Lord Huron, Cold War Kids Headline Two Brothers Summer Festival at RiverEdge Park in June

On June 3 and 4, Two Brothers Brewing Company Summer Festival is hosting their popular, annual music and beer festival at RiverEdge Park in Aurora.

Two Brothers Summer Festival marks the eighth year for this ever growing event with this year’s set to be the best and biggest yet. Headliners are Cold War Kids, Lord Huron, The Lone Bellow and PHOX. It is also the official release event for Two Brothers Hop Centric Double IPA and Hop Centric Black IPA, with a full lineup of Two Brothers beer and guest beers from breweries across the country to enjoy. Proceeds from Two Brothers Summer Festival 2016 benefit local charities, including Make-A-Wish Illinois.

TICKETS ON SALE MARCH 18 AT 10 A.M.

Tickets for Two Brothers Summer Festival 2016 will be made available online starting Friday, March 18 at 10 a.m. CT at www.twobrotherssummerfestival.com. An early-bird price of $20 per ticket (per day) will be valid through Mar. 31. 

Tickets are sold exclusively online through March 31. Starting April 1 at 10 a.m., tickets may be purchased for $25 online, by calling (630) 896.6666, or in-person at the Paramount Theatre box office at 23 E. Galena Blvd in Aurora.

VIP PACKAGES
VIP Tent: $75/day
Includes: day ticket, $24 of beverage tickets, dinner buffet, private bathrooms and dedicated VIP viewing area

Two Brothers VIP SkyDeck: $200/day
Includes: day ticket, open beer bar and food provided, private bathrooms and exclusive viewing deck

FRIDAY, JUNE 3
TBD Artist: 5:30 p.m.

The Lone Bellow: 7 p.m.
Then Came the Morning, the second album by the Southern-born, Brooklyn-based indie-folk trio the Lone Bellow, opens with a crest of churchly piano, a patter of drums, and a fanfare of voices harmonizing like a sunrise. It’s a powerful introduction, enormous and overwhelming, as Zach Williams, Brian Elmquist, and Kanene Pipkin testify mightily to life’s great struggles and joys, heralding the morning that dispels the dark night: “Then came the morning! It was bright, like the light that you kept from your smile!” Working with producer Aaron Dessner of the National, the Lone Bellow has created a sound that mixes folk sincerity, gospel fervor, even heavy metal thunder, but the heart of the band is harmony: three voices united in a lone bellow.

Lord Huron: 9 p.m.
Ben Schneider conjured Lord Huron from the depths of Lake Huron during a trip to his family home in northern Michigan in 2010. Ancient memories, smoke over the moon and nights full of perilous laughter all bolstered the brew from which Lord Huron emerged. Ben brought Lord Huron back with him to Los Angeles, where strange young things are known to flourish, unhindered. As the songs grew, so did the need for a band to play them. Answering the call ringing out from California, grand brethren from years past, friends and fellow Michiganders, Mark Barry, Miguel Briseno and Tom Renaud, left their respective paths, or bent each road to their own will, to reconvene out west. An old crew reformed in a new harbor.After a pair of EPs, a debut album, Lonesome Dreams saw release in 2012. Tours followed that found the boys in blistering deserts, reveling in sinister paradises, wandering frozen coasts and lost among the hanging fog of bygone forests. Who can say but the soles of their shoes how far they travelled and how wide? In 2014, trail-weary but intrepid, Lord Huron set up camp deep in Los Angeles at Whispering Pines Studios to notch their latest songs and abet the journeys of others. Lord Huron released the next chapter of their adventures, Strange Trails, in April 2015.

SATURDAY, JUNE 4
TBD Artist: 4 p.m.

Phox: 7 p.m.
PHOX is a bunch of friends from the Midwestern circus hamlet, Baraboo, WI, a place where kids often drink poisoned groundwater and become endowed mutants. They make music that straddles Feist and Monty Python. It was in Baraboo that the six unlikely musicians attended high school together, some playing on the soccer field, others on video production sets. But in a town with a drive-your-tractor-to-school day, they didn’t last. They did the thing that most people do when they are 18: they fled the coop, each going their separate ways (to film school, cosmetology school, a job with Homeland Security…). But promises were made that couldn’t be kept, and as they fell in unrequited love and lost their respective jobs, in spite of themselves, each simultaneously pulled the ripcord and came home. The sextet promptly (-ish) got a house together in the Portland of the heartland, Madison, WI. As prolifically documented in their online video series, PHOX rekindled their onetime A/V production house while discovering how to live as a family (i.e. how not to berate each other about the hair in the sink). After two years of cohabiting, PHOX beheld a demo reel of bedroom-recorded music (and home movies) that made Bon Iver and The Fray recording engineer Brian Joseph blush. Donning his producer’s cape (and occasional lab coat), Joseph cheer-led the band through its debut album at April Base Studios in Eau Claire, WI. Joseph’s enthusiasm propelled the band through the production of more than a dozen songs that have been swimming in the think tank for two years. Mixed by Michael Brauer at Electric Lady in NYC, their debut album is a school of simple folk-pop songs swimming amidst a chaotic eddy of rock, psychedelia, and soul. If the goal here is friendship, PHOX is doing quite well. If the chosen path is blue collar pixel-pushing and church camp trust falls, they’re on the way. And if their only coping mechanism is to lay down their arms and, for 30 or 45 minutes a day, shut up and listen to each other, you can’t be too upset.

Cold War Kids: 9 p.m.
Ten years have come and gone since Cold War Kids first took to the stage in their homegrown Southern California scene. Time is typically unkind to indie rock bands. So how is that Cold War Kids are still here in 2014, selling out tours and releasing their fifth album in a decade amidst these 40 seasons of torrential fate winds, while so many of their peers have vanished? “We worked really hard,” says Nathan Willett, “and we were successful, which is freakishly impossible, and we should embrace it. That’s our story.” From his post at the front, Willett—along with the band’s bassist and visual director Matt Maust—has led Cold War Kids through the tricky 21st century rock and roll landscape, soaring over the peaks and facing the valleys head-on while carving out a place of the band’s own. Reaping sky-high praise from a mid-2000s blogosphere then growing wings as a live show juggernaut, they stand now with their fifth studio album Hold My Home as both a different animal and an unaltered beast all at once.

Band set times are approximate.