Photo by Wendy Schiller

Festival season started early for New England in 2025 with the inaugural Something in the Way festival taking place this past weekend at Roadrunner in Boston. Waking up hardcore, punk & shoegaze fans from their hibernations, the two-day festival was a welcome distraction from the bone-chilling cold outside.

Hosted by Bowery Boston and Run For Cover, Something In The Way fest follows a recent growing trend of the genre festival taking place across the country. With the mainstream large scale music festival landscape becoming increasingly more volatile, promoters have shifted priorities from welcoming every type of music fan to catering to smaller, but more dedicated communities. We’ve seen this with emo-punk fest When We Were Young in Las Vegas and the indie-queer adjacent All Things Go near Baltimore, both of which have seen success in their endeavors.

Featuring both current and legacy hardcore & punk acts, the weekend proved to be a fantastic crash course in both genres. For the OG fans, legends American Football and Slowdive made highly anticipated appearances, with fresher faces like Mannequin Pussy and Women in Peril rounding out the bill. 

For those looking to grab a souvenir, they did not leave empty handed. A booth from Wanna Hear It Records in Watertown sold vinyl all weekend and original SITW merch was available for purchase alongside artists’ offerings.

Taking place at Roadrunner, one of Boston’s newest and most exciting concert halls, the venue had to adapt to fit all of the acts within one weekend. The solution: a second, smaller stage set in the back of the GA floor. Creating a sort of “theatre in the round” vibe, this ended up favoring the hardcore bands on the lineup, allowing an intimate and raucous environment – perfect for a punk show. It was incredible watching a sea of concertgoers flood the stage before launching themselves back into the crowd, arguably the perfect way to watch a Fiddlehead set. 

With all first year festivals, there will be issues here and there, but SITW managed to come out relatively unscathed. The B-stage definitely could’ve used a few more speakers pointed at the crowds to the side of and behind the stage, as sound quality varied greatly depending on where you stood. Additionally, many attendees were left with rumbling bellies as the only food option – a single empanada stall taking up residence in a coat-check closet, proved insufficient with long lines and limited choices. However re-entry was allowed until 6pm both nights, giving concertgoers a chance to escape and find food elsewhere on Guest Street. 

Something in the Way Festival proved to have something for everyone, as long as you’re a hardcore, punk or shoegaze fan looking to shake off the cold and mosh.

– Andrew Borque

The festivities didn’t end at Roadrunner on Saturday night, as a short jaunt across the river to The Sinclair brought you to the fest’s official afterparty. Keeping with the vague theme of shoegaze and its many tendrils, the late show featured Indianapolis’ Wishy for their first of two Something In The Way sets alongside local heroes Horse Jumper of Love and the (somewhat) recently-reunited legends Drop Nineteens. 

Wishy kicked things around quarter to ten with a heads-down no bullshit set pulled almost entirely from last year’s debut LP Triple Seven. Playing behind captured game footage of the 2001 classic video game SSX Tricky, the five-piece swervedrove (ha) between impossibly hooky jangle-pop and hard riffing rockers with confident cool, stopping only briefly to remind the crowd several times that they are indeed from Indianapolis, which they continued to do the following afternoon back at Roadrunner for Day 2. Seeing this band twice in a 16-hour span was a nice treat. 

Horse Jumpies followed with a tightly-coiled and very moving set on their own on home turf, their first since a heavy bout of touring throughout 2024. A Horse Jumper set at this point (especially with the beantown crowd behind them, although I’m sure the boys are loved everywhere) is a beautifully composed act of tension and release in which they poke around under the hood of their songs, giving them new life. Some become quieter, slower, more devastating than their recorded counterparts, while others get taken for a brisker walk or a heavier downturn. Drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran sneaks lopsided and lightning-quick extra fills between the margins without ever distracting or disrupting the flow while John Margaris holds down the path with his less-is-more bass, the notes not played hitting harder. Seeing this band open for Drop Nineteens was a special sort of full-circle moment.

Drop Nineteens closed out the night with an elegiac yet blisteringly loud set in front of a tennis-ball yellow and green backdrop that, as we said on Bluesky, begged the question: is shoegaze…brat? The quintet’s surprise return in 2023 begat a short dual coasts run last year that had a sort of finality to it, at least that’s how they left it on stage at the Paradise Rock Club between stories of sneaking in from their BU dorms next door back in the day. However, co-founder Paula Kelley recently moved back east (at least partly) for the band, so we may very well be getting more music from this crew after all. Early tracks like “Winona” and “Delaware” and “My Aquarium” still hit like glittery gut punches, while the queasy “Nausea” remains something of a secret weapon. However, it was the spine-tingling extended drone of “Kick The Tragedy” to close that brought me nearly to tears, partly out of exhaustion, but mostly out of sheer beauty. I love to rock and roll.

– Dillon Riley 

Check out our coverage of the fest below! It’s almost like you’re there.