Happy Memorial Day 2026 & A Look Back At Memorial Day Weekend 2017 Listening To "Joyride(Omen)" For The First Time!

The date as I'm writing this is currently May 13th, 2026 meaning Memorial Day weekend 2026 is on the horizon within the next two weeks on May 25th. Some of you will probably be eating a good plate of BBQ or swimming in the backyard pool now that the weather is getting really hot. I'll be indoors reading a book in the cool a/c because no way in hell am I going outside in the scorching humidity in the Southeast.

One year ago, about two days after Memorial Day 2025 on May 28th, Chevelle released the lyric video for “Jim Jones(Cowards, Pt 2)” from their tenth album “Bright As Blasphemy”, their first effort on Alchemy Recordings after exiting Epic in 2021. The color scheme of black, white and red looked great on a phone screen matching appearances after the video for “Rabbit Hole(Cowards, Pt 1)” dropping in late-March, four years after “Mars Simula” from “Niratias”. 

Here's the story of three Memorial Day events starting on May 29th, 2017 with a New Moon on May 25th. My love for this band wasn't instant during the time “The Red” and “Send The Pain Below” dropped from “Wonder What's Next” in 2002-2003. However, car rides between shifts hit me like bricks when a song I thought sounded an awful lot like Muse's “Hysteria”, except with plenty of screaming, actually turned out to be “Joyride(Omen)” from 2016's “The North Corridor”. So…I bought tickets to a concert held on July 19th, 2017 after the DJ accosted me about snagging one before they sold out, and there I was, a face in the crowd, and I had so much fun wilding out to a nostalgic moment from my adolescence. 

Nine years later it's so funny that the date of the New Moon 2017 and Memorial Day 2026, May 25th, comes back full circle of these boys making a sudden reappearance in my life out of nowhere, and changing the landscape of everything in this next era of my life. Take a listen to this track after you listen to “Jim Jones”. 

Happy Memorial Day 2026!