There Is an (Unofficial) Petition to Get SPELLS on the Riot Fest Lineup

A fan of both Riot Fest and Denver punk band SPELLS created a petition this week to get his favorite local band to play his favorite punk-themed music festival. Bradley Ambrose, an apprentice at Boulder design studio AngryBovine, made it his personal project of the year to get SPELLS to Riot Fest.

“Riot Fest had just announced the Denver lineup and I thought it was a shame that SPELLS was not on it,” Ambrose says. “So I set out to solve that problem; to get the SPELLS added to Riot Fest through a design and strategy that aims to communicate the band's irreverent, unapologetic and somewhat slacker forward attitude.”

The result is DontWorkAnyHarder.com, a slick website that offers a petition visitors can sign to get SPELLS to Riot Fest.

“In honor of the bands underacheiving attitude, the project purposefully doesn’t ask very much of the audience — just add your name to the list and push a button,” Ambrose says. “A share would be awesome if you’re not too winded from typing the first three letters of your name and hitting autofill.”

Since Ambrose took it upon himself to let Riot Fest know a crucial name was missing from the line-up, the band had no idea the petition existed until today.

“I've never had a petition before,” says frontman and local comedian Ben Roy. “I guess we in SPELLS just say thank you. Although I'm not sure this is how submission processes work.”

Roy is probably right, and Riot Fest did not respond to our tweet asking for a comment in time of publication. But it could work. Petitions surely work at least part of the time or there would be way less people hassling Whole Foods shoppers about saving the dolphins.

Currently, the petition has 67 signatures.

If the petition does reach the Riot Fest decision makers, or if those in charge of the line up do decide SPELLS is the band to play at 2:30 on a Sunday inside the National Western Complex, Roy says he’ll be there.

“Fuck yeah,” he says. “We'd love to. Big fans of the fest. But there's so many rad bands in Denver, regardless of who gets to play, we'll be there watching our friends.”