When I moved to Portland in 2017, I had very little going. My partner and I moved sight-unseen to an apartment in a city that I visited once for a brief weekend. We had a mattress on the floor, a laptop we used to watch TV, and one part-time job between us, but we almost immediately found ourselves in possession of something unexpected: two tickets to Project Pabst. While listening to local radio in an attempt to learn more about my new home, I had called in during one of those Be The Fifth Caller-type segments and, unbelievably, was the fifth caller. This had never happened to me in life before and has not happened since. We saw a not-yet super-famous Lizzo rap and rip a sick flute solo during her midday slot, an ascendant PUP following the release of their rowdy 2016 classic, The Dream Is Over, and a typically suave set from Father John Misty, whose hammy theatrics felt sincerely majestic against the coming dusk.
I had a great time, but I wouldn’t return the next year because the festival itself did not return, shuttered due to financial issues after a bold attempt to expand into multiple cities. A comeback was mounted in 2020 but was abruptly derailed by COVID-19. I had the distinct pleasure of attending the festival’s return last year, bookended by performances from one of my favorite Portland bands, Alien Boy, and a Big Thief set where they unspooled adventurous jams while playing almost entirely new, unreleased material.
Read more: Death Cab for Cutie’s ultimate summer playlist
This weekend, I once again found myself at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on a sunny July afternoon for two reasons: 1. To cover it for this fine publication and 2. Because I was genuinely impressed with the festival’s comeback year. As small and midsize festivals continue to vanish, what’s left are overstuffed megafests designed to appeal to the widest imaginable audience. They tend to run multiple stages at once, forcing you to make difficult choices about who to see. Coachella sprawls across two weekends and 640 acres now. In contrast, Project Pabst is a tightly run ship. Each day is eight to nine hours long. The narrow strip of park along the Willamette River has one stage at either end; when a band at one end finishes, the band on the other end immediately begins their set. There is no overlap, and if you wanted to see every single artist on the poster, you 100% could.
Sam Gehrke
Day 1 begins blessedly overcast. Everyone in attendance knows that the sun will begin to bake us around 4 p.m., and we all savor the cool part of the day. Another piece of Project Pabst that feels intentional and continually improving is their focus on celebrating the music of this city. The inclusion of Pacific Northwest indie-rock mainstays Death Cab for Cutie and Built to Spill is great, but what really rocked me was Portland punk stalwarts Nasalrod and Portland-by-way-of-Florida hardcore act Gouge Away playing the same day as totemic Portland power-pop group the Exploding Hearts. Gouge Away are one of the best live bands I’ve seen in Portland, equally good in tiny bar venues and on the festival stage. The band’s noise-rock and shoegaze influences blend with big, heavy hardcore and create something as pretty as it is punishing, and their 2 p.m. set was a highlight of the day.
On my way across the field to the other stage, I pass a middle-aged man in a “Devo Crew” shirt standing next to a guy in the distinctive red energy dome. The domes are for sale at the merch area for $60. I swing by the Smartpunk Records tent and flip through the selection of vinyl, which is a mix of the label’s own bands, bands performing at the festival, and punk and emo deep cuts. “I went to high school with the guy from Man With Gun Records,” one woman says to the tent staff, holding up a Cap’n Jazz cassette tape with a wheelbarrow on the front. “I had the demo version of this on a tape of a tape. Advantage of being from the Chicago suburbs.”
Near me, people are already beginning to reapply sunscreen. By 3 p.m., the eight-spout water bottle refill station began to draw more traffic. The field was dusty, as it always is, but there was less of a haze in the air than previous years, and the sun and heat felt less oppressive than expected. Little breezes periodically roll through, little breaths of relief. 16 oz PBRs are $5; the big 24 oz cans are $7.50. The age range of attendees is more diverse than I imagined: aging denim vest punks don’t outnumber the young folks clad in more traditional festival attire. Some people are here with their parents. I recognize three of my neighborhood baristas in the span of five minutes.
Sam Gehrke
I make it a point to get up close for the Exploding Hearts, a ’90s band whose brief career ended in tragedy, leaving only one album, but it’s a stone-cold classic. For 20 years after the death of his bandmates, Terry Six rarely spoke about the accident or the band, but in 2023, Six formed a band to play Guitar Romantic, and has continued to perform as the Exploding Hearts on occasion. These are songs I always assumed I’d never hear live, and experiencing them in Portland was a heartwarming delight. Both guitarists play Telecasters, and both are loud, bright, and chiming. People begin to pogo and fistpump during “Shattered (You Left Me).” Later, as he tuned between songs, Six says, “Enjoy seeing God: Iggy Pop.”
FIDLAR, who also played in 2017, have an infinitely likable juvenile charm. After their first song, singer Zac Carper says in an affected British accent, “Thanks, man, we’re called the Damned,” something he repeats several times throughout the set. They’re always trying to find new ways to get the audience moving in between silly bits: “First rule: Girls only mosh pit! Second rule: If you see a dude in there, fuck him up!” This works, and a tornado of women forms in the center of the crowd. Later, they try (with mixed results) to get every crowd surfing during their last song. Across the field directly after their set, I watch the Chats get more crowd surfers in the air with much less prompting. They cover “Rock and Roll All Nite” at roughly twice the speed of the original.
Sam Gehrke
Right at 6 p.m., Mannequin Pussy take the stage to NLE Choppa’s “SLUT ME OUT 2.” Singer Missy Dabice struts out in a red bra, newsprint capri pants, and kitten heels, a chain hanging from her belt. The band’s searing punk feels perfectly at home on the big stage. Dabice warns the audience that they’re going to use their time onstage to be explicitly political, and if that was a problem, then they should take this moment to go “get a fuckin’ beer.” “It is not antisemitic to call for a free Palestine,” she continues. Shortly after, bassist Colins Regisford takes a moment to say, “I want to dedicate this song to all the Black and Brown people in the crowd… while [I’m] at it, I want to give a hefty fuck you to ICE. FUCK ICE.” A recorded clip served as a segue into their next song and a theme for their set: “I do love America; does America love me, is the question.”
The crowd assembled for Devo is the largest for any Project Pabst act I’ve ever seen in the daylight. The packed crowd is a sea of red energy domes. I’m jostled back and forth by people surging deeper into the crowd and overwhelmed attendees squeezing back out, but the mood is jubilant. Devo begin with an extended video projection that leads into the band entering in black jumper outfits emblazoned with the energy dome logo and “REVERSE EVOLUTION” on the back (the first of several outfits). “Everyone here tonight… WHIPS IT,” Mark Mothersbaugh shouts just a few songs into their career-spanning and life-affirming set before they jump into the monolithic single. As I walked around the outside of the fence to get some additional views of the stage, people lined the sidewalks, dancing alone or in little groups, singing “WHIP IT. WHIP IT GOOD.”
Sam Gehrke
Despite the truly massive crowd for Devo, by 7:30 p.m., at least a hundred people had assembled in front of Iggy Pop’s stage an hour before his set. Iggy also performed in 2017, and somehow looks exactly the same, has the same amount of energy, and wore the same number of shirts (zero). He’s a performer who gives way more than the going-through-the-motions energy you get from many legacy acts. He’s onstage to tear it up, and he does. The headline of Iggy’s set is the live debut of “Superman,” a song having a robust second life since being used for the end credits of James Gunn’s new Superman movie.
Day 2 begins sunnier and warmer than Saturday was, a foreshadowing of the sultrier temperatures that await us that afternoon. At 2 p.m., Dustbunny kicks out a sunbaked set that had little tiny bits of shoegaze and slowcore in their shambling rock, but never fell into any kind of genre revivalism or predictable patterns. During one of their brief breaks between songs, singer Chloe Flores says, “I’m just gonna be sincere up here, which I don’t normally do: Today I’m just extra grateful to be a part of this… As the world grows ever more cruel, community is more important than ever.”
Sam Gehrke
Clad in black denim and large fingerless black-knit gloves, Sam Austins puts on a sultry performance, slinking across the stage and crooning before pitching sharply up into abrupt shrieks. “How sexy can we get?” Austins yells at the crowd. “Do you feel sexy today?” His performance is a genre-blending whirlwind and is, in fact, very sexy.
At 4 p.m., it’s approaching the hottest part of the day, and the small patches of shadow have not yet begun lengthening, but the heat is doing nothing to dampen everyone’s enthusiasm for Wednesday. The twangy indie-rock group have quickly developed an airtight catalog that bridges the distance between achingly pretty and cacophonous, often within the same song. Singer Karly Hartzman is commanding and compelling, and between songs she takes slugs from a full bottle of Bulleit whiskey. They introduce their new guitarist, Spider, who is taking over the role of MJ Lenderman. The set rips; every song feels like a highlight. “We’re gonna play a brand-new one, unreleased,” Hartzman says. “This is about a friend who was rumored to give a boy a handjob under a desk in AP U.S. history.” Dropping the sardonic dryness for a moment, she makes it clear where the band stand: “It’s kind of hard to believe that our tax dollars are still funding Israel killing civilians… I want to say, as a band with multiple Jewish people in it, we are wishing for a free Palestine.” They end with another new song where Hartzman drops the guitar to roam the stage like a hardcore frontperson, falling to her knees and screaming into the mic.
Sam Gehrke
Cap’n Jazz’s freewheeling emo proved that you can return to the music you made as a teenager and find something truly beautiful there. To my own surprise, I remember every song, and a small but enthusiastic contingent of cheering fist-pumpers stands up against the barrier. Tim Kinsella roams the stage, climbs on the barrier, hands the mic and a tambourine to enthusiastic fans, occasionally reads songs off a printed sheet of paper that he crumples and throws into the crowd as soon as the lines are finished. Despite the heat, he wears a “Free Palestine” long-sleeve with a large red “FUCK TRUMP” sticker on it. Before they start their last song, he shades his eyes and squints into the crowd. “Hey, does anybody have my tambourine?”
Built to Spill play exactly the set you’d expect them to if you’ve seen them any time in the last decade: Doug Martsch barely speaks, instead moving steadily from song to song, saving the time for extended jams at the end of most songs. A hat on the floor by an amp reads “WOMEN WILL SAVE THE WORLD.” “APATHY STILL KILLS” is scrawled on a road case. They sound much bigger than a three-piece should. Nothing is backtracked or filled with keys or prerecorded noise — it’s just an incredibly tight band led by one of the most virtuosic and influential guitarists in the history of the PNW. They rip a gorgeous version of the Halo Benders’ “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain,” and I think to myself, “This is my favorite band.” Bands like today’s headliner, Death Cab, began as pure Built to Spill worship, and it’s impossible to overstate the band’s importance and the power of their legacy in this part of the world.
The Japanese Breakfast set is further proof of Michelle Zauner’s artistic vision. She roams the stage in a dress of gorgeous gauzy tendrils and sunglasses with a single pearl dangling from one lens. The stage is decorated with painted waves and anchored by a gigantic Birth of Venus seashell in the center, where she frequently sits to croon into the mic. Zauner is a native of Eugene, Oregon, and she takes the time to gush about seeing Built to Spill and Death Cab shows in the aughts: “Not to date myself, because I am 20 years old.” She shouts out her two best friends from high school who are in attendance. Even on a festival stage, she’s insanely personable and charming. She plays beautiful pop music full of wit and yearning, but it somehow feels like it’s for everyone in the field and for you individually.
Sam Gehrke
The whole festival closes with a headlining set from Death Cab for Cutie, a band with deep PNW roots: After forming in Bellingham, Washington, they became one of the first releases on iconic Seattle label Barsuk Records. They’re incredibly dialed and surprisingly athletic. Ben Gibbard jogged from one end of the stage to the other as he played, dressed all in black and strumming his guitar with the intense authority of Jim Adkins. The bass was loud and present in the mix, and you really get a sense of how much work it does in those songs when you can feel it in your chest. “I Will Possess Your Heart” and “What Sarah Said” unfold gracefully into extended instrumental jams, while career highlight “Cath…” rocked harder than almost anything I heard all day. During acoustic fan-favorite “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” Gibbard pauses to lead the crowd in a group singalong. “I’ve never tried such a high-wire act as leading a singalong at a festival,” he says wryly. “Very assumptive on my part, and if it goes poorly, I’m never doing it again.” It did not go poorly. The crowd carries the chorus together as the band drop away, just our voices together in the night, floating out over the Willamette River.
