One of Phoenix’s favorite music venues is hitting a milestone in May, and it's going all-out with a month-long celebration.
The Rebel Lounge 10 Year Anniversary series — a rolling showcase of Arizona bands and musicians, slashing across an array of genres — runs from May 1 through June 4 at the venue. The Mesa group Authority Zero will kick off the party with two nights of punk, but scan the calendar and you'll find folk, indie pop, soft rock, metal, and afrobeat. (Organizers have built out a Spotify playlist you can use to preview the shows.)“Rebel Lounge means something different to a lot of different fans,” Chilton says. “There are a lot of different sounds. All of these artists (in the lineup) represent Rebel Lounge very well.”
Ten years will feel like a blink to some Valley music fans. For a generation, the low-slung building on East Indian School Road was known as the Mason Jar, one of the city's most notorious rock and metal outposts. Since promoter-about-town "Psyko" Steve Chilton bought the venue and recast it as the Rebel Lounge in 2015, the stage has hosted some 1,600 concerts, plus hundreds of after-parties and theme nights like Emo Night.
Chilton credits the venue's longevity to creativity, tenacity and diversity. When the pandemic forced the venue's temporary closure in 2020, the Rebel Lounge began serving coffee during the day and hosting livestream concerts with acts like Jimmy Eat World. The Rebel Lounge's reputation expanded beyond the local. In 2024 Billboard named it the country's best venue with under 500 capacity, celebrating the "desert oasis of brick, steel and rust" as a low-key major stop for bands touring the I-10 corridor.
Like the Jar before it, Rebel Lounge has built an admirable record of catching artists on their way up. The likes of Chappell Roan, Benson Boone, Mitski and Men I Trust played sets there before they became national names.
“That’s what Rebel is all about,” Chilton says. “For a lot of artists it's the first place they place in Phoenix before going on to bigger and bigger things. I don’t know who’s going to be the next Chappell Roan that people are talking about in seven or eight years. But hopefully Rebel will be there playing the role in new artists, that we've gotten to play in the last 10 years.”
For more details and tickets see the series page at therebellounge.com/10years.
The Rebel Lounge Ten Year Anniversary Series
Authority Zero
EmoNightPHX
Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers
Sidewinders
Madilyn Mei
The Summer Set
Phoenix Afrobeat Orchestra
Blunt Club
Sydney Sprague
Dropout King
The Revenge
Desole
The Maine
