The Dunehounds Don't Do Setlists, and That's the Whole Point
Most cover bands are a jukebox with a pulse. The Dunehounds are something looser and better — an Ocean City four-piece that treats a two-hour bar set like a conversation nobody planned, and this summer they're back in the town's Sunset Park Party Nights rotation, playing a free downtown set over the bay.
The band formed in 2019, fronted by Sean Loomis (vocals, guitar), with Kasey Briggs on bass, Troy Mawyer on guitar, and Adam Bilenki on drums and vocals. Their material is a deep well of American rock — Neil Young, Tom Petty, The Who, the Stones, the Beatles, the Doors, ZZ Top — braided together with their own originals, and the pitch they make, credibly, is that no two shows run the same. The setlist changes every night. That's a small thing until you've watched enough beach bands run the identical 30 songs in the identical order all summer, at which point a band that genuinely reads the room feels close to radical.
Sunset Park is the right frame for them. The town's Thursday series drops working local bands onto a free bayside stage downtown by the Coast Guard station, 7 to 9 p.m., in front of a crowd that's there for the sunset and open to whatever's playing under it. That's a harder gig than a bar — no drink-buying captive audience, just a lawn full of families you have to actually win — and it's exactly the setting a real bar band should thrive in. The Dunehounds' high-energy, no-net approach was built for it.
Here's why a band like this is the health check for a scene. Ocean City has no shortage of touring acts rolling through Seacrets, and no shortage of DJs. What a resort town can lose — quietly, expensively — is the middle layer: the local groups who live here, play a hundred nights a summer, and give the place a musical identity that isn't just whoever's on tour. The Dunehounds are that middle layer. They're not going to headline a festival; they're going to be the reason your Thursday was better than it had any right to be.
There's a durability question hovering over every regional bar band, too. Bands that formed in 2019 have now survived a pandemic, a brutal seasonal-labor economy, and the general entropy that dissolves most cover groups inside three years. That the Dunehounds are still a four-piece with the same front man, still getting booked onto the town's marquee free series, is its own quiet achievement — the kind that only shows up if you've been watching the calendar for a few summers.
Catch them at Sunset Park while it's free and the sun's cooperating. Then catch them in a bar in October, when the crowds have thinned to the locals and the band plays like it's got nothing to prove and everything to say. That second show is the one that tells you whether a beach town has a real scene or just a season. Ocean City, on the evidence of the Dunehounds, still has a scene.
Sources: The Dunehounds Live @ Sunset Park; Sunset Park Party Nights — ococean.com; Sunset Park Party Nights 2026 — WGMD