When 5 Seconds of Summer time had been invited to hitch the nostalgia-heavy When We Have been Younger Competition in 2023, their speedy response was an keen sure. They doubtless would have ended up on the Las Vegas Competition Grounds even when they weren’t performing. The invoice was an exhaustive record of almost each band they beloved and realized from whereas rising up in Sydney, Australia. 5SOS can be taking the stage after Yellowcard and previous units from Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and headliners Inexperienced Day. It was a no brainer.
However as soon as their preliminary enthusiasm dissipated, they had been barely perplexed by the supply.
“The query comes up of, like, ‘Can we match?’” guitarist Michael Clifford tells Rolling Stone. “And, I imply, the reply was nonetheless no.” Glancing on the barricade, he may inform who was clearly there for the extra veteran acts performing later that night time, who first found 5SOS throughout the three years they spent touring with One Route, and who got here throughout “She Seems to be So Excellent” throughout one in every of its recurrent viral surges on TikTok. They couldn’t fairly nail down their very own classification: “Are we another band? Are we pop stars? Are we rock musicians? Are we a boy band? Are we nostalgic?” Everybody there may reply these questions in another way, relying on their very own entry level into the intersection between pop and punk.
The 2 genres perpetually orbit one another. Each few years, punk goes pop (or vice versa), by means of an surprising crossover hit or comeback. Veteran acts shift their sound and break into a brand new period, or a youthful era will capitalize on the starvation for nostalgia. The waves not often last more than a couple of months within the mainstream, however the surge at all times returns. Territorial followers who didn’t need business pop audiences infiltrating their scene within the first place are by no means too thrilled about new listeners or the pop-leaning pivots from their rock gods. However others who might have as soon as discovered the style unfamiliar are launched to the joys of listening to a killer pop refrain filtered via riotous guitars and punk percussion.
Clifford’s earliest pop-punk reminiscences embody enjoying Guitar Hero and watching Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker cowl “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” on YouTube in 2007. That very same yr, Paramore launched the disruptive LP Riot!, Fall Out Boy teamed up with Jay-Z and Babyface on Infinity of Excessive, Avril Lavigne turned The Greatest Rattling Factor to hit pop shortly, and Boys Like Ladies had been making “The Nice Escape.” Over time, the route pop-punk may take to the mainstream was equally altered by crossover hits from Machine Gun Kelly, Lil Peep, Halsey, Willow, and extra. Every new surge confirmed straight-laced pop followers that there was at all times extra taking place on the outskirts of their favourite style.
“With songwriting, it’s attention-grabbing as a result of the pop punk and emo genres [have] easy chord progressions, not lots of elements, very clear idea, good emotional lyrics, actually catchy melodies, are extremely energetic — that’s primarily pop music,” says producer and songwriter Andrew Goldstein, whose collaborators have spanned from Blink-182 and Convey Me the Horizon to Addison Rae and Britney Spears. “Most pop music is three to 4 chords, a very catchy melody, and an idea that nearly anybody can perceive. That’s what actually connects with individuals. These similarities are what actually permits for these artists to turn out to be so much greater.”
Pop-punk first sunk its enamel into Goldstein on the flip of the millennium. He got here throughout New Discovered Glory and Sum 41, in addition to emo leaders Taking Again Sunday and Thursday, but it surely was Blink-182 that rewired him musically. Discovering them proper on the cusp of Enema of the State made him need to decide up a guitar and join with an viewers the best way that his new favourite band did with him. “I bear in mind my good friend’s older brother was like, ‘Oh, they bought out,’” he says. “If any person turns into standard, it’s simple to say that they’re promoting out as a result of there’s completely different steps you need to take to accommodate the fan base.” Enjoying greater venues, mass ordering merchandise, recording in high-tech studios — all of that might be thought of promoting out. For pop followers, it’s unfathomable that anybody would need the rest.
That was the case with 5SOS. “We at all times stated from the start, we need to be as large as fucking attainable,” Clifford says. Coming from Australia, they needed to make their shot depend. Earlier than they’d launched any music of their very own, 5SOS shared A Day to Bear in mind and Go Radio covers alongside renditions of One Route and Justin Bieber tracks on YouTube. Inexperienced Day and Blink-182’s affect was not possible to disregard throughout their self-titled debut album, launched in 2014, and the lasting impression of acts like Mayday Parade and All Time Low appeared clearly on its follow-up, Sounds Good Feels Good. However their sticky melodies and hooks at all times wore the contact of pop, too.
“That fashion of music had taken such a downturn, and no person was into it,” Clifford says of the pop-punk scene on the time. “We had been like, ‘Properly, maintain on, now we have a good suggestion the place we will carry that again into the mainstream.’ And, sure, there are going to must be some adjustments whenever you evolve to carry that fashion of music some place else.” 5SOS leaned into “the traits individuals had been liking about boy band tradition” because it was “all anybody would fucking speak about,” anyway; however they had been nonetheless “eager for acceptance from a neighborhood that we had been so passionately representing.” It got here at a price. “We had been simply shunned by the neighborhood immediately,” Clifford says. “They type of simply checked out how we seemed and wrote it off.”
If the style needed to thrive and survive, it couldn’t hold treating pop success like a dying sentence. “Typically persons are forward of the curve, and it takes time for them to understand the brilliance of a report when it comes out,” says producer-songwriter John Feldmann, whose sprawling credit embody Panic! on the Disco’s Vices & Virtues. Change may be onerous — and there was no more durable time for OG pop-punk followers than 2013. They had been already reeling from My Chemical Romance breaking apart and feeling disconnected from Panic! on the Disco’s directional shift on Too Bizarre to Dwell, Too Uncommon to Die. They had been additionally being reintroduced to Fall Out Boy following an prolonged hiatus whereas Paramore marked the start of a artistic transformation with an explosive crossover hit.
Feldmann noticed Paramore lay the inspiration for that second years prior, when he first heard “That’s What You Get,” a blazing rock observe from Riot! with an plain hook. He remembers Fueled by Ramen founder John Janick telling him, “We will’t put this out. It’s too early for this band. They’ll’t be that standard fairly but.” They’d already damaged via with “Distress Enterprise,” however this might have gotten them caught on the opposite aspect. “With pop, it’s more durable to create a legacy as a result of it takes lots of time,” says Goldstein. “It takes lots of followers.” Followers within the pop-punk scene fostered a distinct sense of loyalty than pop did, and so they anticipated it to be reciprocated.
Paramore’s development to that time wanted to be pure to ensure that it to work. “You may actually see the writing on the wall with that tune,” Feldmann says. “You know the way ‘Nonetheless Into You’ turned one in every of their largest songs? That was already arrange with ‘That’s What You Get.’” By 2013, Paramore had been on their fourth album and umpteenth lineup change. They’d get nothing however false safety out of shifting backwards and rehashing the music they already made whereas clearly craving to evolve. It’s comprehensible why listeners would crave the sort of music they found throughout their childhood. “These are the data that form your complete existence,” Feldmann provides, however notes that “each artist ought to have the ability to experiment and never be harassed for increasing their sonic horizon.”
It’s the identical crossroad Fall Out Boy confronted once they recorded their fifth album, Save Rock & Roll. “I wasn’t thinking about making a pop punk report with anyone. I used to be sort of burned out on that, identical to I feel most individuals had been,” producer Butch Walker tells Rolling Stone. “They didn’t care about that. They had been like, ‘No, we’re gonna lose lots of followers, however we have to make new followers. We have to enchantment to an entire new era of individuals. Or why are we doing this? We’re not rising as a band.’” Once they re-entered the pop enviornment on the time, it was dominated by artists like Rihanna, One Route, and Macklemore. Their lane was large open.
For a complete wave of pop followers, the band helped translate pop-punk right into a format they may simply entry. When Fall Out Boy launched “My Songs Know What You Did within the Darkish,” Taylor Swift instructed her 25 million Twitter followers that she’d listened to it 43 occasions in at some point. “I really like Fall Out Boy a lot,” Swift instructed Rolling Stone in 2019. “Their songwriting actually influenced me, lyrically, perhaps greater than anybody else. They take a phrase and so they twist it.” The 2 acts shared a collaborator in Walker, who can recall the primary time he heard Inexperienced Day’s Dookie in a Nebraska parking zone as clearly as he can bear in mind Swift exhibiting him “Every little thing Has Modified” the morning she wrote it.
As producer, he had “no notes.” The Pink single arrived in near-perfect form, even with the lavatory tiles reverberating via the voice notice. Walker ranks Swift as “the most effective songwriters in pop music ever,” and expresses the identical enthusiasm when praising Pete Wentz. “She made the fitting name by being influenced by that, as a result of I feel that’s the DNA in her music,” he says. When Walker first encountered Fall Out Boy, they had been unsigned, “a fucking trainwreck on stage,” and already writing ingenious lyrics. “How are they considering this large and the way are they considering this poetically?” he remembers questioning. “Pete has simply acquired a manner with phrases like nobody else.”
“My Songs Know What You Did within the Darkish” ended up being Fall Out Boy’s largest hit since “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs.” For Walker, it represents “a traditional instance of a band taking the guard rails off, taking the boundaries off, pushing the partitions down.” The tune began with John Hill throughout pitch periods for an additional artist’s album, however collected mud for a yr earlier than Walker performed the tough demo for the band. They lunged for it. “The fellows had been like, ‘That’s our sound. That’s our new report. Pressing, highly effective, hooky, soiled, loud, aggressive — however poppy.”
Throughout our name, Walker digs up that authentic voice notice and hits play. It confirms that the melody of the refrain has at all times been that impossible to resist. “Do you need to hear the punch line?” he asks. “That was really written for Rihanna.”
It’s intriguing to think about what the pop star may have completed with it. The closest we’ve gotten to Rock Rihanna is Rated R’s “Rockstar 101” with Slash and “Disturbia” — not the unique Good Woman Gone Dangerous single, however the cowl The Cab recorded for Punk Goes Pop in 2009. “Punk Goes Pop was such an amazing factor,” Goldstein says of the Fearless Data compilation sequence through which pop songs get rock makeovers. “It confirmed the energy of fine songs. It was a giant gateway into pop music for individuals to be like, ‘Wow, I just like the tune, it’s simply perhaps I don’t just like the presentation of it.’” Mayday Parade and Pierce the Veil reimagined Gotye’s “Any individual That I Used to Know,” and years later State Champs revamped Shawn Mendes’ “Stitches.” Punk Goes Pop supplied the perfect of each worlds.
“There was one thing about these pop songs that I already knew all of the lyrics to as a result of they had been always on the radio out of the blue having screams and heavy guitars and drums,” says Ada Juarez, drummer within the pop-punk band Meet Me @ the Altar. Throughout their reside reveals, they typically cowl Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Jonas Brothers’ “Burnin’ Up” with an intense rock edge. 5SOS, who they joined on the highway in 2023, did the identical with Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” early of their profession. “Everybody who would come see us was like, ‘Dude, when you guys may write a tune like ‘Teenage Dream,’ you’d be the most important band on the planet,” Clifford remembers. “And I used to be like, ‘Properly, that’s the hardest fucking factor to do.’”
And whereas it’s important for a tune to be nice, the efficiency needs to be convincing, too. “In case you go to fully what your followers need, you may please them very nicely, but it surely may not join,” says Goldstein. “However when you go too far into, ‘Man, I’m going to make one thing mainstream’ or ‘What do individuals need? What’s related proper now?’ — that’s when you may get in bother. It doesn’t sound actual anymore. I can inform what you had been referencing and it’s that tune that was out six months in the past. By the point the report comes out, no matter sound you had been going for is finished.” When pop-punk surged again into the mainstream in 2020, fueled by lockdown angst and Machine Gun Kelly, corners of the trade rushed to capitalize on it.
“You guys have to leap again on and do what you probably did to start with,’” Clifford remembers being instructed. 5SOS are extra pop than punk as of late, although the guitarist’s recently-released debut solo album Sidequest does revive these influences. “We had been all very clearly like, no,” he says. “It wasn’t our place.” Different artists figured it was value a shot. For years, Demi Lovato’s OG followers yearned for her return to rock. Her Disney-era data had been influential in exhibiting a younger viewers that they might be rockstars, too. However when she lastly gave in with Holy Fvck in 2022, it did not crossover regardless of her pop capital and emo child roots. “It undoubtedly felt identical to a money seize, in a manner,” Meet Me @ the Altar’s Edith Victoria says. “Had she completed that years prior, I feel all of us would have beloved it.”
The prior yr, breakout star Olivia Rodrigo drew comparisons to Hayley Williams, Avril Lavigne, and Alanis Morissette when her pop-punk singles “Good 4 U” and “Brutal” crashed onto the Sizzling 100, establishing her as a genre-transcending power. “Olivia Rodrigo pushed that style additional than anyone else in so long as I can bear in mind,” Clifford says. “She took the DNA and the inspiration of what made pop-punk and gave it this recent new life.” When she leaned into the sound much more on Guts, it by no means felt contrived. Feldmann praises “All-American Bitch,” drawing parallels to the choice fringe of Sonic Youth and Inexperienced Day. To his credit score, Machine Gun Kelly additionally “opened the doorways for lots of people to be influenced by him, to make no matter pop-punk music will flip into sooner or later,” Juarez says, identical to Paramore and Pierce the Veil did for them. “It’s simply evolving perpetually.”
At this level in 2025, nothing on the Sizzling 100 sounds even barely harking back to pop-punk. The acquainted is prevailing. However one other surge might be proper across the nook. The hardcore punk band Turnstile may open the gateway with their new genre-blurring album By no means Sufficient, or Pierce the Veil may trip the surprising viral fervor swelling on TikTok round their deep minimize “So Far So Pretend” straight via pop’s barricade. If the following set up in Beyoncé’s genre-shifting album trilogy actually is rock, that might be one other outstanding entry level for the bands who can’t wait to promote out. They don’t have to suit into the pop panorama instantly. They only must go for it. It’s that zeal that retains pop-punk’s perpetual love affair alive.
