The All-American Rejects
WOMPA
July 14, 2025
Last Monday night, the All-American Rejects played a surprise stop in Tulsa on their so-called house party tour in WOMPA’s Machine Shop, a ceiling-less brick warehouse in west Tulsa. An old friend, one from the era when AAR was a genuinely local band that might play a similarly less-than-glamorous venue, sent me a message: “Was it just like the old days last night?”
And you know what? It was.
Following the pattern they’ve used for months elsewhere in the country, AAR has been asking fans to RSVP with their location to find out when pop-up shows in their area will be. Those fans got a couple days’ notice that the show would be in Oklahoma, found out Monday afternoon that it would be in Tulsa, and learned around 4 p.m. on show day if they’d been selected for no-cost, guaranteed entry, with priority given to people who used AAR’s new single in an Instagram or TikTok video. Via text, the band reported 20,000 RSVPs for the state, with 750 spots available. Ticketed fans and hopefuls lined the street outside the WOMPA entry gate hours before the doors opened, with several hundred of them rewarded with the kind of concert you see in teen movies: rock band on the floor with the crowd, minimal gear, minimal frills.
It was a fever dream of an evening, all sweat and intimacy and disbelief and joy, the kind of event that allows you to experience nostalgia for it while it’s happening. This is quite the high-low magic trick for a band that, in the weeks prior to the Tulsa show, announced a tour with the Jonas Brothers and then, in the week following, performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and achieved their first billion-streaming song, 2008’s “Gives You Hell.” That song, like every other AAR single and many of the deeper cuts, is shamelessly catchy, a three-and-a-half minute pop nugget that you can hear once and sing along with for the rest of your life. The band knows this. Their Threads bio reads: “That band who has all those songs from your childhood.”
AAR’s day-one lore feels fantastical now. The band, then still based in Stillwater, produced an EP and mailed it out hoping to sign with a label. It was retrieved from the trash by an intern at Doghouse Records, which signed the band shortly after1 and released their 2002 self-titled debut, re-released more broadly by DreamWorks the following year. It’s been 23 years and 12 million sold records since then, and 13 years since their last studio album. In between, there have been a few singles and EPs here, an acting appearance by frontman Tyson Ritter there, and now the band is surging back into public consciousness by retracing their steps at hyperspeed. One example of this hopped-up trajectory: the Sunday prior to the Tulsa show, AAR played a skating rink in Fayetteville, where a local Slim Chickens gave away free tenders to fans: nice, cute, local. Two days later, Slim Chickens restaurants nationwide offered a free All-American Rejects deal, which the band reports resulted in 86,000 meals given away.
The adjacency of these things feels absurd, and whatever intense planning goes into orchestrating them has been kept well-hidden. I don’t know who came up with the house party tour idea, and I don’t know how they’re paying for it without charging admission, but I do know it’s straight-up brilliant in terms of publicity, goodwill, and securing lifelong fans who felt like they’ve been given something one-on-one by a band they loved.