Bunbury 2019 Turns Cincinnati's Riverfront Into a 3-Day Party

Bunbury Music Festival 2019 runs Friday, May 31 through Sunday, June 2 at Sawyer Point and Yeatman's Cove on the Cincinnati, Ohio riverfront. Fall Out Boy, Greta Van Fleet, The 1975, Run the Jewels and Girl Talk lead the three-day bill.

The headliners, day by day

Organizers split the lineup into days in March. Friday belongs to Fall Out Boy, with Stone Temple Pilots, NF, Machine Gun Kelly, Bayside, Joywave and Poppy filling out the afternoon. Saturday is Greta Van Fleet's night, backed by AWOLNATION, Sublime with Rome, Dashboard Confessional, Blue October and Jukebox the Ghost.

Sunday stacks three closers: The 1975, Run the Jewels and Girl Talk. The same day brings lovelytheband, Clutch, Streetlight Manifesto, The Aces and Reignwolf. That is pop-punk, rock, hip-hop and mashup all in one weekend.

Deeper cuts worth catching early

The full bill runs well past the big names. Jeremy Zucker, Flora Cash, Shaed, Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, Witt Lowry, Lauren Sanderson, The Blue Stones, Common Kings and Taylor Janzen are all on the lineup, along with The Orphan the Poet and Triiibe. Show up at gates-open and you can build a full day around acts that may be headlining their own tours soon.

Three-day passes were priced at $189 when the lineup dropped in January, through the festival's official site.

How Bunbury got here

Bill Donabedian, a co-founder of Cincinnati's MidPoint Music Festival, launched Bunbury in July 2012. In 2014 the festival was bought by PromoWest Productions, the Columbus, Ohio concert company. 2019 marks the first Bunbury since AEG acquired PromoWest, and it follows a 2018 edition that sold out all three days for the first time.

This year's festival spreads four stages across the riverfront parks along the Ohio River. Over the years the festival has hosted acts including Weezer, Jack White, The Flaming Lips and Snoop Dogg.

Update: what happened next

Editor's note: the 2019 edition turned out to be the last full Bunbury. PromoWest canceled the 2020 festival because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2021 and 2022 dates were also called off. In October 2022, organizers said the three-day format would not return, with plans shifting toward "Bunbury-themed shows and events for the near future," Cincinnati CityBeat reported.