It’s been a decade since we’ve had a proper Blowout in Hamtramck. But that drought ends this weekend.
“We all missed it,” says John Szymanski, one of several organizers who helped pull together a formidable festival in a hurry: The 2024 Hamtramck Blowout kicks off Thursday night, bringing together 150 bands that will pack into 17 unique venues across the city over the charmingly chaotic course of three late, loud nights. “The bands missed it, the bars missed it,” says Szymanski, who owns the Outer Limits Lounge and will also perform on Saturday night with SSM, adding that when the idea of resurrecting the Blowout recently sprang up, “everyone was eager to get involved!” The return of Hamtramck Blowout was formally announced last month.
Getting involved, so to speak, also means a little bit more this year, as this iteration of the Blowout will serve as a fundraiser for the forthcoming 44th annual Hamtramck Labor Day Festival.
The history of the Hamtramck Blowout is a long and twisty one, starting in 1998 as a fundraiser for the Detroit Music Awards organized by Metro Times. Though MT eventually split from the Detroit Music Awards, the “Metro Times Blowout” expanded in size and duration over the years, eventually ballooning beyond the borders of Hamtramck into Midtown and even up to Ferndale before it reached an ostensible denouement in 2015. (Metro Times is not involved in this version of the festival.) By 2014, a grassroots “Hamtramck Music Festival” emerged to fill the void left by Blowout, which moved to the summer in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and returned again in 2022 before organizers called it quits.
Szymanski says he worked closely with Konrad Maziarz, the organizer of the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival, along with other enthusiastic volunteers, local sponsors, and music scene movers and shakers to help put this weekend’s lineup together, promising that it’s intended as a full-on reboot, rather than just a one-off experiment. “We definitely hope that this is the first of what will now be an annual thing, for sure,” Szymanski says. “We’ve been getting a lot of good feedback so far. But, ya know, it’s been ten years, so… Is the new generation up for it? I definitely think it is!”
There will be live music at six Hamtramck venues Thursday night, including the Fо̄wling Warehouse, where you can grab a wristband in person and find a printed schedule and map. The festival expands on Friday and Saturday, with 10 more venues, each with unique lineups of local bands performing at staggered set times throughout the night. Attendees could choose to hunker down at one spot for an entire night or ping-pong all across the city and see upwards of 10 bands or more in a single evening.
All-access wristbands are $20, allowing you to walk in and out of every venue for the entire weekend, with proceeds, as mentioned, supporting the 2024 Hamtramck Labor Day Festival. While the lineup could always be subject to a couple of last-minute changes, you can find the full (printable) schedule as well as a list and map of participating venues online at hamtramckblowout.com.
Meanwhile, here’s just a handful of can’t-miss bands performing this weekend, many of which are part of that aforementioned “new generation.”
Honorable mentions: Middle Out (punk) on Thursday at Fо̄wling Warehouse, The Brown Thrasher (Blues) on Friday at Cafe 1923, Quality Cinema Band (indie-rock) on Friday at Outer Limits Lounge, Macho (punk) on Friday at the Polish Sea League, Jackamo (folk) on Saturday at Polka Dot.
