You close your eyes and you’re taken back to the summer of 2008. You’re sitting in the backseat of your mom’s minivan in an Aeropostale logo t-shirt with a clip-in pink extension in your hair. Windows down as your mom drives through your hometown listening to your local radio station as Avril Lavigne’s hit song Girlfiriend ends and the DJ announces the upcoming track to be 30H!3’s Don’t Trust Me. Life is good, life is simple.
But you open your eyes and it’s the summer of 2022. You’re sitting in the front-seat of your mom’s old minivan as you drive through your hometown. Your fashion sense has improved and you no longer wear clip-in hair extensions. With the windows down you turn up the volume to your local radio station as Avril Lavigne’s new hit single Bite Me ends and the DJ announces the upcoming track to be 3OH!3’s new song Lonely Machines. You get a sense of deja-vu as you lean back and wonder how you ended up here.
With the turn of the decade into 2010, it seemed like the era of skater-boy punk and emo was a thing of the past. Rap and alternative music became all the rage and it seemed like the pop-punk music that created the soundtrack for the early 2000s was no more. And to top it all off, many of the bands that were head-banged to in the early 2000s went mainstream, losing the guitar riffs and melancholy, sad boy lyrics that made them so good.But with the COVID-19 pandemic stirring up all sorts of nostalgia for early 2000s kids and the musicians who filled them, a new era of pop-punk was born.
Old, forgotten artists of the early 2000s took to social media apps and started up challenges to their past hit singles. And with the success of Machine Gun Kelly’s platinum selling album Tickets to My Downfall and young new artists like Jxdn, Nessa Barrett and Yungblud arriving on the scene, it seems like the pop-punk we all grew up listening to was beginning to make a resurgence. The new era of pop-punk is here, bringing with it all of the nostalgia from our childhoods.
In case you didn’t know about the resurgence that early 2000s pop-punk was making, here is a list of my favorite new pop-punkers to the scene that are helping with its resurrection: Maggie Lindemann, Willow, Modsun, Jxdn, Yungblud, Machine Gun Kelly and Girlfriends. And here is the list of the veterans who have paved the way for the newbies careers to thrive that are making a comeback to the pop-punk scene: Travis Barker, Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, All Time Low, Jimmy Eat World and Fall Out Boy. Here’s to the resurrection of skater-boy punk-may your hair have fringe and your clothes be all black because early 2000s pop-punk is back. Happy head-banging!