The Spring Horizons Tour 2026

w/ Heavensgate, Boundaries, The Amity Affliction, August Burns Red

I got in early enough to catch Heavensgate from the start, which I'm glad about, because the room was already doing something weird before they even played a note. There was a pit forming. Not a big one, but it was there — people shuffling into position like they already knew. That doesn't happen for openers. Not usually.

Turns out the crowd had good instincts. The Australians came out swinging and didn't let up. Solid riffs, tight rhythm section, the kind of set that makes you forget you're watching the first band of four. Then their guitarist just... went into the crowd. Guitar in hand, still playing, crowd surfing the whole thing. The floor lost its mind. I've seen a lot of opening sets and I can't remember the last time one ended like that. Good luck to whoever had to follow that.

Whoever was in charge of booking this show knew what they were doing, because Boundaries were not a support act tonight. They were a headliner who happened to go on second. There's a difference, and you feel it immediately — in the way the band carries themselves, in how they hit the first song, in whether the room shifts or stays. The room shifted hard.

Matthew McDougal is something else. I kept watching people around me react to him — not just the pit, but people who were just standing there — and they all had this look on their faces like they were being confronted with something. He's got that rare thing where you can feel what he's doing even if you don't know the words. By the time they finished I heard someone next to me go "okay, that was actually insane." Yeah. It was.

At this point in the night I was starting to wonder if the co-headliners were actually going to top what had already happened. That's a strange problem to have at the two-thirds mark of a show. The Amity Affliction came out and answered it pretty quickly — not by doing anything flashy, just by being really, really good at what they do. Their fanbase in Philly is serious. People were singing along from the jump, not just the choruses but everything, verses included, the works. There's something genuinely moving about watching a room full of people lose themselves in songs they clearly know by heart. The Amity Affliction are that kind of band — you don't just listen to them, you carry them around with you. Tonight the crowd proved it. By the end of their set the bar was sitting somewhere in the stratosphere, and it was August Burns Red's job to clear it.

Photography by Wes Shepherd