Bonnaroo 2024 Artist Spotlight: Taking Back Sunday

Like we’ve been doing for many years now, we’re making it our mission to help you get acquainted with many of our favorite acts from Bonnaroo‘s 2024 lineup. After roaring back to life in 2022, after two years off due to Covid and weather, and feeling fully like its old self again with a great fest last summer, this year marks Bonnaroo’s 21st installment (and 23rd anniversary), boasting not only another great and varied lineup, but also a continuation of some of the big changes and improvements rolled out over the last couple of years, with more flexibility in ticketing and camping, a reimagined “Outeroo” campground area, new activations, and further new ways to Roo. Back once again in its usual June 13-16 timeframe, we’re counting down the days until another great weekend on the farm.

As we dig through the entire schedule, we’ll highlight a spread of performers spanning across genres and stages, big and small, new and old, to bring you some of the most interesting, lesser-known, and most highly-recommended among this year’s crop of artists. And as our time at ‘Roo approaches, we’ll also be bringing you some special features and full list-style daily lineup guides, to help you plan your weekend ahead of the fest. While these previews won’t span every artist, and might omit some more obvious must-see acts, we hope they’ll serve as a way to help you navigate Bonnaroo’s gargantuan lineup, and to make the most of your busy weekend at the fest!

Grab your tickets right here if you haven’t already, and read on for our Bonnaroo Artist Spotlight!

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Few bands from the emo, pop punk, and post-hardcore boom of the 2000s are more beloved or more enduring than Taking Back Sunday, whose first three LPs- 2002’s Tell All Your Friends, 2004’s Where You Want to Be, and 2006’s Louder Now– are all stone-cold classics of that era, and have undoubtedly become nostalgic millennial touchstones in the decades since. Despite some lineup shuffles from 2003-2010 (after which their “classic” lineup reformed, and have remained together ever since, save for the departure of guitarist Eddie Reyes in 2018), Taking Back Sunday have been going strong since first forming on Long Island back in 1999 (it’s hard to comprehend that 2000s emo bands are hitting the quarter century mark), and have settled into their role as emo elder statesmen in the second half of their career, continuing to tour and make some interesting and adventurous new records throughout the 2010s, while also paying respect to their roots, and undergoing anniversary runs for some of their classic records. Though, in their early years, the band had something of a revolving lineup (famously featuring Jesse Lacey, who’d go on to front Brand New) and were a DIY fixture in the local post-hardcore scene, by Tell All Your Friends, they’d cemented with singer Adam Lazzara, guitarist and vocalist John Nolan, guitarist Eddie Reyes, bassist Shaun Cooper, and drummer Mark O’Connell (Nolan and Cooper would leave the following year, only to return in 2010). The record deeply resonated with the exploding pop punk scene, and by Where You Want to Be, TBS were becoming bona fide stars, elevating to major label status and attracting the most commercial success of their career with Louder Now. Though that entire aughts pop punk and emo boom waned over the following decade, Taking Back Sunday never slowed down, releasing four additional albums over 10 years, and maturing their style to include more alternative and heartland rock influences by 2016’s Tidal Waves. Though they’ve continued to tour regularly, save for some time off due to the pandemic, the band took the longest gap of their career to make new album 152, which dropped last fall and feels like a culmination of the last 25 years, both in its self-reflection and emotional resonance, as well as its alt-rock bite and pop accessibility. As Gen Z have discovered and embraced this era of emo bands again, classics like TBS have risen back to mainstream prominence in recent years, and the fact that they’re only now becoming a fixture at festivals outside of the genre space (like Warped Tour or Riot Fest) is a testament to how resonant they remain at this stage of their career.

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