NEPA Scene Staff

Dropkick Murphys and The Menzingers rock Mohegan Arena in Wilkes-Barre on March 11

Dropkick Murphys and The Menzingers rock Mohegan Arena in Wilkes-Barre on March 11
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From a press release:

Today, platinum-selling Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys announced the full list of 14 cities on their next St. Patrick’s Day Tour and Wilkes-Barre is one of them – the only Pennsylvania stop on their annual holiday run in 2025.

Scranton punk band The Menzingers will not only serve as direct support at Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza on Tuesday, March 11, but the entire tour that kicks off on Feb. 26 in Huntington, New York and wraps with four concerts in Dropkick Murphys’ hometown of Boston, Massachusetts on March 14, 15, 16, and 17. Teenage Bottlerocket will be opening as well.

Tickets go on sale this Friday, Oct. 25 at 10 a.m. via ticketmaster.com and in person at the NBT Bank Box Office at the arena (255 Highland Park Blvd., Wilkes-Barre Twp.).

The special St. Patrick’s Day weekend celebration in Boston will feature varying lineups and a special family-friendly afternoon mini-concert and meet and greet on Saturday, March 15 at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, which benefits the band’s charitable foundation, The Claddagh Fund. For this show, each adult ticket buyer can bring two kids under 13 for free.

Dropkick Murphys frontman Ken Casey said, “2025 is year 29 of Dropkick Murphys – and we’re excited as hell to bring our annual St. Patrick’s Day Tour to 14 cities, leading into our hometown stand in Boston! We are honored to have two amazing bands joining us for the entire run, The Menzingers and Teenage Bottlerocket, with a few more friends joining us in Boston; we’re stoked to be playing shows with Hot Water Music, The Kilograms, The Bouncing Souls, Rebuilder, and Cody Nilsen on our home turf!”

During the 2025 trek, fans will have the chance to hear Murphys classics, along with their recently released single “Sirens” and possibly other new songs from their next album, slated for release via the band’s Dummy Luck Music/[PIAS] sometime in 2025. Fueled by an infectious, hard-hitting guitar riff and Casey’s raw, intense, and commanding vocals, “Sirens,” which is now charting on rock, alternative, and active rock radio, is a rallying cry for unity, urging fans to rise against those who exploit the working class. The song was produced by longtime DKM collaborator Ted Hutt and was mixed by Hutt and Ryan Mall.

Dropkick Murphys are currently touring North America with punk legends Pennywise and hotly-tipped Dublin rock band The Scratch through Oct. 27 in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In other news, the group – Casey (lead vocals), Tim Brennan (guitars, tin whistle, accordion, piano, vocals), Jeff DaRosa (guitars, banjo, mandolin, vocals), Matt Kelly (drums, percussion, and vocals), James Lynch (guitars and vocals), Kevin Rheault (bass), and live bagpiper/multi-instrumentalist Campbell Webster – recently wrapped their acoustic journey with Woody Guthrie to get back to raucous, electric performances, capping that chapter off with their documentary “This Machine Rising,” a movie about working class music. The film chronicles Dropkick Murphys’ journey with Guthrie’s lyrics, including the writing, recording, and touring surrounding their two acoustic albums “This Machine Still Kills Fascists” and “Okemah Rising.” Both records blow the dust off unrecorded lyrics from the Guthrie archive and set them to the new music and melodies of Dropkick Murphys, shining a light on issues of Guthrie’s day that people still grapple with in modern times.

Dropkick Murphys proudly remain Boston’s rock ‘n’ roll underdogs turned champions. Since 1996, the boys have created the kind of music that’s meant to be chanted at last call, in packed arenas, and during the fourth quarter, third period, or ninth inning of a comeback rally. Their celebrated discography includes four consecutive Billboard Top 10 album debuts (“Turn Up That Dial,” “11 Short Stories of Pain & Glory,” “Signed and Sealed in Blood,” and “Going Out in Style”), along with 2005’s gold-certified “The Warrior’s Code” featuring the double-platinum classic “I’m Shipping Up to Boston.”

Whether fans caught a legendary gig at The Rathskeller (The Rat) under Kenmore Square, found the band by taking the T to Newbury Comics to cop Do or Die in ’98, discovered them in Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning film “The Departed,” or saw them throw down at Coachella (or one of hundreds of other festivals), they’ve all become a part of their extended family. Dropkick Murphys’ music has generated half-a-billion streams, they’ve quietly moved 8 million+ units worldwide, and they’ve sold out gigs on multiple continents.

In 2020, the band was one of the first to embrace live streaming performances, starting with their “Streaming Up from Boston” St. Patrick’s Day virtual performance. It was followed by the landmark “Streaming Outta Fenway,” which drew more than 5.9 million viewers and held the No. 3 spot on Pollstar’s Top 2020 Live Streams chart. Their “St. Patrick’s Day Stream 2021… Still Locked Down” was No. 1 on Pollstar’s Livestream chart for the week ending March 22, 2021, logging over 1 million views.

Dropkick Murphys returned in 2022 with their first-ever all-acoustic album, “This Machine Still Kills Fascists,” and seated theater tour. This and their follow-up album “Okemah Rising” breathed musical life into mostly unpublished lyrics by the legendary Woody Guthrie, curated for the band by Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie.

On Sept. 19, they dropped their new single, “Sirens,” the first hint of a new album to come in 2025.

At this point, The Menzingers are an absolute institution. The Scranton natives’ multi-decade reputation as punk rock road warriors with an unbeatable catalog is cemented as hard truth on their seventh album, “Some of It Was True,” despite its title.

The follow-up to 2019’s well-received “Hello Exile” accomplishes the daunting task of capturing the Philadelphia-based group’s distinctive live energy in the confines of the studio, resulting in an immediate sound that’s both rich, raw, and complementary to their increasingly prismatic songwriting approach. More than 15 years in, The Menzingers – vocalists/guitarists Greg Barnett and Tom May, bassist Eric Keen, and drummer Joe Godino – are still holding their listeners square in the immediate present, and this record documents that power in thrilling fashion.

“Written over the last two and a half years in hotels, backstages, basements, and rehearsal rooms and recorded during a life-changing retreat down South, ‘Some of It Was True’ is the most realized version of what we set out to do when we started this band 17 years ago – have fun and be ourselves,” Barnett shared last year.

Released in 2023 via Epitaph Records, “Some of It Was True” comes after the longest gap between Menzingers records to date, a gestational period brought on by the “Hello Exile”-era tour schedule’s delays after the COVID-19 tour industry shutdown.

“We weren’t really writing new music yet,” Barnett explained. “We were talking about it, but we were honestly just happy to be out and touring again.”

Lyrically, “Some of It Was True” is a showcase for how the band’s songwriting has expanded beyond their own personal experiences, drawing from what’s happening around them and the lives of those who keep this world’s lifeforce pumping.

“Not everything has to derive from your own life,” Barnett noted. “We have the creative license to look around at our friends and family and write through their perspective. Everyone’s gone through so much.”

“We started this band when we were teenagers, and we’ve been at it for a while – and we’re a punk band, which usually represents a lot of youthful energy,” May continued.

“We’re getting older now, so the last thing we wanted to do was re-do anything we’ve tried in the past.”

The Menzingers formed in Scranton in 2006 and relocated to Philly before making their Epitaph debut with 2012’s “On the Impossible Past,” which was voted Album of the Year by Absolute Punk and Punk News. Arriving in 2014, their fourth album “Rented World” was praised as “packed with clever songwriting” by the New York Times and “a colossal fist-pumper” by Stereogum. In 2017, their fifth LP, “After the Party,” landed on best-of-the-year lists from outlets like Clash and Noisey, with Stereogum lauding its “almost unfairly well-written punk songs.” “Hello Exile,” the quartet’s “boldest and most self-assured album” according to Pop Matters, dropped in 2019 and was stripped down and reimagined as “From Exile” a year later.

Always reflecting on the past and how they ended up where they are today, The Menzingers kickstarted a new era in their already illustrious career with “Some of It Was True” by tapping into the energy that brought the band to life in the very beginning.

“This record just feels different for us,” Barnett said.

“It’s a really important one in our catalog, and a pivotal moment in our history. We have the liberty of our fans growing with us now, and after writing these lyrical songs about where we are in life, we decided to take other peoples’ stories and make something bigger out of it.”

“It brought us back to our energetic side as a band,” May concurred.

“We got to let loose, which is what drew us to the energy of being in a band in the first place. This is a live band – why shouldn’t we record live songs? As a result, we’re back to why we started this band in the first place.”

Photo by Scott Kucharski Photography/NEPA Scene