Dance Gavin Dance Headline a Chicago Post-Hardcore Buffet

There's a specific subset of music fan that I'm afraid is going extinct due to progressing technology.

You most likely knew this fan in college. The person who spent most of the late 90's and 2000's constantly evangelizing bands that not one of their friends or coworkers have heard of, constantly burning CDs or curating playlists with track listings that included songs with titles long enough to make you worry if it will fit in the liner notes you have to hand write. This fan was constantly trying to explain to anyone within earshot (and after the advent of high speed internet, that wasn't even a limiting factor) why post-hardcore was doing things that nothing on any type of radio was doing.

I was not this fan. I spent a lot of those years listening to modern rock radio, full of butt rock (or what you kids these days call 'divorced dad rock') and post 9/11 righteousness. The closest I ever got to experiments in time signatures was from Tool, who had already long ago achieved mainstream success.

But man, did I know a bunch of people that absolutely were that exact fan. And while they aren't still making mixtapes and CDs for those in their immediate orbit, they're still around in some pretty big numbers.

The proof? Look no further than the current US tour by Dance Gavin Dance, joined by Fall of Troy. Two of the most talked-about bands by the people I mentioned above (along with Minus the Bear and At The Drive In). Throw in Wolf & Bear and Novelists joining Fall of Troy in support and you've got quite the sampler of mathcore/post-hardcore goodness.

Opening slots are a thankless assignment. You're playing to a room that might still have a line of fans waiting to enter the venue, the other half of the audience is still at the bar, and you have maybe thirty minutes to make an impression on people who may have never heard your name before. Novelists, the French prog-metalcore outfit, responded to this challenge by simply being both A. Loud as hell and B. Absolutely incredible live.

From the opening bars of 'All For Nothing' through the last riffs of 'Turn It Up', Novelists (led by the amazing vocals of Camille Contreras) chugged through a heavy but melodic 7 song set split pretty evenly between 2023's Okapi and 2025's CODA. Fans of Jinjer would be doing themselves a favor checking this band out.

On paper, Wolf & Bear have a lot in common with Dance Gavin Dance. Both hail from Sacramento. Both employ dual vocalists. Both fall well within the post-hardcore/metalcore genre.

But that's where a lot of the similarities end. While Dance Gavin Dance is a little more on the polished side, Wolf & Bear are raw and unfinished, and I mean that in the absolute best way possible. They're raw and loud and play the type of aggressively progressive rock that you literally have no idea what direction they're going in next, only that whatever way it is will end with crunchy riffs and moshing. There's a looseness to Wolf & Bear's sound that masks how precise everything actually is, the kind of quality that makes a band sound effortless even when they're clearly operating at a very high level. Like things could tip over and go completely off the tracks musically at any second, but never does because the tracks are that rock-solid.

'THERE'S NO DUST IN THE CITY' is maybe the perfect name for the closing song of such a massive set, and the band completely backed it up by bringing out Dance Gavin Dance singer Andrew Wells to chip in on vocals.

Wolf & Bear are operating in a weird and aggressive (again, both high compliments) lane that not enough people have discovered yet, which means if you're reading this and you haven't listened to them, you're sitting on an opportunity. You can't be the kind of fan I mentioned at the top without knowing about rad bands before they blow up. Wolf & Bear are exactly in that zone currently.

Holy shit, how do I begin to describe Fall of Troy's set? There are bands you see because you want to have a good time. There are bands you see because the record meant something to you at a specific and formative point in your life. And then there are bands like Fall of Troy, where both of those things are true simultaneously, and the combined weight of them hits you somewhere around the second song and doesn't really let go.

The Mukilteo, Washington trio made some of the most technically dazzling and emotionally chaotic music of the mid-2000s, and the question going into any Fall of Troy set is always whether the songs hold up against the memory of them. And the answer is...yes? I mean yes. I think so.

Part of the trouble is that not only does Fall of Troy not stick to the same setlist night-to-night, but I swear that some of the songs I heard last night were somehow different than I remember them. It was hard to tell. Not only am I old now, but the entire set was chaotic. Like, RIDICULOUSLY chaotic.

Thomas Erak is one of those guitarists who makes you slightly angry at how good he is. Watching him navigate the fretboard in real time while simultaneously fronting the band is the kind of thing that makes you want to go home and sell your guitar, which is both a criticism and the highest possible compliment. It's complicated enough for me to listen to songs like 'Laces Out, Dan!' and 'I Just Got This Symphony Goin'' let alone even think about playing them AND singing them.

"FCPREMIX" closed the set in the only appropriate way: total, unhinged, glorious chaos. The mosh pit almost consumed the entire lower part of GA at the Riv. Bodies were coming nonstop over the barricade. Shoes were lost. Heads were banged. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this is what the actual fall of Troy felt like. I can tell you that I'll be thinking about this music in the back of my head when I watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey this summer.

All post-hardcore score for a historical swords and sandals epic: Who says no?

How do you even begin to describe Dance Gavin Dance to someone who hasn't heard them? The Sacramento outfit have spent the better part of two decades making music that defies any reasonable attempt at genre classification, combining clean vocals that veer into genuinely proggy R&B territory with unclean vocals that hit as hard as anything in the heavier corners of the spectrum, sitting on top of guitar work that borrows from funk and jazz and math rock and somehow makes it all feel cohesive. The elevator pitch writes itself and also undersells the reality by about half.

Live, the band is somehow even harder to categorize. Opening with 'Animal Surgery' into 'Chucky vs. The Giant Tortoise' put a spotlight on the dual-vocal dynamic that makes DGD tick. Andrew Wells' soaring melodic lines against Jon Mess' unhinged counterpoint, two completely different approaches to fronting a band occupying the same space and making it work through some combination of chemistry and controlled chaos. It's like they take what Taking Back Sunday does vocally and cranks things up about 10 notches (and yes that comparison is probably in the forefront of my mind because of Wells' spiffy Miami Vice inspired white suit echoing TBS' Adam Lazzara's signature look.

'Midnight at McGuffy's' and 'It's Safe to Say You Dig the Backseat' gave the longtime fans their early setlist moments, the kind of songs that get the knowing nod and the immediate physical response from people who have been in this specific crowd for a decade or more. 'Speed Demon' hit hard enough to rattle your fillings loose, and 'Synergy' demonstrated once again that Dance Gavin Dance can write a song that is genuinely, straightforwardly beautiful when they feel like it. And it doesn't seem like they often feel like it, which makes it better when they do. Like fake Christian Bale telling his wife he loves her in The Prestige.

As I assume it is at each of their tour stops, 'Uneasy Hearts Weigh the Most' was the emotional peak of the night. It's a song that's accumulated enough years and enough memories at this point that hearing it live feels less like a concert moment and more like a shared spiritual experience. The run through 'Surprise! I'm From Cuba,' 'Carl Barker,' and 'All the Way Down' was pure reward for the patient: deep cuts and fan favorites delivered without a hint of going through the motions, the band playing with the energy of a group that still finds these songs interesting, which after this many years and this many lineup changes is no small thing.

Closing on 'Inspire the Liars' was a slam dunk, the kind of song that functions as a thesis statement for everything Dance Gavin Dance are and have always been: melodically ambitious, technically demanding, emotionally complicated, and completely impossible to put in a box. The crowd responded accordingly, sending the evening out on a note that managed to be simultaneously triumphant and a little melancholy, which is basically the Dance Gavin Dance brand distilled into a single feeling.

Dance Gavin Dance's US tour continues through June 2. Remaining dates and tickets can be found here.

Dance Gavin Dance - Riviera Theatre Setlist 5/15/26

Animal Surgery
Chucky vs. The Giant Tortoise
Midnight at McGuffy's
It's Safe to Say You Dig the Backseat
Speed Demon
Synergy
Uneasy Hearts Weigh the Most
Trap Door
Elder Goose
The Stickler
Surprise! I'm From Cuba. Everyone Has One Brain
Carl Barker
All the Way Down
Inspire the Liars