The tour is called Summer School, and the House of Blues Cleveland stop on July 11 ran exactly like it. Class started on time and stayed on time — every band worked a strict performance window, changeover included, and tardiness was not an option. The expectations were laid out at the top of the night via the PA: crowd surfing and mosh pits were discouraged, ejection was threatened for anyone who tried, and free earplugs were available at the door.

While the crowd held plenty of concert first-timers, the demographic didn’t skew quite as young as the tour’s neon branding might suggest. The barricade was a mix of veterans and fresh faces — including a young girl there with her mother, and a ten-year-old in the front row who looked ready to risk it all.

As in any classroom worth remembering, the real curriculum came from the troublemakers. This time, they weren’t hiding at the back of the room; they were running the class from the stage. Band after band tore up the opening administration announcement and showed the newcomers how a real punk show operates: surf the crowd, open the pit, and look out for one another while you do it. Winona Fighter put the lesson into the syllabus outright: if you don’t want to be touched, say so; if someone says so, respect it. The only rule left unbroken was the set clock. Running over meant cutting into the next band’s time and forcing overtime for venue staff — a cost none of these acts were willing to pass along.

Truss opened the night, the local Cleveland band of Hannah Crandall, Eric Kennedy, and Holden Szalek. Heavy on the nu-metal, post-grunge, and melodic-punk lineage of the late ’90s, their set was riff-first and entirely unfussy. Consider it the local act taking attendance, setting the table for the chaos ahead.

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Chase Petra followed as a stripped-down two-piece. The Long Beach band’s drummer and guitarist carried a catalog of raw, quarter-life-crisis confessions — Liminal, Lullabies for Dogs — losing none of their exposed-nerve vulnerability in the process. The duo also found time for some light-hearted hazing, singling out a fan named Kate in the front row and daring her to shake her booty or be “put down” per upper management. Kate met the challenge head-on, earning an official announcement to the room that she was safe. Even the crowd work came with a built-in safety check.

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Games We Play turned their half-hour into a comedy bit with a payoff. Their first song ran long on the sheer strength of frontman Emmyn Calleiro’s relentless stage banter. When the final note struck, the band thanked Cleveland and walked offstage, only to march back out to “play one more song” — and then perform the entire rest of their set. Celebrating their drummer’s birthday, the band donned party hats and folded the celebration into the show. Calleiro cut off his drummer’s solo mid-flight, telling him no one wanted to hear that, before pulling a fan named Lynette from the crowd, crowning her with a birthday hat of her own, and deputizing her on keyboard duty. Amid the theatrics, Calleiro noted the band spent the past year off the road writing a follow-up album now waiting in the wings.

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Winona Fighter pushed the room’s temperature well past where Games We Play left it. Frontwoman Coco Kinnon drove the crowd straight toward the pit, dismantling the venue’s opening caution and reframing the mosh as an act of community. The set’s centerpiece was a cover of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which Kinnon dedicated to both the newbies and the old-school heads, pulling the room’s entire roster into the same moment. Chants of “one more song” followed them offstage.

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South Arcade kept the heat up and answered the crowd just as directly. Vocalist Harmony Cavelle spotted a sign in the front row requesting “Danger” — the 2023 single whose viral TikTok run catapulted the Guildford dorm-room project into an Atlantic Records signing. “What a lovely sign,” Cavelle said, before launching into it. Their setlist, taped to the stage floor like every act’s that night, showed two songs crossed out after printing — the kind of last-minute audible that suggests they saw the sign backstage and rewrote the lesson plan on the fly. The set carried its rule-breaking further than most: the guitarist marched his instrument directly into the crowd to build a circle pit around himself, and Cavelle went further still, leaving the stage to crowd surf on the waiting hands of the audience. When the room chanted for one more song, the guitarist chanted right along with them — fully and visibly aware that the answer was still a hard no.

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Headliners Honey Revenge closed the night, capping a year spent graduating from opening act to top of the bill on the strength of the single “Hot Commodity.” Devin Papadol and Donny Lloyd kept the crowd surfers rolling over the barricade in waves, turning the spectacle into a running competition — a live tally to hold against Cincinnati’s crowd the following night, grading Cleveland’s participation on a white board.

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By the time the house lights came up, the syllabus had done its work. The veterans had made room, that ten-year-old from the front row had caught his ride across the crowd, six bands had run their windows to the minute, and nobody got ejected. The opening PA announcement asked the crowd to behave; the bands taught them something better — how to cut loose without costing anyone else the night. That is the entire pitch of Summer School, and Cleveland passed.

TRUSS
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CHASE PETRA
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GAMES WE PLAY
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WINONA FIGHTER
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SOUTH ARCADE
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HONEY REVENGE
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IDOBI RADIO
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HOUSE OF BLUES CLEVELAND
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