The Afterburn Ohio Music Festival, set to take place at Victory Park in North Ridgeville, Ohio August 14 & 15 will soon be upon Northeast Ohio.
The festival fills the festival void in the region after the fall of Elevation Group’s Laurelive / Wonderstruck experiment met its demise at the end of 2023. Perhaps that festival failed for having TOO diverse of a format (yes, there is such a thing). Maybe the expansion into other markets instead of focusing on making a single festival great? Maybe it was the all around disorganization and execution. “A for effort.” (I guess?)
Nonetheless, the Greater Cleveland area has been without a larger scale festival the past two years.
What makes Afterburn particularly intriguing is the lineup’s ability to hit multiple generations of rock fans without feeling like a collection of random names thrown onto a festival poster. Third Eye Blind brings the massive alternative-rock nostalgia, New Found Glory represents the enduring spirit of pop-punk, Skillet brings the heavier edge, while Bayside and the festival’s other acts fill in the spaces between. It’s the kind of bill where one band might take you back to high school, the next might be a band you discovered years later, and the next could be the group your kids are currently blasting in the car. That cross-generational appeal could ultimately be one of Afterburn’s biggest strengths.
Speaking with one of the festival’s organizers, Joe Borkey ahead of the big weekend, CleveRock gathered the scoop on why Afterburn will be different.
“One of the big things is that Cleveland has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so it’s the city of Rock and Roll. A lot of the festivals that were coming through were missing the mark a little bit,” Borkey said. “They’re bringing in really popular artists. They had their own fan bases. It was pretty awesome for what it was. None of them were really hitting the mark on the rock genre or really focusing on the rock genre and adjacent genres, I guess, that would be under that umbrella. So whether it’s alternative, hard rock, metal, whatever… It just seemed like that there was a little bit of a void on that one. In Cleveland, being the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame city, why not have a rock festival?”
Speaking of Sonic Temple and Inkcarceration, putting on a two-day festival without the firepower (and deep pockets) or festival powerhouses like Live Nation and Danny Wimmer Presents bring challenges. It’s tough to compete in a festival landscape dominated by large conglomerates.
Victory Park gives Afterburn room to feel like a legitimate festival without becoming an exhausting marathon of stages, crowds and conflicts. With a more streamlined format, fans can spend less time worrying about which stage they need to sprint to and more time actually enjoying the music, hanging out with friends and taking in the atmosphere. For longtime concertgoers who have reached the point where they still want the festival experience but don’t necessarily need 14 hours of sensory overload, that could be a very welcome change.
“I don’t really think it’s going up against it. Those are super established. You have hundreds of bands per day, whereas Afterburn is dialed back a little bit,” he countered. “A way to put it would be sort of a more easygoing version of those. For people that are aged out of it, but maybe don’t want to be shoulder to shoulder all day long, this one’s a little bit more easy for someone to go to that still loves going to festivals, doesn’t want to be part of a gigantic crowd, but still have the super notable bands coming through.”
Asked how he and his teammates went about curating the festival’s lineup:
“It’s a lot more fun of a process than people might think because how we started at nothing.You take the team and you sit at a table. We had the genre. People start throwing out band names and then you get to sit there and argue over, ‘No, I want this one. I want this one.’ You start reaching out. Once you get one, it’s like, ‘Alright, we got one! Who is similar to this act?’ It’s not arguing, but it’s a lot of fun back and forth with the team. We knew we wanted to be in the raw genre to start with or pop-punk alternative stuff like that. And it seems like the bands for both Friday and Saturday go pretty hand in hand with each other. But it really just takes one band to say ‘yes,’ and then it’s really easy to go from there.”
While the team’s primary focus is on the upcoming 2026 festival, Borkey was asked about future plans:
“Of course, we always want it to grow. The more people, the more attention from different bands. We just want to keep going, really. Maybe a genre shift? If people seem to really want to lean into rock, then stick with rock, we’re really open to listening to people and their preferences on things, but we know we want to keep this going for the people, especially in Northeast Ohio. Just like we had talked about earlier, it’s missing some kind of festival and we’re hoping that a rock festival is what brings all the people together.”
Afterburn arrives with something to prove — but perhaps more importantly, something to celebrate. This is a festival built by music fans who believe Northeast Ohio deserves a rock-focused gathering of its own. If the organizers can deliver on their promise of a more relaxed festival experience while bringing the big-name bands fans want to see, Afterburn could be the beginning of something much bigger. For anyone who has been waiting for an excuse to spend a summer weekend surrounded by loud guitars, familiar songs and thousands of fellow music fans, August 14 and 15 may be exactly what the region has been missing.
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