A Crash Course in Discovery and Community: Summer School Tour in Boston
- Alder Boutin
- Jul 20
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 24
An assembly of black and neon buzzed outside House of Blues Boston on July 7. These fans were eagerly awaiting the six-band pop punk Summer School Tour, headlined by Honey Revenge. As the evening ran its course, Summer School would champion fans in discovering new music and lifting each other up (both figuratively and literally).
Lively mosh pits emerged with tutoring from Boston’s own Ringpop!. Chase Petra followed with a resounding proof that the Venn diagram overlap of emo (punk) and emo (sad) is possible and magical. Games We Play delivered an impassioned seminar on rediscovering meaning in art, before Winona Fighter’s masterclass in kinetic stamina and South Arcade’s study of channeling nostalgia. Honey Revenge closed the night with a presentation on the power of synchronized high kicks.
Honey Revenge headlining Summer School is a callback to the tour’s first season in 2024, when the duo opened. Now, Honey Revenge passes the torch to each night’s local opening act. “Every band you see here started out somewhere: in a backyard, at a bar, or at a local show,” frontwoman Devin Papadol said, praising Ringpop!’s performance. “New music is out there. You gotta go find it!” Her words align with the Summer School ethos of fostering discovery. The tour’s set times rotate each night so fans are more likely to be exposed to bands they haven’t heard. In between bands, music videos from up-and-coming pop punk artists illuminate the stage. (Tally Spear, Like Roses, and rosecoloredworld were immediate additions to my own playlists.)
Summer School’s dedication to shaping an inclusive scene appears in the gender diversity of the lineup, and in the audience connections curated by each band. Hunter Allen of Chase Petra instructed, tone grim but eyes twinkling, that the crowd simply must “shake ass” during “Soda Pop” to save the life of one (very lucky or very unlucky) audience member. Games We Play volleyed Diet Cokes into the crowd, then brought a fan onstage to join “Silver Lining” with a simple piano accompaniment.
Winona Fighter’s Coco Kinnon scrambled over the barricade to crowd surf, and South Arcade’s Harmony Cavelle offered her microphone to the front row for the call-and-response in “stone cold summer.” Devin Papadol danced through the crowd during “Worst Apology,” then called a fan onstage to sing along to “Are You Impressed?” (Years ago, Papadol recalled, she’d been pulled onstage by a favorite band, and she hoped to pass that transformative experience forward.) Between sets, a recorded message from Honey Revenge cautioned against tinnitus and encouraged fans to retrieve free earplugs from their merch table.
Chase Petra got candid with meandering rhymes and offbeat analogies. “Last night,” Hunter Allen sang, “I cried enough to make the Pacific blush.” Her soulful lyrics juggled the discordance of selfhood and success, yet Allen didn’t hesitate to bring her convictions to the stage: She kept punk political, voicing support for Palestine and denouncing ICE. Chase Petra’s most recent release, “Your Life Is Worse,” closed out the set, lamenting a broken connection with an emotionally aloof flame.
Games We Play frontman Emmyn Calleiro took us on his journey of self-discovery. “I didn’t like the music I’d been putting out,” Calleiro explained. Those earlier songs had been collaborative efforts, and he had doubted his ability to craft lyrics alone. This year, though, he had challenged himself to write a new song every day. He takes a ferocious pride in the resulting labor of love: I Wish I Never Quit, his upcoming album. “I put everything into that album, and I showed it to my best friends and they didn’t like the album at all!” he laughed. “But I like the album!” Sometimes, the irresistible new music you discover might just be your own.
Winona Fighter spoke fondly of their roots in the Boston music scene, pouring love back into the city that “raised” and “shaped” the band. “My call to action for you: look after one another,” Coco Kinnon rallied, “‘cause all you have is community!” In true Winona Fighter fashion, Kinnon’s rules of consent and safety were delivered with the stipulation that any offenders could expect her to “beat [their] ass outside to the sweet sounds of Noah Kahan” (who was performing across the street at Fenway Park). The band’s newest song, “Bombs Away,” echoed this sentiment in earnest: When oppressive, divisive systems “fuel the fire just to say you poured the gas,” Winona Fighter’s community will “start a riot” in response.
Before turning the House of Blues stage into their personal trampoline, South Arcade performed a special acoustic set at the local Guitar Center. Here, their bold, high-energy tracks were stripped to showcase Harmony Cavelle’s clear vocals—and a foot tambourine wielded enthusiastically by drummer Cody Jones. Audience requests yielded a mix of recent hits, older favorites, and the debut of an unreleased song. “I used to cut off my wings just to make you feel weightless,” Cavelle sang in the latter, an ode to the push-and-pull of authenticity and fame. Normally rowdy fans leaned forward in chairs; tapping feet and (at the band’s request) imitating sound effects. Later at House of Blues, South Arcade cranked the production level back up. Harry Winks and Ollie Green jumped in mesmerizing unison, flanking Cavelle in her signature bikini-top-big-shorts combo and wraparound sunglasses. At one point, Green lifted his bass to reveal the wry message he’d taped on the back: “LIKE A BOSS-TON.”
“Boston, I know we’re at a show, but can we pretend we’re at a club?” Devin Papadol asked between songs from Honey Revenge’s upcoming album Loving and Losing. The Honey Revenge version of a club, as it turned out, was one big karaoke party with song lyrics onscreen and a conga line snaking through the pit. “Butterfly Effect,” a new favorite of Papadol’s, wrestled with the urge to control what can’t be controlled. “I want to know that I can choose whether I love or lose,” she sang—an artful reference to the album title. The band’s next single, “Sunday Scaries,” featured her witty wordplay in full force (“I’mma throw up both my hands and throw up in the sink”) as guitarist Donny Lloyd hyped up the audience with a contagious grin. During “Habitual,” a large whiteboard was used to tally the number of crowd surfers. The rainbow light-up sneakers and platform heels that tumbled above the crowd at an escalating rate felt like a metaphor for Summer School’s uplifting sense of community.
Don’t miss the final dates of Summer School Tour across the U.S. this month!
Honey Revenge
South Arcade
Winona Fighter
Games We Play
Chase Petra
Ringpop!
All photos by Alder Boutin for Zany Waves
