and I’ve seen them enough times to know that isn’t a given.
Ice Nine Kills
Now the story.
Ice Nine Kills’ gear never made it into the country. None of it. They played anyway, because Mayday Parade, Chiodos and The Devil Wears Prada lent them enough equipment to get a full set out of it. Three bands with no obligation to do anything at all, handing over their own instruments so a fourth band’s fans wouldn’t go home with nothing.
Hawthorne Heights had given a speech about community two hours earlier and every word of it was true. This was the same thing said with amplifiers.
They opened on American Nightmare and then did what they do, which is theatre. A guy brought out in a straitjacket by fake cops. Matt and Johnny from Reel Big Fish guesting on the third song. An axe. A white shirt with blood on it. And then Art the Clown, out of the Terrifier films, for A Work of Art, running a wall of death from the stage and then parking himself behind the drum kit. They played Play Dead, the one they wrote for Dead by Daylight, which is made here in Montreal by Behaviour, so that one got an extra pop from the room. All of it on borrowed gear.
Jimmy Eat World, and leaving Jimmy Eat World
Bleed American front to back, which is a hell of an offer, and it means The Middle, Sweetness and A Praise Chorus all land in the same forty minutes. Hear You Me done acoustic, and Jim Adkins asked from the stage whether this was the most acoustic guitars ever assembled at a Warped Tour, then answered his own question by pointing out it was still punk as fuck. He wasn’t wrong on either count.
They were sounding great. The problem was me. This landed at the exact hour of day two when my energy was gone, and what I needed was not a beautiful record played beautifully, it was something to slap me awake. So I left halfway through, which I feel a bit bad about, and went to the Ghost Stage.
Counterparts
Best decision of the weekend.
Most people I saw at the Ghost Stage across both days, packed in, and after Bleed American they were heavy as hell. As good as always. They played Stranger and I stayed all the way to the end, which cost me the beginning of Yellowcard, and I’d do it again.
Whispers of Your Death gets me every time. Every time. There is something perfect about a metal guy screaming and singing about his cat, and I’d argue it was the most punk rock thing that happened all weekend. All I wanted to do after that song was go home and hug my cats.
Anyway. Yellowcard.
Yellowcard
Arrived as Five Becomes Four started, which is my own fault. Lights and Sounds after, then a drum solo. I saw them at Warped 2014 too and got lucky enough to get pictures with them, so there’s history here. Turns out that 2014 show was the last time they played Montreal, twelve years, which explains a few things about the noise the crowd made.
Ryan Key and Sean Mackin still know exactly how to run a crowd, and they had a field of us singing our hearts out inside of two songs. Only One moves me every single time and I’ve stopped being embarrassed about it. Then Ocean Avenue. The pop punk classic, the one where a park full of people in their thirties all remember being sixteen at once, because the song tells them to.
Simple Plan
Hometown band closing a Warped Tour in Montreal. There was never any question how this was going to go.
Jet Lag with LØLØ out on stage, her second guest spot of the weekend (that I know of). Partway through Welcome to My Life they stopped to tell us “on vous aime Montreal.” Then they introduced the whole band in French, making jokes about how none of their names sound as cool that way. Someone in the crowd was holding up a plant. An actual plant. I have no explanation and I’ve stopped looking for one.
Summer Paradise came with beach balls, and later there were fire jets and balloons the size of small cars going out over the crowd. Loser of the Year. Then a medley that ran through Avril Lavigne, The Killers, and Smash Mouth’s All Star, which means I heard the same Smash Mouth song covered twice in one afternoon by two completely different bands, and I did not have that on any version of my Warped Tour bingo card.
Then a sea of Scooby Doos swarming the front for the Scooby Doo theme, because of course they still play it and of course people dress for it. Happy birthday sung to Jeff right before I’m Just a Kid, and when the line came around about every night being the worst night ever, they changed it. Not tonight.
Shut Up. Jump. Every hit they have, in order, no hostages. Chuck was wearing a Victoire hoodie and promised to high-five every single person in the crowd, then went crowd surfing to prove it, at which point Pierre got behind the kit and played drums for him. Jaret from Bowling for Soup came out to sing the end of a song.
They finished on Perfect, and then more fireworks, because if you’re going to close a Warped Tour in your own city you may as well close it properly. What a show.
Maxime Le Huidoux
Across the weekend
Among the legendary acts, Warped Tour did a fantastic job showcasing local talent with this 2026 edition. The Paget stage was smack in the middle of everything, and impossible to avoid when moving between stages. Thousands of people were exposed to the wonderful talent this province has to offer. I caught Bruiserweight, K-Man and the 45s, and Sudden Waves’ performances, among others, at this stage. I chatted with Vince and Max of Sudden Waves before their set, and they shared that the opportunity to perform at Warped with all of their friends’ bands was a childhood dream come true.
After two full days of moshing, stage-hopping, interviews, and friendly catchups, I was happy to sit on the top of the slope to witness the last three main stage bands close out the festival while seeing a beautiful sunset over Montreal’s skyline. Jimmy Eat World and Simple Plan had enjoyable sets, but Yellowcard pulled out all the stops to give what must have been my favourite set of the weekend. A solid and varied setlist, fantastic sound, and a flawless vocal performance from Ryan Key. A significant improvement from the previous three times I’ve seen the Floridian five-piece, both pre and post reunion.
As I took it all in from the back of the site, the weekend felt like a moment I could have lived in for a whole week, all without running out of music to enjoy, or familiar faces to run into. I have no idea what’s in store for the future of Warped Tour, but I hope we showed the organisers that Montreal is a city worth coming back to. As Mike Herrera of MXPX said best, Quebec is the punk rock capital of the world, and after this weekend, I’m inclined to believe him.
Mathieu Perrier
My weekend highlights, for the record: 3OH!3, A Day To Remember, Jutes, nothing,nowhere., Counterparts, Simple Plan. I’d only ever seen half of them before. Choosing them also meant giving up Sleep Theory, half of Jimmy Eat World, most of The Devil Wears Prada and half of Yellowcard, and I’d make most of those trades again tomorrow.
Because Warped isn’t just a festival where you go and see your favourite bands. There are Facebook groups where people trade bracelets and work out where to meet before the gates even open. And at one point over the weekend a guy near me was handing out cat stickers. Not selling them, not promoting a band, not building an audience. Just quietly giving cat stickers to whoever happened to be standing around him. I had already watched a man scream about his cat on the Ghost Stage, so I stopped asking questions and gladly accepted my stickers.
Hawthorne Heights stood on a stage and told us we all belong here, and they were right, but the thing that stuck with me was quieter than a speech. Comeback Kid handing The Devil Wears Prada a bass. Three bands lending their own gear so Ice Nine Kills could play at all. That’s what it looks like when nobody’s holding a microphone, and it’s why this is one of the few weekends where the slightly alt, slightly outcast, not-quite-following-what’s-mainstream crowd gets to be the majority.
All weekend I kept seeing the same Simple Plan shirt on people. It says “I’m just a kid” with the word kid crossed out and replaced by “an adult.” That’s exactly how the whole thing felt. I was nine when that song came out. Twenty-four years later I’m almost thirty-four, at Parc Jean-Drapeau, shouting it back at the band who wrote it.
My millennial body is in pain and I wouldn’t trade those two days for the world. That was my fourth Warped Tour. I’m still hoping Montreal gets a few more.
Maxime Le Huidoux
Photo Credits:
Faith Nguyen (FNG) / @faithwinphotos
Scott Hutchinson (SSH) / @scotchphotos
Tim Snow (TML) / @timsnowphoto
Skyler Greene (SAG) / @skygreene
