The dream of the aughts is alive at The New Colossus Festival

Indulge an oldhead in some maudlin reminisces, won’t you? Time was, New York City was lousy with neighborhood music festivals, low-barrier-to-entry affairs where even a broke 20-something could wander in and out of different venues around North Brooklyn and see a couple shows for cheap, fueled by $4 beer-and-shot specials at the Levee, no obligation to spend hundreds (or more) on a badge, or book a flight or wildly overpriced Airbnb. Back when the biggest corporate bugaboo in Williamsburg was the hotly-debated new Dunkin Donuts on Bedford Avenue.

Since that heady era of the 2000s and 2010s, both CMJ and the Northside Festival succumbed to financial difficulties, mismanagement and rampant accusations of unpaid wages. Many of the venues that used to host these shows have fallen victim to a brutal economic landscape, too; a quick browse of the Northside 2014 schedule is a veritable graveyard of dead institutions (RIP Matchless, Shea Stadium, Brooklyn Bazaar, and many more). The local live music landscape has been worse off ever since. 

Instead of sitting around waxing sentimental into their beers like the rest of us, some veterans of the local music scene are actually doing something about it. Enter The New Colossus Festival, which runs next week (March 3-8) featuring close to 200 bands in showcases at venues scattered across the Lower East Side (think Parkside Lounge, Pianos, Arlene’s Grocery, and the Frances Kite Club, to name a few).

"We want people to want to walk around. I love when we walk around the festival the first couple of days and bands are walking around saying, ‘Oh my god, I’m in New York and playing three shows in New York.’"

“CMJ ended in 2016 and we were all like, ‘God, that just stinks for us,’” said Steven Matrick, a longtime talent manager as well as booker at Pianos, and one of the festival’s co-founders alongside Mike Bell and Lio Kanine. “I was on a panel with all the other talent buyers in the neighborhood and we were all like, we should just get together and do it ourselves.”

The festival, which is designed to be a first stop for bands before they head to SXSW in Austin each March, launched in full in 2019, and got most of its shows in under the wire before lockdowns hit in 2020. After going online-only in 2021, New Colossus has been back and quietly gaining momentum since 2022.

The choice to keep it all within a walkable radius in lower Manhattan was deliberate.

“I’ve been in the New York music scene since 1999. At one point it moved from the East Village to the Lower East Side, then it moved across the bridge to Williamsburg. Then Williamsburg became condo city so it moved to Bushwick, Bushwick became condo city so it moved to Bed-Stuy, and then on to Ridgewood,” Matrick told The Groove. Venues in Manhattan are constantly under pressure from sky-high rents, he added, and primarily make their money from dance parties these days, rather than live bands.

“We were like, hey, let’s bring it back here for one week a year,” he said. “The proximity is so much better [than in the outer boroughs], where you have to take a lot of cabs. We want people to want to walk around. I love when we walk around the festival the first couple of days and bands are walking around saying, ‘Oh my god, I’m in New York and playing three shows in New York.’” 

The name of the festival itself is a nod to the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus” that’s immortalized on the Statue of Liberty.

“The Lower East Side is the birthplace of so much and so important in the history of music in this country, and we want to continue that,” Matrick said. “And Manhattan, man, Manhattan is New York City.” 

Single-day badges run around $93, a  pass for the full week is $185, and there’s also an option for a $250 “pro level” badge that comes with merch, discounts, and “co-founder mentoring regarding touring the U.S. market upon request” (more on that in a bit).

The festival's shows are often structured as showcases (curated by record labels, individual members of other bands, bloggers and other assorted diehards), and consolidating them into a full-blown festival is meant to be a boon to the bands as much as it is to audience members.

Touring is notoriously expensive, and doubly so when you’re a young band staring down the barrel of New York City prices and a lack of local name recognition.

“With New York specifically the expectation is, ‘it will feel awesome to get a New York date on your first tour but it’s probably going to suck,’” said Connor Murray, founder of the Pittsburgh-based record label Crafted Sounds, which is hosting a showcase of bands at Parkside Lounge on March 6. “There are so many good artists, how are you going to pool a critical mass to sit in a room with 100 people?”

With the momentum of a festival, bands that might not otherwise justify making the trek can come to the city. “I can do it on the basis of, ‘Hey, this one’s not going to suck,’” Murray said. “This one band Silver Car Crash in particular has been a cult favorite and a band’s band in Pittsburgh, but they never had tour aspirations [before this year’s festival] because we all know how expensive it is.” 

Organizers also have an eye on the festival as a way to introduce U.S.-based bands to the European market and European bands to the U.S. market, with a near 50-50 mix of American and European bands on this year’s lineup.

Organizers attend 8MMFest in Berlin and Left of the Dial in the Netherlands, and both these festivals have showcases on this week’s lineup. “I love these exchanges,” Matrick said. “There’s a ton of bands from New York that want to tour Europe, and we’ve also helped bands from Europe get agents [here].”

It’s also just a chance for the bands to get to know each other.

“We have this band BRNDA on our showcase that’s playing the EU this summer, and they’re going to be able to rub elbows with other people who can tell them, ‘Here’s where to get vegan food, here’s where to get a beer, you can sleep at my place,’ ” Murray said. “It’s exciting for the label but for the bands, too. It’s a tremendous opportunity to bring that kind of global mass together.”

The full New Colossus lineup is online here (and they’ve also got a Spotify playlist of the week’s bands), and Matrick specifically shouted out a Friday night showcase at Pianos featuring a lineup of UK bands including Feet, Lip Filler and Alien Chicks. Thursday night at Parkside Lounge will be “our first actual punk rock party” along with a showcase curated by the blog God Is In The TV. And Saturday night at Pianos includes a lineup of punk bands from the Midwest.

The drink prices will never be what they once were, but consider this your call to get off the internet and indulge in some healthy aughts nostaliga— with an updated soundtrack.