Mayday Parade – Tickets – College Street Music Hall – New Haven, CT – May 23rd, 2025
Mayday Parade
Microwave, Grayscale, Like Roses
Wed, January 15, 2025
10:00 am EST
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This event is General Admission Standing Room on the Floor, and Reserved Seated in the Balcony.
MAYDAY PARADE
Mayday Parade – vocalist Derek Sanders, drummer/vocalist Jake Bundrick, guitarists Alex Garcia and Brooks Betts and bassist/vocalist Jeremy Lenzo – will be celebrating 20 years together in 2025. As they welcome this career milestone, the Tallahassee, Florida, five-piece is set to release perhaps their most aspirational and ambitious effort yet: a three-part album showcasing their prolific, emotionally resonant songwriting. The first entry, Sweet, arrives April 18, 2025, and is led by the effervescent bounce of “By The Way,” a pitch-perfect blend of what’s made Mayday Parade a genre mainstay for decades: a tender, piano-led groove ultimately giving way to a crush of stereo guitars, ascendent melodies, and heart-on-sleeve lyricism.
“Being in a band for this long, sometimes you feel like you’re getting it right and sometimes you feel like you’re dancing around what you should be doing. This song feels locked in as a step in the right direction. It’s a song about trying to stay optimistic as the world and everything you know is changing around you. We hope you all enjoy it.” – Derek Sanders on “By The Way”
Sweet succinctly showcases just how far Mayday Parade has come in the past two decades featuring the trademark sound that’s transformed them from genre newcomers to torchbearers for a new generation. Recorded with longtime producers, multiplatinum engineers Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount (All Time Low, Jimmy Eat World), the trilogy of releases will serve as Mayday Parade’s eight full-length studio album and first LP since 2021’s What It Means To Fall Apart. The new three-part album is also the band’s first self-released collection since 2006’s Tales Told By Dead Friends EP that Mayday Parade sold in parking lots across the country as they followed that year’s Vans Warped Tour.
“Being a band for 20 years feels big and we wanted to do something big to match that. Our next release will be a large album split up into three different parts. It feels like a challenge and an exciting step forward for the band. Our goal is to take the things we’ve learned and the ways we’ve grown and apply them towards an ambitious release. We’re incredibly thankful for the opportunity to continue to create music and we cannot wait to share Part 1 - titled ‘Sweet’ - with the world.” – Derek Sanders on Sweet
Since first forming in 2005 Mayday Parade has graced the covers of Alternative Press and Rock Sound, been featured in Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Kerrang, twice headlined Sad Summer Festival (a festival they co-founded six years ago), performed as a feature act at 2024’s When We Were Young festival, and are already announced for this year’s event in Las Vegas on October 18th. They’ve also been a featured act at Riot Fest and Slam Dunk, done numerous headline tours as well as support slots and just last year Mayday Parade’s Derek Sanders joined Dashboard Confessional’s “Emo SuperJam” at Bonnaroo Music & Art Festival.
As one of the most enduring acts to rise from the underground in the mid-aughts, Mayday Parade has soundtracked both adolescence and adulthood for millions of listeners. Their music stands synonymous with the emo and pop-punk genres: 2007’s A Lesson In Romantics, their debut LP is gold certified and has been hailed as one of the best – and most influential – emo albums of all time by Alternative Press. Monsters In The Closet, their 2013 release, debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, and tracks like the platinum-selling “Jamie All Over,” gold-certified “Miserable At Best” and “Oh Well, Oh Well” represent not only widespread commercial acclaim, but the sort of artist-audience relationship that’s fortified them across changing musical landscapes and the ebb and flow of an unforgiving industry.
Now, with Sweet set to launch and the project’s remaining two releases waiting in the wings later this year and into 2026, it’s undoubtedly a good time to be a Mayday Parade fan. The only thing better? Being in Mayday Parade these days, riding high on a renewed sense of confidence, clarity and creativity that acts rarely feel this far into a career. Fans can hear “By The Way” and “Pretty Good To Feel Something” (released last summer) now and look for tour dates and more new music in the weeks leading up to the April 18th release.
Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify
MICROWAVE
From start to finish, Let’s Start Degeneracy marks a liberated new chapter for Microwave, one unbound by realities other than their own. Recorded between Atlanta and Nashville and later mixed by Josh Wilbur (Korn, Bad Religion) and mastered by Brad Blackwood (Maroon 5, Lamb of God), the long-awaited fourth full-length record from Microwave, is a trip. Its title, taken from a conservative politician's take on drugs in 1970, captures the band's newfound liberated spirit, and its tracks play by no one's rules but their own. At various points the Atlanta trio of vocalist/guitarist Nathan Hardy, bassist Tyler Hill, and drummer Timothy “Tito” Pittard pull together a multitude of influences ranging from ambient pop and R&B to psychedelia and yes, even Sublime.
Lyrically, Let's Start Degeneracy is loaded with revelations, some of which came to Hardy after experiences with ayahuasca in Peru with Tito. As the pandemic wound down, the two reconvened with bassist/vocalist Tyler Hill and together, found their way back to being Microwave again.
“It’s about letting go of attachments and behaviors that aren’t serving you and trying to shake off your programming and not be motivated by fear and guilt and shame,” says Hardy. “It’s about learning to be happy and take care of yourself.”
Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify
GRAYSCALE
A rock band from Philly.
Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify
College Street Music Hall
238 College Street
New Haven, CT, 06510