Four Chord returns to Pittsburgh with big music acts and a beef with Live Nation

Tornado evacuations. Record heat waves. Last minute headliner cancellations. Four Chord Music Festival has been collecting worst-case-scenarios like they’re video game achievements, and yet the Pittsburgh pop-punk bonanza is still standing, in many ways stronger than ever.  The annual fest celebrates its 12th year Sept. 25-26 with a two-day lineup boasting some of the biggest names in the greater scene-kid canon: Pierce the Veil, Knocked Loose, Mayday Parade, Underoath, and nearly 30 other bands will be whipping crowds into action at Station Square’s F.N.B. Stadium (formerly Highmark Stadium).  Since launching in 2014, Four Chord has grown into a nationally recognized institution for melodic punk of all stripes, having hosted many of the genre’s bigwigs as headliners — Blink-182, A Day to Remember, The All-American Rejects, Simple Plan, Yellowcard, and Bad Religion, to name just a few — while also putting on for Pittsburgh’s own local scene. Last year’s fest was their biggest yet, with Blink-182, AFI, Jawbreaker and more tearing up EQT Park out in Washington County. Knocked Loose, part of the Four Chord Music Festival Credit: Courtesy of Pure Noise Records This year’s Four Chord is both a recalibration and reassertion of what it’s always been; it’s returning to a new-old venue within the city limits, introducing a new style of music to the bill, but preserving the same DIY ethos (in spirit, at least) that’s been guiding the fest all along.  The year Four Chord started, pop-punk was in a weird spot. Rishi Bahl had been fronting his Pittsburgh band Eternal Boy (then known as The SpacePimps) since the mid-2000s, which is right when the genre reached its commercial peak before experiencing a precipitous fall-off. By the early 2010s, the kind of pop-punk Bahl grew up seeing at Warped Tour had been pushed back underground, and though new-gen bands like The Wonder Years and The Story So Far were becoming reasonably popular, Pittsb