Beauty School Dropout

A solo file that outgrew the band it came from

Beauty School Dropout began in Los Angeles in 2020 as something Cole "Colie" Hutzler was doing on the side while he played in Strangefaces. When that band came apart, the side project took the furniture: Hutzler brought in his former bandmate Brent "Beepus" Burdett on bass and Bardo Novotny, first as a producer and then as the guitarist. Colton "SeaDawg" Flurry settled in on drums. The debut single, "Last Time", came out in February 2020.

The origin story the band tells is less tidy than the timeline. Burdett dates the whole thing to Hutzler messaging his ex-girlfriend, and describes the drum stool as a running hazard — in his telling the group's turnover of drummers follows the Spinal Tap model, a film he calls the band's bible. The joke has a practical edge; the line-up has never been fixed in the way the four credited names suggest.

The early lift came from two people with a track record in the same lane. Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Mark Hoppus of blink-182 took an interest, and Hoppus signed the band to Verswire in 2022. The first release under that deal, We Made Plans & God Laughed, carried a Hoppus feature on "Almost Famous" and produced two tracks that each passed 14 million streams.

The record that changed the method

Ready to Eat arrived in 2023. The band's own framing treats those first two releases as EP-scale work and Where Did All the Butterflies Go?, out on 5 September 2025, as the first proper full-length; Wikipedia logs all three as studio albums. Either way, Butterflies is the one that rearranged how they work.

The trigger was a documentary. At the start of 2024 the four of them watched Meet Me in the Bathroom, about the New York scene of the early 2000s, and came out of it wanting the texture rather than the sound — the DIY framing, the sense of a record made in a room. They wrote more than a hundred songs and cut the list to fourteen. Neal Avron, whose credits include Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park, produced, and the band handed him the final call on what made the album.

Novotny describes the result as the most imperfect thing they have released, and treats that as the point: it sounds real. Hutzler puts it as the most live and raw feeling they have managed to get onto tape. The lead single, "SEX APPEAL", came out on 11 July 2025 with Royal & the Serpent appearing in the video; the band described the song as the punch in the face life delivers when escape is being chased through the wrong means. A video for the album track "MADONNA" followed on 18 July 2026, ten months after the record.

Two years as the opener

The Butterflies cycle was built on other people's stages. UK and European dates went out in September 2025, and in the United States the band joined blink-182's Missionary Impossible run — their second time opening for Hoppus's band — appearing on select dates including the tour's first night at Hollywood, Florida on 28 August 2025, on a bill whose main support was Alkaline Trio. They also played the idobi Summer School tour and the full Vans Warped Tour schedule.

May 2026 moved them up a size. Beauty School Dropout opened the North American leg of the Lost Americana Tour for Machine Gun Kelly and co-headliner Wiz Khalifa, from Toyota Amphitheatre in Wheatland, California on 15 May to Credit One Stadium in Charleston, South Carolina on 30 May. Warped slots continued through the summer: a five-song set on the RFK Stadium grounds in Washington DC on 13 June 2026, then a 30-minute, nine-song set at Shoreline Waterfront in Long Beach on 25 July.

Coverage has followed from People, NME, Alternative Press and Billboard, with TikTok doing much of the rest of the work. The fanbase answers to "the Dropouts", a name the band leans into — Burdett's account of touring is that they go out after every show and speak to everyone who waits.

The Circus, and a borrowed drummer

The current run was announced on 13 August 2026, with presales opening the same day on the code BOYSDOCRY and general sale the following morning. The Circus covers 27 US cities between 8 October and 24 November 2026 — the first headline tour of this scale since the February and March 2026 North American dates, which opened in Salt Lake City and ran through New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Flurry is not on it. Benji Spolinasky of Not A Toy is filling the drum chair, a swap with its own small history: Not A Toy opened for Beauty School Dropout three years earlier. No Love For The Middle Child joins from the Columbus date on 24 October and plays every remaining non-festival show. One festival sits inside the routing — Vans Warped Tour in Orlando on 15 November — and the tour closes at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles on 24 November.

The itinerary is club-sized and tightly spaced: Goldfield Trading Post in Roseville on 8 October, Alpine in Reno on 9 October, the B Side room at House of Blues Las Vegas on 11 October, Hotel Congress in Tucson on 12 October, then Oklahoma City, St Louis, Nashville, Indianapolis, Allentown, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Albany, Hampton, Portland, Worcester and Sony Hall in New York on 3 November.

What the room looks like

On the opening night in Roseville the queue ran around Vernon Street and a fair proportion of it turned up in tutus and ripped tights. The band opened with "FEVER" and closed on "DADDY DON'T CRY", with "TWO OF US", "MADONNA" and "FIGHT MODE" in between. Writing for Melodic Magazine, Julia Torres described Hutzler working the front lip of the stage and holding eye contact with the front row, and the floor and balconies moving together for most of the night.

The headline sets from earlier in the year ran considerably longer than the festival slots. At the Bowery Ballroom in New York on 1 March 2026 the band played for over two hours, drawing heavily on Butterflies — the title track, "XXX", "FEVER", "MADONNA" and "HEART AWAY" — while keeping "scarlett letter" from Ready to Eat and the older "WE MADE PLANS & GOD LAUGHED", which took the loudest response of the night. Nightbreakers, from Florida, opened with a 30-minute set that included a Justin Bieber and Sean Kingston cover. Band members crowd-surfed, fans were pulled up for the finale, and Burdett told the room he had been crying behind his sunglasses.