“It’s time…” A Day To Remember talk Slam Dunk Festival 2025, new music, and three-hour shows

Slam Dunk Festival has long felt like the obvious destination for A Day To Remember. As vocalist Jeremy McKinnon promises, the Florida pop-punk-metallers’ massive and very much overdue appearance in 2025 will level Hatfield and Leeds…

Hey, Jeremy! How does it feel to be making your Slam Dunk debut?
“It’s awesome. We’ve heard about Slam Dunk for years, and the timing just worked out right for us to be able to do it. I’ve never even had the chance to see one before, so I’m super excited!”

You were booked to play headline shows at Hatfield and Leeds around the festival in 2020, which were of course cancelled due to COVID. How wild is it to think that it’s taken five years to finally get there?
“I know! We have UK fans in our comment sections all the time telling us how long it is since we’ve been over there. It’s crazy. You don’t really think about it when you’re the ones [in the band] but it really has been a long time. Time is just passing insanely. We’ve been doing this for so long now, and with how busy this lifestyle keeps you – all the ‘hurry up and wait’, the travelling all the time – it seems that time flies because everything is new all the time. It’s just crazy.”

Slam Dunk has some of the flavour of your own Self Help fests. What’s the best thing about playing on a bill like that?
“Self Help is a little different, because we get to curate the whole line-up. But the cool overlap with Slam Dunk is just being able to see and catch up with people and bands that you haven’t in a long time. That’s awesome. I love that the UK has such a strong festival season. It’s like family reunions every time.”

It’s a big slot for you guys. If the ADTR who first toured the UK in 2008 – and picked up a Best International Newcomer nomination at the K! Awards – could see where you’re at now, what would they think?
“Everything that has happened since that time period is just so far beyond what we thought was even possible. At that point, we thought the pinnacle of what we were going to be able to accomplish was just seeing the UK for the first time. Being on the first international flight we’d ever been on and finding ourselves over there. Not even taking into consideration all the amazing festival offers and places we had to play with such a rich history in our genre. If I was able to go back and tell that band what we’re doing now, they wouldn’t believe it was real. I’d be like, ‘Okay, we’ll see…’”

Have you been plotting anything special to mark the moment?
“We’re kinda going through that right now. We’re in the works of going through three different things, and going back and forth between what all of them are going to do. We’re right in the mix of getting that locked down.”

In terms of what you have been doing, we’ve been watching The Least Anticipated Album Tour unfold online all summer. What have been the stand-out moments?
“As a person, I’m always on the more nervous side of things. I never really expected this to happen, and I’m always asking, ‘What if this is the tour where everybody decides they’ve had enough?’ So that tour blew me away expectation-wise. It’s been so long since we’ve done a big run of real headliners anywhere, and now we’re doing some of the biggest shows of our career. We sold out Red Rocks [Amphitheatre in Colorado] on pre-sale! Seeing that popularity this deep into our career is just crazy. And it’s inspiring. You see so many different people coming to the shows these days. You see families coming. There are actual kids at the shows – 10-year-olds with their families – a whole different generation discovering us at the same time. We’re so fortunate to have a fanbase who’ve not just supported us all these years, but who are now sharing us with their families!”

Some old favourites like This Is The House That Doubt Built and It’s Complicated have been back in the set for the first time in years. Should we expect a similar selection at Slam Dunk?
“I don’t know what we’ll be doing next year. I will tell you that we tried some new things with that setlist. We tried, maybe not to do medleys where we were shoving it in people’s faces, but to space it out a little where we could pack in so much more material by cutting off little sections here and there, all while ending the show in a timeframe that people want, whether they’re a superfan or not. At a point, you’re just like, ‘Damn, I’m tired.’ It’s all about finding that balance where you can fit in the rarities that people always talk about and the songs that people really want to see. That really worked out for us on this tour. The energy was off the charts. So expect us to try some new stuff, even if I’m not really sure what that is yet.”

Just not ADTR goes E Street Band with a three-hour show…
“Does anybody really want to see a three-hour show? If y’all want it, we’ll do it. We actually did it at a special show in New York once, where we opened for ourselves twice. The first thing was acoustic, the second thing was older songs, then the normal set. It was between 30 and 40 songs. The biggest set of our lives. I wasn’t able to talk for three days afterwards!”

It’ll be a first opportunity to play new songs like Feedback. How exciting is it to think what else might have made it into the setlist by then?
“It’s exciting. That song worked great live! Playing the UK in itself is just great, so I’m definitely excited to play some new stuff over there.”

You’ve also announced a couple of headline dates at London’s O2 Academy Brixton after Slam Dunk. Will that be a more intimate showing or something of an encore for the hardcore?
“The idea was to just do something special in London and just grow from there. We’re doing that and seeing what other things might pop up!”

And what else have you planned between now and then?
“As usual, we’re just constantly writing. So we’re just trying to get something together that we think is good enough to be a new record. And once we do that, it’ll be all guns blazing. I know people are ready for us to do that because they’re telling us all the time. It’s like that meme with the guy poking the horse like, ‘C’mon, do something!’ It’s time...”

Slam Dunk returns to Hatfield Park on May 24, 2025 and Leeds Temple Newsam on May 25 – get your tickets now. A condensed version of this interview appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of the magazine.

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