Belmont Closes Out the BYAM 10th Anniversary Tour with a Proper Chicago Homecoming
- SPOONS
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Saturday night Belmont brought the "Between You & Me" 10th Anniversary Tour back home to Chicago for the final night of the run at House of Blues, with Major League, Spite House & all in ur head. (Full disclosure before I get into it because I always think this shit matters: my band Aim High has multiple songs and has played with Belmont before and I’ve followed the band for years, so yeah, I’m probably a little biased here). Whatever. But there was something genuinely cool about watching a Chicago band come back home to close out a tour celebrating the record that really started putting everything together for them.
Between You & Me(BYAM)came out in 2016 and it’s only five songs, which is kinda hilarious considering how much weight that EP still carries all these years later. “731,” “Solitude,” “Shackles,” “Overstepping” and “Minuscule” basically laid out the blueprint for everything Belmont would eventually become. The technical shit was already there, the heavier influence was there, Taz already sounded unmistakably like Taz, and the band was already doing way more musically than most of the pop-punk bands getting lumped in with them at the time.
That’s probably the coolest part of hearing those songs again now though because Belmont has changed A LOT since then without ever really becoming a different band. The self-titled record pushed everything further, Aftermath got weirder and heavier, and by Liminal they were just throwing pop-punk, hardcore, metal, electronic shit and whatever else they wanted into the same blender. Calling Belmont just a “pop-punk band” in 2026 feels kinda lazy at this point. They’re still obviously rooted in it, but they’ve spent the last decade basically seeing how far they can stretch that sound before it stops being Belmont… and apparently they haven’t found the limit yet.
Major League being on this run also made way more sense than just throwing another older pop-punk band on an anniversary tour for nostalgia. They basically disappeared for the better part of a decade, and now they’re back playing shows and releasing music again after more than 12 years without a new song. So you’ve got Belmont looking back at a record from ten years ago while Major League is basically stepping back into the same world after being gone for almost that entire amount of time. And the new stuff doesn’t feel like they’re just trying to pretend it’s 2012 again either, which I respect the hell out of. A reunion is one thing. Actually coming back with something new to say is another.
And that’s why this tour made sense to me beyond the obvious anniversary-tour thing. Between You & Me isn’t Belmont’s biggest or most polished release, and it’s definitely nowhere near the weirdest shit they’ve made at this point, but you can listen back to it and hear basically everything that came later starting to form. That’s what makes anniversary shows fun when they’re done right. It isn’t just “remember when this came out?” You’re basically getting to hear the starting point again after already knowing where the story went for the next ten years.
Then you end the entire run in Chicago. The city the band came from, after ten years of lineup changes, tours, new records, different sounds, bigger rooms and somehow surviving a genre where bands disappear every other week. Ten years in pop-punk might as well be fuckin 40 at this point. Belmont just kept becoming a stranger, heavier, more technical version of Belmont, and closing this tour at home felt like the proper way to put a bow on that first chapter. Between You & Me was the beginning. Ten years later, Chicago got to close it out exactly where it should’ve. Shoutout Taz, Brian, Jason & the entire Belmont team. This was one for the history books. <3
Does BYAM still hit just as hard for you? Make sure you keep up with the band HERE.
All words/photos: @SAUCEWITHSPOONS
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