Decline and Revival (2009-present)
The Revival Era
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The Era of Pop Punk
Pop punk generally waned in mainstream popularity by the end of the first decade of the 2000s. While Blink-182 and Green Day continue to headline arenas and sell out their concerts, others, such as New Found Glory and Yellowcard, have seen attendance decrease steadily. Devon Maloney of MTV News writes that “Pop punk and emo bands don’t headline Coachella or Bonnaroo; they rarely, if ever, are even billed on mainstream festival stages,” and notes that it has similarly disappeared from the press. The only magazines that feature pop punk bands are niche publications like Alternative Press (AP) and the occasional teen magazine, while influential pop punk magazine AMP ceased publication in 2013.

Several pop punk bands have embarked on anniversary tours, playing some of their most popular albums in full. While some members of these bands have had mixed feelings about these performances, quite often these tours sell as well as or better than the first time around. Many pop punk bands have folded; “once essentially child stars, their members are now adult musicians hoping to move beyond the teen trappings that gave them careers.” However, the genre has experienced somewhat of a “minor renaissance.”

Bands such as A Day to Remember, Four Year Strong, The Wonder Years and Set Your Goals have combined the pop punk sound with melodic hardcore.

In 2013, Fall Out Boy and Paramore, “two bands who rocketed into the mainstream at the height (or perhaps at the tail end) of emo and pop punk’s second wave,” had two number one albums — Save Rock and Roll and Paramore — side by side on the Billboard 200. Their popularity provoked conversations about the state of the genre; Maloney writes that these records “could hardly be considered pop punk at this point.”

Club promoters in the United Kingdom have created nights based around lasting appreciation of the genre, including Pop Punk Ain’t Dead in Brighton, Hello Bastards in Leeds, Say It Ain’t So in London and What’s My Age Again?, a night celebrating “pop-punk, youthful abandon and teenage riot”.

Pop punk bands that achieve minimal mainstream success have seen a return to grassroots form, “the micro-operation style that yielded the results that caught the mainstream’s attention in the first place.” Kelen Capener of the band The Story So Far said

“I think pop-punk is a zombie … It hushed down for a bit but then it got brought back to life in an almost undead fashion. … Back then it was mainstream, you would see it on MTV and things like that. Now, it’s different, it’s got a fighting chance and it’s crawling its way back up. It started out with a pretty selective crowd but now it’s opening up to more and more people.”

The Warped Tour still attracts hundreds of thousands of attendees each year; the 2012 tour attracted 556,000 festival-goers, its third-best attendance. Bobby Olivier of The Star-Ledger wrote: “The genre, like an awkward high school kid, continues to reinvent itself and Warped is pop-punk’s prom.”

New Found Glory has continued to tour on the Warped Tour, and had their own Pop Punks Not Dead Tour, a reworking of an “old, defiant punk rock battle cry.” Chad Gilbert, the band’s guitarist, wrote in an op-ed for Alternative Press entitled “Why Pop-Punk’s Not Dead—And Why It Still Matters Today”: “This isn’t a dead genre, and just because there isn’t a song on the radio to clarify that shouldn’t matter … Pop-punk means something to a lot of people and to me, having success as a band in our genre is about longevity, touring a lot and staying true to your fans. It’s about us putting our lives on a plate for our fans to take what they want and not jeopardizing our integrity for any reason.”

Pop-punk’s emo era came to a swift end as bands like Fall Out Boy and Paramore moved on to more mainstream sounds and labels and Drive-Thru closed their doors. Pop-punk wasn’t universally celebrated the way it once was, as metalcore began to take center stage in the music scene. But around 2008, a resurgence of pop-punk would begin taking shape with bands like The Wonder Years, Man Overboard and the Story So Far, as the genre began drawing attention from iconic record labels like Hopeless, Fearless and even traditionally heavier labels like Rise. The massive eruption of A Day To Remember’s career that took place in this era undoubtedly helped fuel the resurgence. Though the band were a variant of pop-punk, metalcore and melodic hardcore, they showed that the genre could thrive again in some shape, and even reach rock radio. Now, much like in the late ’90s, pop-punk is in, and there’s a whole new wave of bands reviving the genre: Real Friends, State Champs, Modern Baseball, Neck Deep and Knuckle Puck to name a few.

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