When We Were Young Festival gets nostalgic in Las Vegas — PHOTOS

They came, 50,000 strong.

They saw, 53 bands perform for over 12 hours.

They conquered the city’s supply of black nail polish.

On Saturday, emo and pop punk mega-gathering returned for a sold-out show at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, the fest continued on Sunday with the same lineup.

The crowd was a familial blend of punks and parents navigating a massive asphalt footprint with multiple stages and inflatable skulls crying tears of blood. They came dressed like a sexy funeral procession, with plenty of slinky black dresses and fishnets galore along with the de rigueur “Make America Emo Again” tees. The day’s top accessory: a When We Were Young hand fan to try to keep cool, lest all that mascara run like inmates on a jailbreak.

It was a whole lot to take in, this being year four of what’s become a leading destination festival for the scene.

Here are a half-dozen highlights:

Panic! attack

The crowd was thoroughly stoked by his command.

All the nearby casinos?

Maybe not so much.

“Let’s shatter windows on the Strip,” Panic! at the Disco frontman Brendon Urie enjoined the gargantuan audience amassed at the 7-11 Stage, encouraging them to sing along as loudly as possible, leading by example.

“We’re in for a show tonight!” he howled, his voice rising like a jetliner at takeoff.

And with that, Panic launched into “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” the band’s breakout hit from their 2005 debut, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out,” whose 20th anniversary they celebrated by performing the album in its entirety.

It was a big moment: Urie retired Panic in 2023 as the group’s lone original member, and some of these songs, like a punchy “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks,” hadn’t been played live since the album’s original tour cycle 18 years ago.

What distinguished Panic! from their emo peers back in the day was something likely inherent in their Vegas DNA: a love of outsize showmanship, of pomp and glitter, flash and spectacle. They brought real theatrics to the genre via elaborate stage shows, operatic songs and Urie’s verbose, often lacerating lyrics.

Basically, the band has long been the Queen of the emo scene, a point they underscored by covering “Bohemian Rhapsody” late in the show, with Urie absolutely nailing Freddie Mercury’s vocal acrobatics.

Urie has always favored a more-is-more approach, and the show on Saturday evidenced as much, with Panic backed by three-piece string and horn sections, a nattily attired Urie undergoing a series of wardrobe changes as he presided over a career-spanning, nearly two-hour performance that encompassed close to 30 songs.

“I’m overwhelmed,” he said at one point, and the crowd could definitely relate.

Panic came full circle at show’s end, bringing out original drummer Spencer Smith to play with the band for the first time in a decade, performing “Sins” once more, refusing to close that door just yet.

Catching The Cab

It’s a song that encapsulates a career — a career reborn.

“It was us against the world / We’ve been tethered from the start,” The Cab frontman Alex DeLeon sang on new song “Stay This Way Forever,” voicing a familiar theme of the weekend. “We went from sleeping in the van to shows on Sunset Boulevard.”

For The Cab, the song is a means of moving forward by looking back on what got them here: After an extended hiatus, the group returned to play their first hometown shows in over a decade.

“We’ve been hibernating for 10 years, but we’re back,” DeLeon said. “It means a little bit more to us, because we’re from right up the street.”

The show was a family affair: Both DeLeon’s 2-year-old daughter and singer-keyboardist Alex Marshall’s 1-year-old child were in the wings, watching their fathers perform for the first time.

The Cab were greeted like returning heroes from a crowd of thousands at the Ghost Stage, which erupted from the first strains of show opener “One of Those Nights,” the audience continuing to shout along to the R&B-flavored pop punk of “Bounce” and ”Temporary Bliss” to the band’s biggest hit, a show-ending “Angel With a Shotgun.”

“It feels just like it was yesterday,” DeLeon sang at the outset of the playfully funky “Bad,” a sentiment shared en masse on this afternoon.

The queen of the scene

“Who out there never wants to grow up?” Avril Lavigne asked, posing the (rhetorical) question of the night.

Lavigne was introducing “Here’s to Never Growing Up,” doing her part to live up to the song’s title by looking ageless in a black-and-pink leather get-up as she commanded the stage and the crowd in unison.

Lavinge’s set was like a 40-minute, open-air karaoke session, with countless Coors Light cans becoming impromptu microphones for crowd members to sing into, bellowing every word.

The pop-punk boom of the early aughts was decidedly dude-centric, and while Lavigne was certainly more pop than punk, she was scene-adjacent back then with her “Skater Boi” anthems and radio-friendly rebelliousness.

Two decades later, she’s treated like royalty, and was received by a rapturous court on Saturday at the Pink Stage, where she brought out Simple Plan singer Pierre Bouvier to duet on new song “Young & Dumb,” released in May, in which Lavigne looks back on the early years of her career and nights spent “Livin’ like a rockstar / trashin’ hotel rooms.”

“We said this would last forever,” she sang, her words having yet to be disproved.

Getting Loose — and heavy

It was like throwing hands at a baby shower.

When Kentucky metallic hardcore quintet Knocked Loose hit the Pink Stage after four hours of a whole lot of sweet-voiced pop punk up to that point, the contrast was jarring, knuckles bleeding in place of hearts all of a sudden.

“We love the chaos,” singer Bryan Garris noted, and they brought it as one of the heaviest bands to ever play a WWWY main stage, introducing blast beats and guttural death metal backing vocals to the festivities alongside seismic breakdowns, turgid, down-tuned riffing and Garris’ strangulated screams (“I didn’t understand nothin’ he just said!” a security guy exclaimed after one of the band’s songs).

Knocked Loose’s set was so intense that it had to be briefly paused to tend to an overwhelmed crowd member.

“We only have 30 minutes,” Garris noted at the beginning of the band’s performance.

Frankly, we’re not sure the audience could have handled a minute more.

Let’s hear it for the smart, older guys

Bad Religion frontman Greg Graffin, 60, possesses a Ph.D. in zoology and has lectured at UCLA and Cornell.

The Offspring singer Dexter Holland, 59, earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology from USC in 2017. The title, in part, of his dissertation paper: “Discovery of Mature MicroRNA Sequences Within the Protein-Coding Regions of Global HIV-1 Genomes.”

This from the fellow who penned “Pretty Fly for a White Guy,” which Holland and company performed on Saturday, playing back to back with Bad Religion on the 7-11 and Ghost Stage, respectively.

Taken together, the two performances were like an 85-minute history lesson on melodic SoCal punk led by a couple of singing brainiacs who really could be college professors.

“We’d like to play a song from 1993, since this is a day of reflection and sentimentality,” Graffin quipped by way of introducing the moody, midpaced “Struck a Nerve.”

With their heady, hook-heavy, high-velocity catalog and signature multipart harmonies, Bad Religion penned a whole chapter in the Book of Punk Rock, airing favorites such as “Infected” and “21st Century (Digital Boy),” in which they were joined onstage by NOFX frontman and Punk Rock Museum proprietor Fat Mike.

Up next, the Offspring ripped through a turbo-charged nine-song set of punk rock standards, from a show-opening “Come Out And Play” to a show-closing “Self-Esteem,” both songs culled from the band’s aptly titled, breakout third album, “Smash.”

And now for some not-so-smart older guys

Oh, we’re just kidding, Blink-182, who are actually some pretty sharp dudes.

You’d just never know it from their pointedly puerile — yet obnoxiously funny — between-song banter, none of which is fit for print in a family newspaper and most assuredly had many of the moms and dads in the house covering their youngsters’ ears.

For the most part, though, Blink’s repertoire is more sincere than infantile, the potty humor a way of relieving some of the tension inherent in songs about divorce (“Stay Together for the Kids”), unrequited longing (“Down”) and teenage awkwardness (“I’m just scared of what you think / You make me nervous, so I really can’t eat,” singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge confessed to a crush on “First Date”).

On Saturday, they shared Vegas memories that may or may not have been true (“My dad caught me smoking in the Circus Circus arcade when I was 15,” singer/bassist Mark Hoppus recalled) while delivering a tight, equally self-effacing and self-aware 22-song set with a knowing wink.

“Are you guys having fun?” Hoppus asked at one point. “Well, knock that (expletive) off — this is an emo show.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.