Andy Knight
“We’re not trying to sell you finance tickets to Coachella. We’re not trying to sell you fucking Ticketmaster penalty fees or $25 parking. We’re just trying to sell you some songs you might have grown up with.” Those aren’t the words of a pioneering hardcore band but All-American Rejects and their chisel-jawed frontman Tyson Ritter.
Ritter, bassist and frontman for the band behind millenial pop-punk classics like “Swing Swing” and “Gives You Hell,” has been sticking it to the man through a series of impromptu live shows they have dubbed the House Party Tour. A recent clip from one of the shows saw Ritter describe AAR as “a band that gives a shit about the common man.”
That might come across as over the top for a once Top 40 legacy act, but the band is moving with some truth to it. To attend their new shows, tickets aren’t available through a credit card pre-sale and there is no golden circle for VIPs. The tour’s name says it all: All-American Rejects are playing bars and backyards the old fashioned way. Right now they’re surfing a powerful wave of nostalgia and altruism; free tickets to see a band you remember from better times is a powerful drug.
But what’s their incentive? In a recent interview, Ritter told Vulture that he’s “recently read something about the complete inaccessibility of the concert experience in 2025, and how it’s juxtaposed against these wild and weird economic times. It blows my mind that our shows can still work.”
Ritter has pointed to the band’s 29-year-old manager Megan Kraemer as being the brains of the operation and also said he feels a key to the success of the shows has been choosing to play outside of major cities. “This is the reason people are showing up. It’s the have-nots and have-littles in the middle-of-nowhere America who keep the lights on for our country. They’re often drive-through states for many of these big tours. Who’s playing Ames, Iowa? Who’s playing Green Bay, Wisconsin?”
That’s something you don’t find a lot of artists doing these days and it’s certainly a crucial part of their success. At a time when the cost of seeing live music anywhere has begun to feel prohibitive, think pay-in-three festival deals and the introduction of the dreaded dynamic pricing, All-American Rejects are thriving. Other bands may look on with envy. Ritter told Vulture that his group “took $50,000 out of our own pockets” to make these shows happen. That’s a hefty price tag but, also, lucky them for having those reserves in the bank. It’s also impossible to remove the TikTok effect from all of this. Footage from these shows are going more and more viral with each passing performance. You can’t buy your band a TikTok trend but having tens of thousands of dollars to keep it going certainly helps.
Of course, let’s call it as it is: the House Party Tour is promo for the band’s new song “Sandbox,” a canny play for virality by a band returning after more than a decade away. The shows appeal to elder millennials who remember the band from their youth and kids eager to experience a trend IRL.
But at the same time it’s also giving the band a major platform to speak out about the broken state of the live music industry and show millions online that there are alternatives to paying huge amounts to sit in the rafters of an anonymous arena — and that’s a great thing and something that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Speaking of bland mega venues, All-American Rejects will follow up their house party tour by opening for the Jonas Brothers on a nationwide stadium run. Good luck conjuring the spirit of Black Flag and Fugazi on that one, guys.
Check out more clips from the House Party Tour below.
