How Warped Tour taught Chase Atlantic how to be in a band
Chase Atlantic‘s music is an amalgamation of rock, alternative, hip-hop, R&B, trap and psychedelic — and a careful listener could probably pick out more. In a world where artists are historically berated for changing up their sonic style, the band’s sound speaks just as much to the eclectic and frenetic listening habits of Gen Z, as it does to its experimentalism and understanding of their audience of peers. Read an excerpt from their cover story below, which appears in our spring 2023 issue.
Beyond Warped Tour, Chase Atlantic detail surviving the pandemic, their new album and the boy band-like fandom they’ve cultivated.
Rewind to 2018. A hot, sticky summer across North America. Chase Atlantic were the unlikely breakout band on Warped Tour that year, on a full lineup that included Waterparks, the Maine and Crown The Empire. Watch videos of their high-energy, low-production (as is the Warped Tour way) sets from that year and hear crowds already singing back their lyrics. That experience was a stepping stone that took them a long way; a key turning point in their story that brought them to this room.
“Warped Tour is like the hardest, most difficult tour you can do,” Anthony explains. “It’s boot camp for bands, in a sense. It makes you realize you cannot take a regular tour for granted because you’ve done 26 shows in a row, not knowing what time you’re gonna play. Waking up at 7:30 a.m. and going to sleep at 2 a.m. It really makes you grateful for just doing your own tour and being able to be on your own schedule.” Warped taught them how to be in a band and care for everyone around them who helps to make their sets happen — the real rock stars are the roadies and crew people who make it happen — and, as Mitchel says, echoing many years’ worth of Warped musicians, “You work out which of the bands really aren’t good people.”
[Alternative Press spring 2023 issue with cover stars Chase Atlantic, shot by Jordan Kelsey Knight]
Though they’re humble and modest, it’s not a surprise to them that they ascended during those shows — they were the odd ones out. “We were definitely the weird ones, while they were all still playing punk enough music,” Mitchel says. “We were doing a lot of programmed drums mixed with that rock element. We always like to dress up, and we were the only ones wearing the type of clothes we were wearing. It was like school where people are like, ‘Oh, who are these posers? Oh…oh, actually, they’re very nice.” The crowds, too, were responsive to that: “I mean, who likes mundane stuff!” Anthony believes they came in a long line of seemingly oddball, off-genre artists who used that tour to surprise kids across the country. “Some of the biggest artists coming out of Warped Tour are the ones that were not in the same room. I mean, look at someone like Katy Perry. She came out of the Warped scene, and she was so drastically different to all that,” Anthony says. “Eminem did Warped Tour, too!”
