Blowout. It’s a long story, but I’ll try to be brief. The Hamtramck Blowout is a multi-day local music festival and it’s happening this weekend; as the elongated legend goes, a festival of this scale and focus has long happened around this time of year, but we’ll get to that later.
The basics
Over the course of three uproarious nights, there will be more than 150 bands performing at staggered set times, loaded into 26 unique venues situated within relative walking distance across the city of Hamtramck. You can purchase an all-access wristband, allowing you to enter any venue of your choosing — meaning you can stay at one spot all night, for example, or dip in and out for just a furious 15 minutes. The Hamtramck Blowout presents you with the opportunity to discover, meet, experience, observe and absorb as many bands and artists (and genres and creative personalities) as possible between the hours of, roughly, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. My own personal record, for one night, was 13, and I think you can beat that.
For the local music scene, it’s sort of like New Year’s Eve, Mardi Gras, and Halloween all rolled into one. You can get yourself a special Blowout-produced map to every venue’s location so that you can effectively choose your own adventure. It can be overwhelming, but it’s also supposed to be — because, by design, it’s a chance for you to dive into the literal deep end of the local music scene. You can go see the bands you’ve already heard of or are familiar with, or you can purposefully pick out a random sample of names unknown to you to thus expose yourself to something fresh, something pleasing, or something peculiar.
The backstory
It was first held in early March of 1998, produced by Metro Times and spanning two nights with just 74 bands and featuring soon-to-be-big names like the White Stripes and Eminem. The festival steadily expanded in scale over the years, then ambitiously spread outside of Hamtramck to include venues in Ferndale and Detroit. After MT decided to let it be, it was picked up by volunteer Hamtramck residents (many of them musicians) and was indirectly reborn as the Hamtramck Music Fest — which existed from 2016 to the end of 2022. And while it was long in early March, the Metro Times Blowout moved later into spring for a few years, and even the HMF shifted into August for two of its iterations. In 2024, though, Blowout regenerated once again as the Hamtramck Blowout, now as a fundraiser for the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival.
A lot of local love obviously sustains this madcap music tradition. Konrad Maziarz is co-chair of the Labor Day Festival and part of this year’s Blowout committee, and says organizing something like this is “a surprisingly large task that somehow comes together each year.”
Maziarz adds, “there’s a small-ish group of dedicated volunteers who are mostly musicians — I say mostly because I’m there and I’m not a musician — who all love the event and we wanted to help fundraise for the Labor Day Festival. It’s an event that so many people have fond memories of, and we wanted others to experience it. It brings many people into Hamtramck and into the venues, and we hope that they become repeat visitors to the city.”
Hamtramck Blowout dates and details
Festivities kick off Thursday, with 11 host venues, then expanding to more than 20 on Friday and Saturday night. You can purchase or pick up wristbands at the Fowling Warehouse (3901 Christopher St., Hamtramck), where there will also be 10 bands performing. You can find other wristband pick-up locations at hamtramckblowout.com or by following the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival on Instagram, @hamtramcklabordayfestival. You also have the option to pay a one-off cover charge at a single venue if there happens to be only one lineup you’d like to see.
Bands to catch
There are too many to choose from! Here’s a fun random sample for you:
Indie rock and beyond:
Elspeth Tremblay &and the Treatment (Thursday, Fowling Warehouse, 11 p.m.)
Phased Out (Thursday, Polish Sea League, 11:15 p.m.)
Tears of a Martian (Saturday, PLAV Post # 10, 9:45 p.m.)
Post-punk and beyond:
Eck! (Friday, Polish Sea League, 12:30 a.m.)
Double Winter (Friday, Painted Lady, 12:45 a.m.)
Day Residue (Saturday, Bumbo’s, midnight)
Country, Americana:
Fangs & Twang (Thursday, Fowling, midnight)
The Going Gones (Friday, Ghost Light, 11:45 p.m.)
Loose Koozies (Friday, Port Bar, 12:30 a.m.)
Punk, experimental, avant-garde, etc.:
The Antibuddies (Friday, Outer Limits Lounge, 10:15 p.m.)
Fen Fen (Friday, Club Coyotes, 12:30 a.m.)
Big Life (Saturday, Polka Dot Bar, midnight)
Early sets:
Dyzioek (Friday, Book Suey, 7 p.m.)
Emily Rose (Saturday, Cafe 1923, 5:30 p.m.)
For more information, including the full line up and schedule, see hamtramckblowout.com. Happy Blowout!
