Punk goes stadium rock: Green Day, Weezer & The Interrupters played Citi Field (pics, review)

Making this show slightly less hella mega was the absence of Fall Out Boy, who had to drop off this show (and Thursday's Boston show) at the last minute due to a person on their team testing positive for COVID. If you were attending this show for '90s nostalgia, that might not have seemed like a huge loss, as Fall Out Boy's breakthrough didn't come until about a decade after Green Day and Weezer's, but they're also probably the second most popular band on this tour, and presumably responsible for attracting a younger crowd, so I did wonder if their last-minute cancellation would mean a noticeably smaller turnout. But the Hella Mega tour persevered, and by the time Green Day took the stage, the home of the New York Mets looked pretty damn full. And both Weezer and opening act The Interrupters did some fan service by covering "Sugar, We're Goin Down," with The Interrupters doing about half the song full-band, and Rivers Cuomo playing the entire song solo during Weezer's set.

As for the rest of The Interrupters' set, they were the perfect band to open this kind of show. Their 2018 single "She's Kerosene" (which closed their set) was the first genuinely popular ska-punk single in ages, and in general, they hearken right back to the mid '90s punk era that Green Day and Weezer blew up during. One of their songs ("Broken World") was co-written by Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, and all of their albums are produced by Green Day's old pal Tim Armstrong of Rancid and Operation Ivy. If you've kinda checked out from new music but you're coming to this tour for the '90s hits, you'd probably find that The Interrupters tap into the sound of that era effortlessly and deliver potential hit after potential hit. Every song in their setlist was insanely catchy -- not just "She's Kerosene," their more recent hit "Gave You Everything," and their popular cover of Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy" -- and The Interrupters really knew how to play to a stadium crowd. They looked the part, they were incredibly tight, and they knew exactly how to get the crowd going, even if most people in attendance were unfamiliar with their songs. At one point they joked about how they're now a stadium rock band and did a partial, tongue-in-cheek cover of Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" to prove it, but jokes aside, The Interrupters really do know how to be a stadium band. I wouldn't be surprised if they left Citi Field with tons of new fans.

Weezer followed, and they really leaned in to the whole stadium rock thing. Before they took the stage, they blasted Van Halen's "Jump" over the PA, nodding to the fact that they wrote their Van Halen-inspired album Van Weezer in order to have some actual stadium rock-sounding songs in their arsenal for this tour. They also went all out visually, with the floating Weezer logo flanked by three gigantic lightning bolts, literally dozens of pastel-colored Marshall cabs stacked to towering heights, and six (!) bass drums just to spell out "w-e-e-z-e-r" with one letter on each one. Totally unnecessary! (Yet somehow charming.) If that wasn't enough, Rivers Cuomo took the stage donning a studded leather jacket, mullet, mustache, and V-shaped Jackson guitar, as if he was dressing up as an '80s stadium rocker for Halloween. Weezer have always had this side to them (there's an ode to Kiss on their first record), but that didn't make any of it seem less ridiculous.

As for the songs, it was a typical hit-or-miss Weezer show. As they usually do, Weezer sounded genuinely great when they played the classics (which included half of Blue Album), but they littered their set with way too many late-career duds. I don't know how many Weezer fans are dropping a few hundred bucks a ticket with hopes of hearing "Feels Like Summer," but for me, I'd like to see Weezer put half as much effort into their setlist as they do into their stage props. That said, if Weezer proved anything at this show, it's that their "uncool" songs tend to fare a lot better than their "cool" ones. "Beverly Hills" and their cover of Toto's "Africa" were two of the biggest crowdpleasers of the night. The one Pinkerton song they played ("El Scorcho") went over alright; it got its biggest reaction when Rivers knowingly sang the "I asked you to go to the Green Day concert" line and then paused the song to let the crowd scream.