Less Than Jake Heads to Point Break Festival with New Songs, Old Fire and Zero Interest in Blending In.

June 15th, 2026

There are bands that walk onto a festival stage and politely fit the bill.

Less Than Jake has never been one of them.

They arrive more like a confetti cannon with a horn section, a Gainesville grin and just enough glorious mischief to make a sunburned crowd forget their knees hurt. For more than three decades, the ska-punk veterans have made a career out of crashing musical neighborhoods where they were not always expected, then somehow turning the whole block into their party.

That makes their upcoming appearance at Point Break Music Festival in Virginia Beach feel less like a curveball and more like classic Less Than Jake. The festival leans heavily into reggae, reggae-rock, surf-rock and beachside good vibes, but if there is one thing frontman Chris DeMakes knows by now, it is that Less Than Jake does not need a perfect lane. The band brings its own traffic pattern.

When asked what allows the Gainesville-born group to fit comfortably on bills that stretch across punk, ska, reggae and rock, DeMakes first went exactly where any longtime Less Than Jake fan would hope he would.

“The paycheck,” he said, laughing.

Then came the real answer.

“Very early on in this band’s career, we always jumped at the opportunity to play with bands that maybe were a little left of center of us,” DeMakes said. “We were never afraid to stick out.”

That sentence could double as the band’s operating manual. Less Than Jake has never survived by blending in. They have survived by being unmistakably themselves, whether surrounded by punk bands, metal acts, pop-punk peers or sun-soaked reggae-rock crowds looking for something loose, loud and liberating.

“We might seem like the outlier a little bit here on this festival,” he said, “but we make it work for us.”

Of course, standing out is easier when the band’s entire identity feels built around motion. Less Than Jake songs do not simply ask a crowd to listen. They tug at your shoes, shove a horn line into your ribs and dare you to remain emotionally responsible. In that sense, Point Break may be a surprisingly natural fit. The festival’s beach-party energy lines up neatly with the band’s long-running reputation for turning even the most mismatched stage into a celebration.

“People have called us a party band,” DeMakes said. “A lot of the reggae surf rock bands, their whole vibe is kick back, have a drink, have a good time. That’s what we’ve been all about.”

Still, there is a big difference between bringing the party and begging a crowd to like you. Less Than Jake learned long ago that the fastest way to lose a room is to chase it too hard.

“We’ve been sandwiched between Disturbed and Flare on a festival before, on a main stage,” DeMakes said. “The worst thing you can do in that situation is try to please the crowd, because that’s how you fail.”

That may be one of the quieter secrets behind the band’s longevity. Less Than Jake does not twist itself into the shape of whatever surrounds it. The band shows up as Less Than Jake, horns blazing, choruses flying, jokes loaded and stage energy set somewhere between teenage chaos and veteran precision.

And yet, for all the fun, the connection fans have with the band goes much deeper than a wild afternoon set. For many, Less Than Jake has become part of the emotional architecture of growing up. Their music has scored high school drives, college mistakes, breakups, road trips, questionable haircuts, Warped Tour memories and the kind of life chapters people only understand years later.

DeMakes does not treat that lightly.

“What do you say to somebody that comes up and they have your lyrics tattooed or your logo tattooed, and they’re telling these stories?” he said. “Now there’s grandparents with their kids and grandkids coming to the show, and they tell you that you were a part of the soundtrack of their lives. I mean, you can’t tell someone what that means. I just smile and I tell them thank you, give them a hug.”

That is where Less Than Jake has always been sneaky. Beneath the bouncing tempos, toilet-paper cannons and ridiculous stage antics, there has always been heart. The band’s songs often carry the ache of growing older, missing home, feeling misplaced, second-guessing the future and still finding a reason to sing louder than the doubt.

So while the live show may feel like a party, the reason people keep coming back is not only because it is fun. It is because the fun comes with memory attached.

Keeping that feeling alive for 34 years takes more than nostalgia. It takes chemistry, restraint and the rare ability to know when a band should push harder and when everyone needs to step back before the wheels start smoking.

“The three of us, me, Roger and Buddy, have been here since the very beginning of the band,” DeMakes said. “I’ve always said, man, I’ve just met the right people. We take this as seriously as we have to, and then when it gets too serious or feelings are getting hurt or people are getting aggravated, we back off, because that’s how bands are going to break up.”

That balance between commitment and self-preservation has carried Less Than Jake through changing scenes, shifting lineups, industry upheaval and the wonderfully rude physical truth that touring in your 50s is not the same as touring in your 20s.

When asked what is harder in 2026, writing a great song or getting out of bed after sleeping on a tour bus, DeMakes leaned into a comparison that felt both funny and painfully accurate. He described hearing an older athlete explain how he could still compete with younger players, just not in the same reckless way.

“The 22-year-old kid fresh out of college, they can go out drinking all night, they can wake up, have a Gatorade and some aspirin,” he said. “Where I’m saving up all my energy all day, I’m eating right, I’m getting sleep, I’m not out the night before partying.”

Then, when showtime arrives, the old engine still roars.

“About an hour, hour and a half before we go on stage, I’m getting warmed up, and then I go out and I strike deadly for an hour and a half,” he said. “Outside of that, I’m a 52-year-old man.”

It is a hilariously honest snapshot of veteran punk-rock survival: part performer, part athlete, part road-tested adult who knows the difference between “rock and roll” and “my back is going to hate me tomorrow.”

That maturity has not dulled the band. If anything, DeMakes believes it has sharpened them.

As Less Than Jake prepares to take its show overseas again, he sounds less interested in the old mythology of the after-party and more focused on the responsibility of delivering a great set. The thrill now comes from execution, from walking out in front of a crowd thousands of miles from Gainesville and proving the band still has every bit of its spark.

“I enjoy going out there and putting on the best performance I can,” he said. “That’s the most important thing. And it wasn’t always that way.”

With age, the distractions have changed. The mission has become clearer.

“When all of that stuff is in the rearview mirror, you’re able to focus on what’s important,” he said. “I have to deliver for that hour, hour and a half, however long it is, and then the rest of the time I have to get my mind and my body ready for the next one.”

That focus has given the band a different kind of confidence. Less Than Jake is not sprinting on fumes. It is pacing itself like a group that understands how rare this whole thing is.

“I think this band’s playing better now than we’ve ever played,” DeMakes said.

The same mix of humor and reflection appears when DeMakes talks about Gainesville, the city forever stamped into the band’s mythology through “Gainesville Rock City.” The song title always had a wink built into it, and that wink has only become funnier with time.

“Gainesville is just a small little, you know, if it wasn’t for the college, it’d be just some little hillbilly town in North Florida,” DeMakes said. “To call it a rock city, it’s a small town.”

Yet the song did something real. It gave Gainesville a strange international punk-rock passport.

“There’s been fans over the years that have come to Gainesville from other countries,” he said. “That song title has really reverberated and, in an odd way, put Gainesville on the map for people that had otherwise never heard of it before.”

That is the strange magic of a band lasting long enough. A joke becomes a landmark. A small town becomes a destination. A song written in one chapter keeps gathering meaning in another.

And Less Than Jake is not done writing new ones.

DeMakes pointed to the 2024 release Uncharted, the new single “Scatter the Ashes,” and a split with Japanese band Hay Smith featuring brand-new material. He also revealed that the band is actively circling the idea of another full-length album.

“We all have tons,” he said. “We’re talking about right now sitting down at the end of the year or at the top of next year and recording a new full-length album.”

The creative process sounds less like a neat studio plan and more like a glorious digital junk drawer full of hooks, melodies, fragments and half-remembered inspiration.

“I had tons of demos, but I found 15 that I want to recircle around and try to put some work into,” he said. “I then went through my voice memos. I had 383 voice memos from 2014 sitting in there.”

Those voice memos could be anything, from a hummed horn melody to a guitar part to a small idea waiting years for the right moment. DeMakes narrowed them down to about 40 and planned to dig through hundreds of lyric notes next.

“The process is happening,” he said.

For a band with such a deep catalog, that process still requires openness. Some songs need to be wrestled into shape. Others arrive like they were waiting in the guitar all along.

“Sometimes you’ll put hours and hours of work into a song, and you just can’t get it anywhere,” he said. “And other times you sit down in a chair, you plug in the guitar, and within 10 minutes you have a complete song. I’m open to all ideas.”

That willingness to let things happen naturally may be tied to one of the biggest lessons DeMakes has learned with age. Asked what he believed at 25 that he no longer believes now, he gave one of the interview’s most thoughtful answers.

“I always thought that someday I’d be happy if I kept chasing the carrot, whatever that was,” he said. “At 25, that carrot was, did we sell as many records as that band, or are we on the radio? What tours are we getting?”

Thirty-four years in, the scoreboard looks very different.

“I don’t measure my success by any of that stuff anymore,” he said. “If I could go back, it would be that you have to be happy in the moment. There’s no point in your life where, oh, if I just get the house paid off, or if I just get this, I’m going to be happy. That’s not the way it works.”

That perspective carries extra weight coming from a musician whose career has stretched across multiple music-industry lifetimes. Less Than Jake came up when success meant records, radio, touring and label machinery. Now, artists are competing with streaming algorithms, social media trends and attention spans trained to move on before the chorus even hits.

“You have to expect that your fans are going to adjust to it first,” DeMakes said. “It’s a younger person’s game, and we do our best to keep up.”

Still, he believes Less Than Jake has stayed remarkably nimble for a band with that much road behind it.

“We’ve always been on the cutting edge of technology and kept up as best as we could,” he said. “For a band that’s been around as long as we have, we’re still doing it really well.”

If a 1994 version of DeMakes suddenly appeared backstage at Point Break, the biggest shock might not even be that Less Than Jake is still touring worldwide. It might be the glowing wall of phones pointed at the stage.

“There was no plan back in the day,” he said. “It wasn’t even a one-year, it wasn’t even a five-year plan. It was like, you’re in a band, okay, where can we play this weekend? Who’s giving us free beer?”

That is the beauty of it. Less Than Jake did not map out a 34-year career. They just kept showing up, writing songs, making friends, adapting when necessary and refusing to let the grown-up world completely steal the fun.

So what keeps it from becoming just a job?

For DeMakes, the answer is not applause in the shallow sense. It is not ego. It is not nostalgia alone. It is the realization that all those years of vans, stages, records, sweat and absurdity actually mattered to people.

“The adoration, and I don’t mean like, oh, the fans love us and they give me attention,” he said. “It’s the tattoos, and your lyrics mean so much, and going out and seeing the kids with the parents, and the older guy that ends up being their grandfather at the show.”

That is what still feeds the spark.

“We did something cool,” he said. “We’re no better than the next band. We just worked really hard. We wrote some songs that touched some people’s lives, and now 34 years in, who the hell would have ever thought that?”

In a strange way, DeMakes said, this chapter feels almost like a reward.

“I kind of feel like, in a weird way, I’m retired now,” he said. “I did all the hard work. I just got to go out there and deliver for an hour and a half at the next show. That’s it. Just got to be myself.”

Maybe that is why Less Than Jake still works. The band is not pretending to be young. It is simply still plugged into the part of itself that remembers what being young felt like. The jokes still land. The horns still punch. The choruses still lift the room. The crowd still leaves lighter than it arrived.

And if someone cannot have a good time watching Less Than Jake act like teenagers on stage after 34 years?

As DeMakes put it, “Maybe you’re the problem.”