Travie McCoy is reuniting with Gym Class Heroes for the 2023 When We Were Young festival, more than 25 years after the group first formed in Upstate New York.
McCoy and Gym Class Heroes updated their social media pages with the news Tuesday as the pop-punk-heavy music festival lineup was announced, with Green Day and the newly reunited Blink-182 headlining the day-long concert scheduled for Oct. 21, 2023. , in Las Vegas. Other acts scheduled include The Offspring, 30 Seconds to Mars, Good Charlotte, 5 Seconds of Summer, All Time Low, Rise Against, Something Corporate, Yellowcard, Simple Plan, New Found Glory, Say Anything, Relient K, Less Than Jake, Thrice. , Saves the Day, Goldfinger, Sum-41, MxPx, Plain White T’s, Lit, Michelle Branch, The Academy Is… and Bowling For Soup.
The event is a follow-up to this year’s sold-out When We Were Young festival, headlined by My Chemical Romance and Paramore.
Presale tickets for the 2023 festival will go on sale Friday, Oct. 14 at 1 pm ET. General admission prices start at $249.99, plus fees.
It will mark a comeback for Gym Class Heroes, who last released “The Papercut Chronicles II” in 2011. The rap-rock group had two top 10 singles, the Supertramp-sampling “Cupid’s Chokehold” (feat. Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy. ) and “Stereo Hearts” (feat. Adam Levine of Maroon 5), and won an MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in 2007.
McCoy, who grew up in the Finger Lakes city of Geneva, NY, formed Gym Class Heroes in 1997 as a teenager with his friends Matt McGinley and Ryan Geise. The group built a following in Central New York by performing a mix of hip-hop and alternative rock at Syracuse University and other schools; other members included Milo Bonacci, who went on to form Ra Ra Riot at SU, and Cornell University alumnus Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo.
McCoy, a 41-year-old rapper also known as Travis McCoy, went solo in 2010 and found more success on the hit song “Billionaire” (feat. Bruno Mars) plus collaborations with Cobra Starship, Taio Cruz, Jason Mraz, and Tyga. . McCoy released a second solo album, “Never Slept Better,” this past summer on the indie label Hopeless Records.
In July, McCoy told Vulture that he struggled with an addiction to opioids in 2012 after suffering a knee injury, and has since done multiple stints in rehab, including after a relapse during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. McCoy also said he first planned “Never Slept Better” to be a Gym Class Heroes album when he started writing it five years ago, but put the band “on hold” because of “a lot of miscommunication and internal madness” and described the split as “ disbanding for the moment.”
“With Gym Class, it started to crumble, and it was hitting me. S—, this is all over ten years. It’s the chronicling of the last ten years of my life. The highs, the lows, the very highs, the very lows,” McCoy told Vulture. “There’s a common thread, and I think it’s overcoming the low lows. The songs that are better are happy and triumphant. Those came from making the songs that weren’t so triumphant.”
The group hasn’t said if any other Gym Class Heroes concerts will be scheduled or if fans can expect new music, but keep an eye on @gymclassheroes’ Instagram and Facebook pages for the next chapter.