REVIEW: Nothing Fest IV is the House Show that Never Ends

MusicReviewShows

Oct 20

☆ Aleah Antonio ☆

IT WAS POURING RAIN ON SATURDAY NIGHT — the first day of Nothing Fest IV, and yet fans took the risk of moshing and stage diving into wet concrete for their favorite bands. Returning to the Garden AMP in Garden Grove, CA, Nothing Mag hosted their fourth annual music and arts festival last weekend. With co-headliners Together Pangea and Beach Fossils on Saturday night and Destroy Boys, Show Me The Body, and STRFKR closing out Sunday night, this was Nothing Mag’s biggest iteration of their festival yet.

Day 1 Featuring Beach Fossils, Saiah, Together Pangea & Ultra Q

The weekend felt like organized chaos. Each set was stacked one after the other with no room to wait. Once a set ended, everyone ran to another stage to catch a band that had just begun to play. For those who came early, it was an eight hour day of expending energy, jumping from the main stage to the Tree House to the Locker Room. Others came for just the headliners, filling themselves with as much beer and Liquid Death as possible before the night rolled through.

The headliners, rather than being small-font bands on major festival bills, seemed larger than life at Nothing Fest IV. Many of the headliners are now major success stories and other bands on the bill shared their admiration of them during their own sets. Together Pangea, a band hailing from Santa Clarita, CA, got their start in the DIY scene that they are now celebrated in. Their high-energy performance had everyone drenched in rain, screaming to classics like “Too Drunk to Come” and “Badillac.”

At the end of night one, it felt like everyone was waiting for the moment for Beach Fossils to finally come on stage. Other than The Other Side of Life (Piano Ballads), a collection of acoustic reworks of their older songs, the band has not released a full length project in five years since 2017’s Somersault. They’ve hinted at new music coming soon: “I’ve been quiet on here because I’ve been busy,” lead singer Dustin Payseur captions a post from the Beach Fossils Instagram in April before later announcing a small Mexico tour and a residency at San Francisco’s The Chapel. At Nothing Fest IV, they played songs from What a Pleasure to Clash the Truth to Somersault. Something about hearing their surfy and hazy songs that are now pivotal to the indie-rock genre underneath the wet overcast of the California sky made their set feel euphoric — everything one could possibly say about how music festivals bring people together was encapsulated in Beach Fossils’ closing set.

Day 2 Featuring 3l3d3p, Death Lens, Destroy Boys, Show Me The Body, STRFKR

On Sunday, Destroy Boys had one of the most energetic sets of the entire weekend. The band has had plenty of time to perfect their orchestration of an audience after an entire spring and summer tour run with Scowl, playing songs off their latest 2021 release Open Mouth, Open Heart. The band dressed as the Addams family (with drummer Narsai Malik as Wednesday, naturally), and the crowd, dressed in anything from Jesus, Finn from Adventure Time, or a slice of pizza, shouted back every word the band sang to them.

“If you have any shame or fear or anxiety about dancing or moving your body,” guitarist Violet Mayugba spoke into the crowd, “I ask and request that you let that go and dance with us.”

This was the ethos of the entire weekend. The festival-goers did everything from dancing the tango, two-stepping, and shaking ass during the two-day excursion. Hyperpop, psychedelia, and hardcore artists paraded the festival as a celebration of musical diversity in the community. Fans of Show Me The Body dashed their way through security to stage dive and front flip off the monitors, and by the time STRFKR came on, it was as if the audience was having a crowd surfing contest with themselves.

Show Me The Body, a hardcore trio based out of New York, was a bone-shaking highlight of the weekend. Every audience member and band member filed into the main stage with eyes wide and mouths agape. With their set clocking in at a mere 30 minutes, Show Me The Body were thrilling, playing new songs off their upcoming record Trouble The Water.

STRFKR's Sunday night set transported everyone to their 2010's nostalgia. With STRFKR's synth-y indie pop as a soundtrack, their closing set turned into what felt like a late-night Scott Pilgrim party. They opened with the first two tracks off of their 2020 album, Dear Stranger, before playing their self-titled classic "Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second." They continued to roll our their hits, including "Reptilians" and "Kahlil Gibran," before ending with a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

When the lineup for Nothing Fest IV came out, it felt like a suburban kid’s Coachella. Almost every artist - from Big Fun to Mexican Slum Rats to King Shelter - was instantly recognizable to a SoCal native. Resident bands across Los Angeles and the Inland Empire with dedicated fans who show up rain or shine permeated the lineup. For just one weekend, Orange County - already a blooming zeitgeist for indie rock music in its own right - served as the center point of the rest of southern California’s independent music scene. Nothing Mag did what they do best: they brought all of this magic to one place.

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We couldn’t be more stoked to have Suriel Hess as our new headliner for our upcoming LA show 🤩 🫶 Not gonna lie, us & Notorious Noise kinda went OFF with this line up & you’re not gonna wanna miss it - ticket link in bio 🎫