Alexisonfire, Broken Social Scene, Arkells headline Area 506’s 10th year

Organizer Ray Gracewood said that he believes the lineup “truly offers something for everyone,” with the “right balance” of returning stars and new and interesting acts.

Broken Social Scene, an indie supergroup with members of Metric and Stars celebrating the 20th anniversary of their self-titled album this year, anchors a Friday lineup including Nova Scotia-based roots-rocker Matt Mays, Saint John four-piece The Last Call, The Kingston Collective from Kingston, N.B., and Poets and Liars, featuring Saint Andrews’ Kendra Gale.

On Saturday, dance-punk duo Death From Above 1979 and “party metal” punks Cancer Bats, both from Toronto, will go on before Alexisonfire, who hit 1 and 2 in the Canadian charts with their 2007 album Crisis and their 2009 album Old Crows / Young Cardinals. 

Saturday also features Moncton rockers The Motorleague, Pabineau First Nation rapper Wolf Castle with Fredericton’s The Olympic Symphonium, Fredericton indie rock trio The Merci Buckets and Saint John electronic/emo/R&B quartet Today Junior.

Sunday sees Hamilton’s The Arkells, who last headlined in 2022. They follow Montreal’s Half Moon Run, Halifax singer-songwriter Ria Mae, who returns from the 2023 festival and a Waterfront Concert Series spot last year, Halifax alt pop bopper Maggie Andrew, Acadian pop and disco band BAIE, Montreal dance-pop duo Ura Star and Fireball Kid and Saint John alt-rockers Red Cardinal.

Gracewood said that planning for the lineup is a process that stretches as far as a year or more.

In thinking of some of the most memorable performances from the festival’s history, Gracewood said that the Arkells and Matt Mays “are on that list.”

The Arkells going to social media after their first Area 506 appearance in 2018 and telling other festivals to look out for what Area 506 was doing was a big moment for the festival, Gracewood said.

When the festival runs polls each year for which groups people want to see, Alexisonfire always shows up near the top, Gracewood said. Bandmember Dallas Green headlined with City & Colour in 2019.

He said the success of PUP on Sunday last year shows the audience is ready for some heavier music, and said he’s “excited” to see Saturday go in that direction with Alexisonfire and Cancer Bats.

Broken Social Scene is a band Gracewood said he’s been after “almost since Day 1,” and said it’s “criminal to me” they’ve never played in Saint John. Half Moon Run, who use overlapping harmonies and switch frequently between instruments, is also a band they were after for “several years,” said Gracewood.

Of the 19 bands in the lineup, 12 are from New Brunswick, and many have appeared on “second stage” events like the Waterfront Concert Series before, he said. He described Mays and Ria Mae as “people that really build every time they play.”

Last year, Alvvays headlined the festival’s Friday lineup, Our Lady Peace broke attendance records on the Saturday and The Beaches took over after Sum 41 had to drop out. Approximately 12,000 fans came through the gates throughout the weekend, Gracewood said.

Gracewood said organizers have drawn up a list of 10 things that will be different than last year, and there will be “surprises” as the festival approaches.

That will include more public events in the lead-up to the festival, including the week of, as well as payment plans to make attending more affordable, Gracewood said.

Early-bird weekend passes, priced at $229, and VIP passes, priced at $499, have stayed the same price, with the regular pass dropping $10 as part of a “tiered pricing system” that sees the price go up as the festival approaches, Gracewood said.

“Want to make event as accessible and as affordable as possible,” said Gracewood, saying the tiered pricing is to convince people to “commit earlier,” which helps festival planning. Tickets are on sale as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

The music festival, held annually on the New Brunswick Day long weekend, started on Long Wharf in 2016 and moved to Water Street in 2019, where the Area 506 Waterfront Container Village opened in 2022.  Gracewood said an “awful lot of work” has gone into the festival over the past 10 years.

“I think we’ve done a pretty good job of sticking to our vision of bringing the best of New Brunswick to life through music, culture and goods,” Gracewood said. “I think that in 2025, Area 506 means something to people around here ... things happen here, amazing things happen here, there’s great people and working on cool things here.”

Gracewood said that one of the things that “stands out” about the festival’s 10 years is that the sponsors, members and volunteers are “just as committed now as in 2015, when it was just a glimmer in the eye.”

It was in late 2015 when a Facebook post about bringing big events to Saint John led to a meeting with a group of four people upstairs at Moosehead Breweries, where Gracewood worked.

“We got together and kind of questioned the idea of, why can’t we have a marquee event in that city,” Gracewood said. “Ten and a half years down the road from that, here we are here, but that’s where it all started.”

The first year of the festival in 2016 featured Grace Potter, Matt Andersen and Big Sugar, among others.

Since then, the festival has seen bands like the Strumbellas and Tegan & Sara in 2017. The Glorious Sons and July Talk in 2018, Sloan, City & Colour and Interpol in 2019, the Arkells, k-os and Mother Mother in 2022 and Metric, the Sheepdogs and the Sam Roberts Band in 2023.

Gracewood said the festival team embraced the “difficult task” of getting the event off the ground and it’s gotten “bigger and better every year thanks to the continued support” of people around the region.

“We want to make sure everything we do is a reflection of the local economy,” within Saint John, the region or in Canada, Gracewood said. “We feel there’s an awful lot to choose from here, and we can be as independent as we want to be.”

Sarah Tippett, the festival’s director of marketing and events, said she joined the planning committee in 2017 after working with a vendor during the first year of the festival, when the container village was set up and removed specifically for festival weekend.

The festival relies on as many as 100-120 onsite volunteers doing things like ticketing, checking wristbands and helping drive talent to and from the airport, Tippett said.

She said they’ve got support of local groups like the United Way, which gathers as many as 100 individual volunteers annually to serve drinks and collects the tips as donations to charity.

Alexya Heelis, the United Way’s senior executive director for central and southwestern New Brunswick, said they started doing that in 2018.

“It’s a lot of fun, it’s a great way for us to engage existing volunteers but also to recruit and engage with a whole bunch of new volunteers in the community as well,” Heelis said.

She said that the group has raised $96,575 in donations in the six years of taking part, with $8,000 in the first year and $20,000 in the most recent outing.

After cancelling its in-person event in 2020 and running a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival returned with an event in 2021 in socially distanced pods.

That year, United Way’s volunteers carried drink orders out to each fenced-in pod, Heelis said.

“We thought we were going to have a hard time getting volunteers ... but that’s one of the years our volunteers had the most fun,” Heelis said.

The opening of the Waterfront Container Village in 2022 was when “everything started to feel much bigger, much different,” Gracewood said.

The container village, a partnership with Port Saint John, now also hosts an annual concert series and the Boxcar Country Music Festival the week before Area 506. Four hundred thousand people visited the village last year, he said.

“It went from volunteer work off the sides of all of our desks to a full-time gig that has a number of elements to it,” Gracewood said. “Now we work with 30-35 business owners where what we create is their lifeblood, where they set up shop.”

He said those are heavy things to take on, but the “nice part” is that with everyone that takes part from sponsors to attendees to vendors to musicians, it contributes to “this enhancement of what it is to be from this region.”

“We’ve tried to take the Area 506 experience from one weekend of the year to something we can celebrate for five seasons of the year,” he said.