Show Review: Highlights of Aftershock 2025!

Review by:
Alan Ralph @ConcertGoingPro and Emily Anderson @emilyphotoadventure

Photos by:
Alan Ralph @ConcertGoingPro unless otherwise stated

Nearly one year ago, at the very end of Spinning Platters’ Aftershock 2024 review, this question was raised: “West Coast’s Biggest Rock Festival had such a stellar lineup this year, HOW are they possibly going to outdo themselves in 2025?!?!” 

If one hundred people were asked if 2025 was better than 2024, there would undoubtedly be one hundred different answers and opinions. Aftershock 2024 was so exceptionally good and a heavy metal fan’s wet dream – Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Slayer, Pantera, Slipknot, Mastodon, Anthrax, Clutch, Ministry, Body Count and more! Fans of other genres of rock, punk, and loud music were still out in force, as Aftershock 2024 set an attendance record of 40,000 people per day, but may have felt neglected by the sheer amount of metal that closed every night of the festival.

For the 13th annual Aftershock in 2025, promoter Danny Wimmer Presents (DWP) altered the overall lineup to cater to the rest of those fans while still appealing to the heavy metal fans, by combining every Warped Tour, Ozzfest and Rockstar Mayhem Festival lineup, put it all in a blender, and poured it in a tall glass of Discovery Park for four days of the best rock, alt-rock, metal, 2000’s nu-metal, hardcore, and pop-punk bands, all in one place at one time in the outskirts of downtown Sacramento!  

For the Aftershock 2025 lineup, DWP made sure to cover all the genres with top tier bands Blink-182, Korn, Deftones, Bring Me the Horizon, Marilyn Manson, Good Charlotte, A Perfect Circle, Bad Omens, Turnstile, Gojira, and Rob Zombie. Filling in the middle of the poster was a stellar lineup of Knocked Loose, Mudvayne, Lamb of God, Three Days Grace, Kerry King (of Slayer), Machine Head, Hatebreed, All Time Low, GWAR, Dream Theater, The All American Rejects, Slaughter To Prevail, Yngwie Malmsteen and so much more.

To plagiarize our own words from last year’s review, Aftershock is also a bit of an endurance test. There are the crazy fans who run in as soon as the gates open and stand at the barricade for basically 11 hours, with no food or even the means to leave to find a restroom (because they’ll never get their spot back). Security did hand out plenty of water up there though so that nobody passed out in the 80° heat! There are others who try to take in as much as possible by going from stage to stage to stage all day long to see as many bands as they can. Many just get drunk and sit around on their picnic blanket or at the VIP section tables, while others take it all in stride and hit up the myriad of food trucks, beer tents, alcohol and cannabis vendors… all while dealing with a rainy festival opening that turned Discovery Park muddy for most of the rest of the weekend.

Then there’s Spinning Platters. As members of a fairly sizable contingent of media onsite to cover all things Aftershock, our crack team of reporters hardly stopped at all for the entirety of their four days here. To assist the press as a whole, DWP provided a little spot in the back corner of the VIP section known as the Media Lounge. This lounge was also connected to a backstage Artist entrance, where many of the bands had an opportunity to enter and participate in interviews and photo ops.

Those interviews are typically set up in advance by each artist’s own publicist (if they have one) yet with over 100 bands appearing, Spinning Platters had received only a couple of requests prior t0 the week of the festival. With another dozen last-minute requests showing up a day or two before Aftershock began, by this time travel plans and schedules were already made, so only one prearranged interview took place… with an intergalactic band that traveled all the way from Antartica… very worthy of being the sole interview this year!

For each of the last two years (2024, 2023), Spinning Platters presented a long, articulate, engaging, and entertaining review that flowed effectively from the first day of Aftershock to the final day. Due to current time constraints and wanting to publish this in a timely manner, this year’s format will be less storybook and more Highlights and Lowlights…

Highlight: Amtrak. Spinning Platters new preferred mode of transportation for all things Aftershock! This was very convenient and affordable for the relatively short ride between downtown San Francisco and downtown Sacramento. No more worries about renting a car and filling the tank and where to park every day and all that… and it was only $35 each way!

Highlight and Lowlight: City of Sacramento Regional Transit (SacRT) Shuttle. It’s impossible to know if it was SacRT’s fault or DWP’s, but someone dropped the ball on the shuttle (and the evening light rail) schedules. While it is tremendously appreciated that a free shuttle is provided all day long to ferry attendees between a downtown pick-up location and the south Jibboom St. entrance of Aftershock, the shuttle schedule definitely should have started an hour earlier at 10:00am, for those who like to be first in line when the festival gates opened at 11:00am (first shuttle was actually six minutes late one morning). This meant that those trying to get in first and early did not get in until roughly 20 minutes after doors.

Highlight and Lowlight: SacRT Light Rail. Free to use all weekend long for all Aftershock attendees, this was massive for being able to get to and from Spinning Platters weekend headquarters which was located several miles east of Discovery Park. Except for one thing… if memory serves correctly, for at least the last couple of years, there was never a need to leave the festival early in order to catch an after-show light rail to return to HQ. The last Gold Line train this year arrived every night at 10:54pm, meaning that anyone who relied on public transportation and stayed east of downtown HAD TO leave the festival by around 10:15pm in order to make it back to a shuttle to get to the light rail station before that last train left (the last Blue Line north/south train was 20 minutes later, which would have been a little better for anyone headed in those directions). Running one extra late train on Friday and Saturday nights, when Deftones and Korn didn’t even finish until 10:55pm, would have been immensely helpful to those who actually like to watch more than half of the headlining sets.  

Lowlight: Rain! The gates of Aftershock opened at 11:00am on the first day to a steady rainfall that did not look as if it was going to let up anytime soon. Every early band, including Dry Kill Logic, Left to Suffer, Hot Milk, The Ataris and Forbidden performed to wet crowds. The inclement weather did finally subside, and the sun came out, but the damage was done. Raindrops dripped from roofs of stages, trees and most other structures for much of the day, as well as wet grass and mud throughout the rest of the weekend… but it certainly was better than the 90° heatwave of Aftershock 2023! 

Highlight: In the mid-1990’s, Korn and Deftones popularized nu-metal, so it made perfect sense to have these early pioneers headline several of the days over the resurgence of the supporting cast of late-90’s / early-2000’s era nu-metal bands like Snot, Spineshank, Static-X, Kittie, and Dope! If only Powerman 5000 could have also performed… 

Highlight: Bay Area Thrash Metal represented to the fullest! San Francisco is merely 90-minutes from Sacramento, and it was amazing for DWP to invite nearly a half-dozen Bay Area thrash legends Testament, Exodus, Death Angel, Forbidden, and Machine Head (all of whom were home and not even on tour!) to hop in their cars and drive in to lay waste to the extended Bay Area hometown crowds. In addition, thrash icon Kerry King of Slayer also performed, whose band features three of Bay Area’s finest thrash musicians Phil Demmel, Mark Osegueda, and Paul Bostaph.

Highlight: Turnstile’s 15-song set featuring six from their new album Never Enough and seven from the phenomenal Glow On. Musically intense, they played in silhouette and focused the lights and cameras on the crowd. The main video wall rarely showed the band and instead showed frequent random crowd shots (including repeats of some people), grainy overhead shots of the mosh pit, vertical color bars, absolutely nothing (white screen), and a static shot from a camera tripod directly behind the drummer that mostly showed his back and his view of the stage and crowd. Turnstile doesn’t need video walls to showcase their talents, as their show was all about the fans and the response was mutual… and one hour was not enough! 

Lowlight: A Perfect Circle did not use the two big video screens that are on the left and the right sides of the stage. With their logo or other graphics shown on the main video wall behind the band, attendees watching from a reasonable distance away from the stage would have seen just about nothing of the actual band members that were on the stage performing the music.

Highlight: Bay Area illustrator and cartoonist Jay Howell, character designer of the animated series Bob’s Burgers, offered live portrait sessions at Aftershock and turned real-life people into cartoon characters, and some of the bands even got in on the action. Berkeley-based emo/indie band Mom Jeans., whose 2016 song Edward 40hands actually used a sample of dialogue from an episode titled Purple Rain Union, seemed absolutely delighted to sit with Jay after their prime Thursday afternoon mainstage slot.

Highlight: Another incredible early-2000’s band Chimaira was back in northern California for the first time in at least 12 years. They toured all the time back in the day and Spinning Platters has witnessed their show 18 times from 2001-2010!

Lowlight: Performing in direct sunlight. This cannot be avoided for most of the afternoon time slots on any stage, and any band who has ever played outdoors should know to just grin and bear it. Standing on the side of the stage during Static-X, bass player Tony Campos could be heard yelling to his bass technician between songs “I hate direct sunlight!” One song later, he yelled again “The sun sucks!” A couple of days earlier, upon walking off the stage after his set, Yngwie Malmsteen muttered out loud something to the effect of “F* Me!” while wiping the sweat from his forehead. Thankfully, the viewing areas on the sides of all stages were mostly shielded from the sun, so Spinning Platters did not leave the festival this year with any sun burn!

Highlight: Speaking of Yngwie Malmsteen, he Unleashed the F*king Fury! His setlist even had “Solo” listed as one of the dozen songs he performed, but really, the entire set was one extended guitar solo. Dragonforce played on the same stage the next day, and between the two of them, there was probably more guitar notes and riffs than from the entire main stage lineup of any day (or even all four days combined)! 

EXTRA SPECIAL Highlight: It is generally a courtesy to prepare in advance for any interview with any band… perhaps with the one exception being GWAR. Here’s the whole thing, all four minutes of it, completely unedited and unfiltered. Knowing full well that they always have plenty to spew about the pathetic humans that attended Aftershock and that live on this filthy planet, Spinning Platters first and nearly only question was simply “What’s going on in the GWAR universe?”

[Spinning Platters E.A.] This will be the first time I’ll see you in person. Is there anything I should bring or prepare for?

[Blöthar and Gradius] Yeah, you should definitely wear one of those N95 masks because we all have COVID right now. We also have malaria too, so you’re going to get that right now. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. And you should probably bring a wet suit or something. You’re probably going to get wet. I mean, I realize you’re going to get wet. And that’s because the ladies are always dripping. That’s right. Skirts all over the place. Yeah, I was going to say that. Yeah, yeah. I know you’re wet now. Wait till you see us really play some rock and roll. That’s when the ladies get going. That’s where all the goo comes from. Oh, yeah.

[Spinning Platters A.R.] I saw Gwar on the NPR Tiny Desk.

[Blöthar and Gradius] Yeah. I watched that video a couple of times. Yeah, we didn’t have a lot of access to female ejaculate during that performance. However, today! Oh yeah, in droves! In droves, right? Is that a saying? What? Ejaculate in droves? I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right. 

[Blöthar and Gradius] You know, we’ve been cutting off the heads of some political figures. Yeah, and that’s been causing a stir. I’m kind of of the mindset that you should, like, keep politics out of art and music completely. I don’t really see what the big deal in that. What is the big idea there? It’s like Rage Against the Machine. I don’t know, I mean, people act pissed off that war is killing people. What do they expect? It’s what we do. What we’ve always done. I read the articles about, like, who’s never, like, who has never seen you do that? Like, how did they not know? Posers! Yeah, yeah. And 11-year-olds. Yeah, ding-dongs. Yeah, ding-dongs. I mean, well, I mean, it’s just people that obviously have never seen war. Although, I think it’s a sign that, you know, we live in a very politicized time.

[Blöthar and Gradius] I mean, 40 years, we’ve been lopping the heads off of anybody. I mean, believe me, when I say we’ve killed anybody, you should listen, there’s a war song called The Litany of the Slain. It lists all of the people we’ve killed, and it’s an impressive list. Some of them we regret killing. Princess Diana, maybe not the smartest thing we ever did. But it was funny when we did it. That’s right, yeah. And Marilyn Manson too, who’s here today. Yeah, yeah. That was cool. We ripped his face off, or her face off, I don’t know. It’s tough to say. It’s tough to say. It’s face off. I don’t even think they care. Speaking of face off. Their face off. When’s the last time you guys watched that one? Johnny, Johnny, what’s his name, Nicolas Cage? His Face/Off is good stuff.

[Spinning Platters E.A.] What’s it like in your intergalactic universe?

[Blöthar and Gradius] It’s a lot sweaty. Sweaty. I mean, there’s a lot of dumbass humans everywhere we go. Yeah. And that’s annoying. It smells bad. Yeah, I mean, we’re trapped on this Earth right now. We’ve been trying to get off for the last 40 years since we woke up from Antarctica, you know, that whole thing. It’s going very slowly. Yeah. It’s like Gilligan’s Island. You just keep, we almost get off. I put on a coconut bra and the next thing I know, we’re stuck again. Then we’re gang-banging Blöthar, because we can’t resist. I’ve got a coconut bra and a grass skirt. Then we’re all getting off, but not getting off on the island, you know. 

[Spinning Platters A.R.] Thank you for your time.

[Blöthar and Gradius] No, thank you. Give me a hug. Give me a hug. Come here. Come here, fella. Come here. Come here, fella. Oh, aren’t you cute?

 

With real life persisting quickly on the horizon come Monday morning, it was time to bid Aftershock 2025 adieu and look forward to 2026’s endurance test!