Friday, Aug 14: Pick a Lane — Rochester's Clubs Go All-In on One Night
Everyone's going to spend the week talking about Hoochenanny — free Friday, whiskey, Lit, all of it, and rightly so. But eight miles west of that Fairport field, Rochester's club rooms are staging one of the busiest single nights of the summer, and it's a genuine choose-your-own-adventure. Friday, August 14, four different venues, four completely different rooms. Here's your map; pick a lane.
If you want loud and cathartic: Montage Music Hall. The ~400-cap downtown shape-shifter is hosting a full rock bill — Revis, Smile Empty Soul, Static Affliction, Letter to Elise, and Hywater. That's five bands of post-grunge and modern hard rock in the room that flips between metal nights and jazz-fest duty. If your idea of a good Friday involves your ears ringing pleasantly on the drive home, this is the ticket.
If you want dangerous and legendary: Bug Jar. South Africa's The SoapGirls bring their notoriously confrontational punk-rock live show to the 1991-vintage dive that has, somehow, hosted The Black Keys, Vampire Weekend, and The White Stripes in a space the size of a generous garage. The SoapGirls in the Bug Jar is a near-perfect matchup of band and room: small, sweaty, unpredictable, and exactly the kind of night the Jar was built for.
If you want bass and lights: Photo City Music Hall. The genre-agnostic room founded in 2016 hands Friday to DirtySnatcha, a heavy-hitting name from the bass-music world, in a venue that sells itself on a "state of the art set up and inviting energy." Translation: come for the low end you feel in your sternum. This is the dance-and-EDM lane, and Photo City is purpose-built for it.
If you want intimate and polished: Anthology. The reopened east-side favorite — the few-hundred-cap room a local musician talked back to life in 2024 — hosts Aaron Rizzo. It's the classiest of the four rooms and the one where you'll actually be able to hear yourself think between songs.
Why it matters: this is what a functioning scene looks like on a random summer Friday. Four venues, four genres, zero overlap — hard rock, punk, bass music, and a singer-songwriter-friendly listening room, all going off within a few miles of each other on the same night. Cities twice our size don't reliably manage this. Rochester does it on a Tuesday's notice.
A word on strategy, since Hoochenanny is happening simultaneously: you cannot do all of this. Do not try. Pick one room and commit, or plan a tight two-stop crawl and accept you'll miss things. Downtown parking applies for the Montage/Bug Jar cluster.
The beautiful, slightly stressful truth of August 14 is that there's no wrong answer — only trade-offs. Loud, dangerous, heavy, or intimate. Choose your Friday and own it. The only real mistake is staying home while four rooms are this alive.
Sources: Montage listings (Bandsintown); Bug Jar listings (Bandsintown); Photo City listings (Bandsintown); Anthology listings (Bandsintown)