To celebrate 20 years of their historic reunion set from Riot Fest, Chicago punk icons Naked Raygun will be releasing the set on a limited edition vinyl this November.
Few bands have shaped a city’s sound the way Naked Raygun did Chicago’s. Active in various lineups from 1980 to 1992, with reunion shows in 1997, the band was one of the first and longest-running Chicago punk bands, and its influence on the scene is hard to overstate. Naked Raygun was one of the few bands to span the entire decade of the 1980s, playing with or helping bring along most of the era’s defining acts. The band reformed in late 2006 and remains active today. In 2021, they released Over the Overlords, its first full-length album of new material in 31 years, proving the reunion was no fluke.
For Riot Fest founder Mike Petryshyn, Naked Raygun’s music was his introduction to the city he’d come to love. “They introduced me to the Chicago I would ultimately fall in love with: loud, uncompromising, beautifully authentic, perfectly abrasive, yet somehow profoundly comforting,” he says. “There was never any pretense with Naked Raygun… It was simply intrinsic to who they were.” That influence became foundational to what Riot Fest itself would become. “Naked Raygun is inextricably woven into the fabric of this festival: the attitude, the humor, the sense of community, the distinctly Chicago obstinacy, and the conviction that you can create something entirely on your own terms without soliciting anyone’s permission or approval,” he says. Even now, when the band plays Riot Fest, he describes it as something more than another band on a stage, a set with real gravity behind it, carrying a sense of history, continuity, and homecoming.
That night at the Congress Theater in Chicago opened a new chapter for the band. Mike Vinikour, who shot the show’s photos, calls it “the single most important band reunion in the history of the Chicago music scene,” and one that kickstarted a second run for the band lasting nearly two more decades. Live at Riot Fest is the first official document of that night.
Rise Against’s Joe Principe first saw Naked Raygun at the Riviera in April 1990, a show that turned into a lot more than just a gig. He found a tight-knit crowd that became lifelong friends, and traces the formation of his own first serious band, 88 Fingers Louie, straight back to those nights waiting for Naked Raygun to take the stage. He also credits bassist Pierre Kezdy as a formative influence on his own playing. “Naked Raygun isn’t just a band, they are an institution,” he says. Tiger Army’s Nick 13 agrees, placing the band alongside Misfits and Cock Sparrer as one of the few bands that could “breathe that rarified air.”
Live at Riot Fest arrives November 6, 2026 on Loud Pizza Records as a 2xLP pressed on Raygun Infra-Red vinyl. The package includes a tattoo flash sticker sheet, an individually numbered souvenir ticket stub, a VIP All Access pass postcard, and a 12-page commemorative zine packed with 2006 live photos and stories from fellow bands on the reunion’s impact.
It was recorded on November 5, 2006 at Congress Theater in Chicago by Jeff Poremba, and was re-mixed and re-mastered by Dan Precision at Bombshelter. Naked Raygun is Jeff Pezzati, Bill Stephens, Eric Spicer, and Pierre Kezdy.
