Santa Cruz punk band Drain to make Coachella debut

Grab a sunhat, slap on some sunscreen and get those water bottles ready because Santa Cruz punk band Drain is playing at Coachella. 

The three-piece hardcore act will make their Coachella debut in 2026. The influential festival in the Southern California desert is held on two consecutive three-day weekends. Drain will perform in the Sunday slots — April 12 and 19 — sharing the stage with fellow punk acts like The Chats, Suicidal Tendencies and Iggy Pop, along with other pop stars such as FKA Twigs, Wet Leg and Karol G, who will be headlining. 

This comes on the heels of Drain performing at all three Warped Tour locations this past summer. The longstanding traveling punk festival ended in 2018 as a nationwide event. However, to celebrate its 30th anniversary, three locations — Long Beach; Washington, D.C.; and Orlando, Florida — were chosen to bring the festival back for two days in each city. 

Drain isn’t the only Santa Cruz band to grace the Coachella stage in recent years. 

Their friends and contemporaries in Scowl played the festival in 2023 to about 500,000 people over the two weekends. With music industry attention on them following Coachella, Scowl signed to the Dead Oceans record label the following year. The indie label represents a wide range of internationally touring acts like Bright Eyes, Phoebe Bridgers, Durand Jones, Mitski, Japanese Breakfast and Khruangbin. To promote their second full-length album, “Are We All Angels,” the label put Scowl on the late-night circuit, with the band making their “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” debut on April 9 of this year. 

Drain was founded by drummer Tim Flegal in 2014; guitar player Cody Chavez and singer Sammy Ciaramitaro joined the following year. Known for their positive message, heavy breakdowns and chaotic live performances, Drain built their reputation playing as many shows as possible in those early years. One any given week one could catch the band locally at the Blue Lagoon, Caffe Pergolesi (R.I.P.), The Crepe Place or Red Room. 

The band recorded two EPs —”Over Thinking” and “Time Enough At Last” — but their first big break was in 2019 at the Sound and Fury Festival. Held annually in Los Angeles, Sound and Fury is one of the biggest hardcore punk festivals in the country and a who’s-who of up-and-coming acts along with genre-defining bands. Drain’s 12-minute, 13-second set is the stuff of legends (the video is still on YouTube for non-believers.) 

That performance caught the attention of hardcore label Revelation Records, which quickly signed the band and recorded Drain’s debut album, “California Cursed.” And cursed it was — the album was released in 2020 to a world under COVID-19 lockdowns, which meant all of the tours and live shows the band prepared to use to promote their musical debut were canceled. 

However, the silver lining is that new, young fans had plenty of downtime to discover the band and learn their songs. So when Drain performed the renegade “Real Bay Shit (RBS)” show in 2021 in a San Jose parking lot with Scowl, Los Angeles metal/hardcore crossover act Xibalba and San Jose hardcore bands Sunami and Gulch, more 2,000 people from as far as Florida attended, singing the lyrics to every song. 

That same year, Drain announced they had signed to Epitaph Records. Founded by Brett Gurewitz — guitar player for legendary Los Angeles punk band Bad Religion — Epitaph records has remained one of the best-regarded punk labels since its inception in 1981. Two years later, Drain released their second full-length, “Living Proof,” hosting a record release show at Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz then played the largest heavy metal and hard rock festival in the world, Wacken Open Air. 

The announcement that they will play Coachella comes ahead of the release of Drain’s third studio album, “… Is Your Friend,” which drops on Nov. 7.

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