I got to the PNE Forum just after 5 pm with about ten people ahead of me in the queue. Within minutes the line behind me had started filling in, and it kept a steady pace all the way to doors. By 6:30 it was already wrapping around roughly half the building. What struck me most was who was in it. Rise Against draws a long-time crowd, people who have been coming out since the early 2000s, but Destroy Boys has built something of its own, pulling in a younger contingent, heavily queer, who in some cases had never seen a Rise Against show in their lives. The two audiences stood in the same line, dressed differently, there for different reasons and the night ended up being exactly about that tension. Doors opened at 6:30 and moved smoothly. Most of the crowd was inside by 7.
At 7:30, Speed of Light walked out and immediately made the case that they belonged on this bill. The band is a trio of siblings out of Santa Monica, California eight songs on Spotify at the time of the show. I had listened to all of them in the weeks leading up and I was hungry for more. Live, that hunger made sense. Their recordings are good. Their stage presence turns them into something else entirely, a physical push of sound that got the floor moving almost immediately. The lighting for their set ran in stark reds and blues, keeping the band backlit for long stretches with occasional bursts of white stage light pulling one member at a time into sharp focus. It suited the rawness of what they were playing.
When "Teeth" and "Pain on a chain" landed, the first-chord cheers from the floor told you a pocket of pre-fans already knew every word. Everyone else in earshot found a new band they liked. I heard that exact sentence from at least four different strangers over the course of the night. Most of the crowd hadn't known they were on the bill. That didn't matter by the end of their set.
Destroy Boys took the stage at 8:30. I had been trying to catch this band since 2024, when they were set to open for Mother Mother and couldn't make the date. The anticipation had been sitting with me for a while. Formed in Sacramento in 2015, they arrived with the kind of riot grrrl defiance that doesn't feel like a costume, political, unapologetic and completely at home on a bill with Rise Against. Talking to some of the younger attendees beforehand, Destroy Boys were the main reason for showing up. That tracked.
The five of them used the full width of the stage and the energy was relentless. "Drink" and "Crybaby" were the standouts, songs that work on record but hit harder in a room of several hundred people all moving at once. They didn't play "I just threw glass in my friends eye and now I'm on probation", which would have been something to witness at this scale, but the set didn't suffer for it. What came through most was how fluidly they moved between teenage fury and something sharper, a sociopolitical weight that landed differently in a room this size than it does through headphones. Between songs they talked about how much they love Vancouver and kept checking in with the crowd, making sure people had space and were okay. It came across as genuine. The room responded accordingly.
Rise Against hit the stage at 9:30. Before they appeared, the venue filled with smoke, thick, low-hanging haze that rolled through the floor and up into the rafters. The band emerged as silhouettes behind it, and the effect was earned. This is a group twenty years into its catalogue, on The Ricochet Tour supporting their tenth studio album, Ricochet. They know how to walk into a room.
The production anchored itself in the tour's signature orange, warm and bold against the haze, used to isolate frontman Tim McIlrath during quieter moments and then blown out into full-stage washes when the band opened up. They opened hard and with songs like**"Prayer Of the Refugee"** arriving early and setting a clear temperature for the night. The set arced from there, driving and upbeat through the middle, pulling back into the slower, more deliberate gravity of "Hero of War" before the encore brought the room fully back.
McIlrath dedicated songs to both opening acts. He thanked Speed of Light for what he framed as community, passing something forward and named Destroy Boys explicitly as the next generation of rock. He talked about Vancouver as one of the first cities that ever made the band feel welcome and about songs written here. He spoke plainly about the state of the world and about not going anywhere. The room went quiet while he did it. It had been nearly eight years since Rise Against last played Vancouver, and that absence made the moment land differently than it might have otherwise.
The PNE Forum is an odd room, not your typical venue, but the sound held for all three acts: not muddied, with the right amount of harshness for the genre. For the encore, "Swing Life Away" brought phones and lighters up together from people who had been waiting almost a decade for this and from people who had come out for Destroy Boys and ended up staying for something they hadn't planned on. Both arms raised at the same time.