Silverstein

Burlington, February 2000

Silverstein formed in February 2000 in Burlington, Ontario, a commuter town on Lake Ontario between Hamilton and Toronto. The name is borrowed from Shel Silverstein, the American children's author and poet the young band admired. Four of the five people on stage today were there at the start: Shane Told on vocals, Josh Bradford on rhythm guitar, Billy Hamilton on bass and backing vocals, and Paul Koehler on drums. The lead guitar chair changed hands twice, from Richard McWalter, who left in 2001, to Neil Boshart, who stayed until 2012, and then to Paul Marc Rousseau, who has held it ever since. Fourteen years without a line-up change is rare in this corner of heavy music, and it shows in how tightly the band plays.

The debut, When Broken Is Easily Fixed, came out in 2003. Its follow-up, Discovering the Waterfront, arrived in 2005 and remains the record most people mean when they say the name. It reached number 34 on the Billboard 200 and brought the band a Juno nomination in 2006. Two of its songs, 'My Heroine' and 'Smile in Your Sleep', have never really left the set. Both were played at the Camp Screamo opener in Asbury Park on 12 July 2026 and again at the Buffalo finale on 7 August.

A catalogue built at a steady pace

Thirteen studio albums in twenty-two years is the shape of the career. After Discovering the Waterfront came Arrivals & Departures in 2007 and A Shipwreck in the Sand in 2009, then Rescue in 2011, Short Songs in 2012, This Is How the Wind Shifts in 2013, I Am Alive in Everything I Touch in 2015, Dead Reflection in 2017, A Beautiful Place to Drown in 2020 and Misery Made Me in 2022. A Beautiful Place to Drown earned the band's second Juno nomination, for rock album, in 2021.

The gaps between records rarely stretched beyond two years, and that consistency is part of why the audience has never had to be won back from scratch. The current set draws from nearly every era. 'The Afterglow' from Dead Reflection, 'Bad Habits' and 'Infinite' from A Beautiful Place to Drown and 'The Altar/Mary' from Misery Made Me sit alongside the 2005 material and, from the very first record, 'Smashed Into Pieces' and 'Bleeds No More', which has closed almost every show the band has played this year.

Twenty-five years, two albums and a desert

The anniversary plan was announced on 17 October 2024. Rather than one record, the band would release two: Antibloom on 21 February 2025 and Pink Moon later that year, both on UNFD, both produced and mixed by Sam Guaiana at Fireside Sound in Joshua Tree, California. The band's own statement put it plainly: 'In 2025 we will be celebrating 25 years as band. For a milestone this large, we felt it deserved the largest campaign of our career.' The singles 'Skin & Bones' in August 2024 and 'Confession' that October led the way, with Told calling the latter 'one of the strongest singles we've ever released'.

Antibloom ran to eight tracks, from 'Mercy Mercy' through 'Stress' to 'Cherry Coke', and picked up a Juno nomination in 2026 in the heavy metal album category, the band's third. Pink Moon followed in September 2025, another eight songs including 'Negative Space' and 'Drain the Blood', which now open almost every show. Critics split on the second half. Luke Nuttall, reviewing it for The Soundboard on 12 September 2025, called it 'the lesser of the two halves' and 'inessential', while conceding that 'scarcely any in the same field have this kind of hawk-eye accuracy for what they want'. The band answered with the setlist: the Pink Moon songs are the ones they chose to lead with in 2026.

The tour attached to the campaign, 25 Years of Noise, began in North America on 10 January 2025 and went to Europe with Thursday, The Callous Daoboys and Bloom. By the time the third and final leg closed at Brooklyn Paramount on 20 December 2025 it had sold close to 110,000 tickets. The Aquarian's review of that last night described the band playing one song from every album in reverse chronological order, with screens behind them colour-coded to each record, a My Chemical Romance cover, and a mosh pit the writer called one of the most fun and energetic experiences of the year. The verdict was 'a perfect concert experience'.

Where they stand in September 2026

On 27 March 2026 the band played a JUNOFest set at the Corktown Pub in Hamilton, Ontario, a small-room show a short drive from Burlington. On 7 April came the announcement that has defined the year: Camp Screamo, a co-headlining run with Story of the Year and Origami Angel as support. It ran seventeen dates from the Stone Pony in Asbury Park on 12 July to Outer Harbor in Buffalo on 7 August. Told promised something 'slightly unhinged' and 'mildly dangerous', with material from across the band's eras.

It worked well enough that on 28 July 2026, before the first leg had finished, a second was announced. Camp Screamo returns on 16 November at Showbox SoDo in Seattle and runs nineteen dates to Citizens House of Blues in Boston on 13 December, taking in the Wiltern in Los Angeles, the Tabernacle in Atlanta, the Fillmore in Philadelphia and Palladium Times Square in New York, with Stand Atlantic and Footballhead replacing Origami Angel. Told's pitch: 'Expect the hits, a few deep cuts, and the biggest production we've ever brought on tour!'

Between the two legs the band crosses the Atlantic as a support act. On 18 May 2026 Beartooth named Silverstein and Kingdom of Giants as the openers for the European and UK leg of the Pure Ecstasy tour, which starts in Frankfurt on 17 September and passes through Oberhausen, Hannover, Brussels, Tilburg, Prague, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Milan, Zurich and Paris before three British dates: O2 Academy Brixton in London on 3 October, O2 Academy Leeds on 5 October and Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom on 6 October. Tickets went on sale on 22 May.

What a Silverstein show is now

The 2026 set is remarkably stable. Across 25 documented shows this year the band opened with 'Negative Space' 23 times and closed with 'Bleeds No More' 23 times; only one show had an encore. The average set runs to fourteen songs: the two Pink Moon openers, then 'Smashed Into Pieces', 'Your Sword Versus My Dagger', 'I Am the Arsonist', 'The Afterglow', 'Stress', 'Infinite', 'Massachusetts', 'Bad Habits', 'My Heroine', 'The Altar/Mary', 'Smile in Your Sleep' and the closer. The moveable slots in the back half are where 'Bankrupt', 'Retrograde' and 'Massachusetts' trade places from night to night.

On the Camp Screamo dates the band closed the night. At Asbury Park on 12 July doors were at 5pm, Ally Nicholas opened, Origami Angel played at 6.40, Story of the Year at 7.30 and Silverstein took the stage at 8.50 for a fifteen-song hour. In Buffalo on 7 August the reviewer for Concert Hopper timed the set at nearly seventy minutes, again fifteen songs, and described horror-camp visuals on LED screens, fog and hard lighting, with pits opening and crowd surfers reaching the barrier for most of it. The line the review kept returning to was that 'Buffalo loves Silverstein, and Silverstein loves Buffalo'.

For the European and British dates the band is billed second to Beartooth, with Kingdom of Giants opening, so the running order and set length will be the headliner's call. The staging Told has promised as 'the biggest production we've ever brought' belongs to the November Camp Screamo leg rather than the support slot. What travels regardless is what the Brooklyn and Buffalo reviews both landed on: a five-piece that has played together for fourteen years and sounds like it, and a catalogue deep enough that an hour touches every era from 2003 to 2025.