Phyoe Thaung
Jul 31, 2026
Co-headliners Silverstein and Story of the Year turned Marquee Theatre into a revolving door of crowd surfers as Camp Screamo arrived in Tempe.
There was a time when discovering Silverstein or Story of the Year meant catching a music video on MTV or VH1, buying the CD after school, and wearing it out before the next Vans Warped Tour stop.
Those records were the soundtrack for plenty of fans who packed Marquee Theatre on July 28 as the Camp Screamo Tour made its way through Tempe, Arizona. More than twenty years after both bands broke through, they shared the bill as co-headliners for a show that felt less like a reunion and more like another night on the road.
Silverstein took the stage first, dressed in matching camp shirts that leaned into the tour's theme before immediately trading the jokes for distortion. "I Am the Arsonist," "Massachusetts," and "Smashed Into Pieces" kept security occupied from the opening minutes as crowd surfers rolled over the barricade one after another. Frontman Shane Told rarely stopped moving, pacing from one side of the stage to the other while the rest of the band matched his intensity.
Midway through the set, Told paused for "Silverstein Says," turning the floor into a game before instructing the audience to start the biggest circle pit of the night. Within seconds, the center of the venue opened into one massive rotating pit before collapsing back together as the band jumped into the next song. The transition from comedy to chaos happened almost instantly, and the audience never seemed to need much encouragement.
The room shifted again when "My Heroine" began. Told stepped back from the microphone, letting the audience handle much of the chorus themselves as voices echoed throughout Marquee Theatre. It lasted only a few moments before the pace returned with "Smile in Your Sleep" and "Bleeds No More," ending Silverstein's set the same way it began: loud, fast, and with another wave of fans headed toward the barricade.
Closing the night, Story of the Year walked into a room that had already spent hours in constant motion and somehow found another gear. The opening riff of "And the Hero Will Drown" triggered another flood of crowd surfers while CO₂ cannons fired across the front of the stage. Even inside a packed venue that had become increasingly humid as the night wore on, the floor never really settled.
Rather than relying only on early material, Story of the Year mixed songs like "War," "Choose Your Fate," and "2005" throughout the set. The latter landed especially well, pairing footage from throughout the band's career with a song that reflects on the years since their breakthrough.
While the screens looked backward, the floor looked anything but nostalgic. Younger fans packed the barricade alongside people who had been following the band since the Page Avenue era, with both groups shouting every chorus the same way.
There wasn't much suspense about how the night would end. The opening guitar line of "Until the Day I Die" drew the loudest reaction of the evening, sending one final surge of crowd surfers toward security as nearly every voice in the building joined the chorus. House lights eventually came up on a room filled with soaked shirts, exhausted smiles, and fans still singing the hook on their way to the exit.