Pop Punk is a genre that I love so much. It was mainly popular around the late 90s and early 2000s. Bands around that time like Sum 41, Blink 182, and Green Day are cult icons of the period. It made a smaller comeback in the mid-2010s but it was just different. Bands of that time like Neck Deep, State Champs, and The Story So Far would make it but it never came to the massive popularity of the 2000s Pop Punk scene. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still incredible music and I still love it, but it just doesn’t compare to the power that the earlier music carried. However, that changed in 2020 when MGK released Tickets to My Downfall. Now to make my opinion clear, this album stinks and MGK is a bad artist. It did, however, reenergize that earlier 2000s pop-punk nostalgia, so maybe it wasn’t all bad.
In 2022 we returned to greatness when all the nostalgic bands from the 2000s teased and released new albums. The first band that would release a new album was Fall Out Boy. The band had many ups and downs and even disbanded in the late 2000s before a reunion in 2013. With the revival in 2013 came a new poppier sound that most earlier fans hated. It did bring them a ton of success but fans still craved and wanted a new Fall Out Boy album that gave them the older sound. Dreams came true when, what we now know as So Much (For) Stardust, started being teased on a website the band had created. Eventually, they dropped the lead single for the So Much (For) Stardust album on January 18th, 2023 entitled Love From The Otherside. The song was an incredible return to form for the band after lackluster efforts from the album Mania.
The next band that teased/announced a new album was Blink 182. I remember the day I was in geometry when I was scrolling through Twitter and saw the tweet announcing the band reunion, new album, and tour all in 1. It was truly a great day. With this announcement came a new song called Edging. This reunion was special because it came after so much heartbreak for the band. Their drummer Travis Barker was in a plane crash in 2007, which still affected his drumming for years afterward. Also, the worst of it was when the bassist Mark Hoppus was diagnosed with cancer. This brought the whole band back together and reformed the bonds between Mark and lead singer, Tom Delonge, to make a new album one more time, so after a very long year of waiting and a few tweets from Travis about the progress of the album, One More Time was finally released. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts and honestly, it was the perfect Blink 182 return album. The mix of serious and cheesy joke songs was nice and it just brought back the old-school vibes. I wanted to go to either of their reunion tour shows in Boston, but tickets are stupidly expensive.
However, the biggest band to return to form in the 2020s was my favorite band of all time, Green Day. In 2020, they released a very odd stadium pop-rock album, Father of All. The album was met with universal hatred and is considered the worst album the band ever made. People were clamoring for the older Green Day sounds from the American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown eras. In early 2022, rumors started circulating that the band was starting to record a new album in England. This was amplified when Green Day started uploading teasers to their social media pages. All of this had to be leading up to a brand new album in time for the band to turn 50 years old, then nothing for about a year. Eventually, the band finally announced the album Saviors in early October of this year. They even announced a new stadium tour coming to Fenway Park in Boston in August of next year with The Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, and The Linda Lindas. Green Day has released two singles so far, The American Dream is Killing Me, and Look Ma! No Brains. I’m so excited for the album even though I need to wait 3 months for February of next year.
