The genre has since faded in popularity, but the reason I dedicate an entire column to it in the year 2020 is that it continues to manifest itself in interesting ways and continues to be an influence on so much of today's music, from indie rock to hip hop and beyond.įor this edition of 'In Defense of the Genre,' I'm taking a look back at the '80s punk albums that paved the way for the eventual explosion of albums like Dookie, Smash, and Enema of the State. Pop punk got even bigger and more sonically diverse after the pivotal 1999 release of blink-182's Enema of the State, and it continued to expand its sound and fanbase as emo took off in the early/mid 2000s and hugely popular bands like Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and My Chemical Romance made the line between pop punk and emo look close to nonexistent. Once hardcore bands realized they could combine the genre's speed, intensity, and simplicity with bright, catchy melodies, pop punk was born.

When punk’s first wave started to die down and make way for the more digestible, mainstream-embraced sound of new wave, a new crop of bands took the loud, fast sounds of the Ramones and the Dead Boys in a more extreme direction: hardcore. But as many people knew then and even more people know now, the mid '90s pop punk boom wasn't a revival of anything it was the culmination of a sound that had been bubbling on an underground level since the early 1980s.

When bands like Green Day, The Offspring, NOFX and Rancid helped pop punk explode in 1994/1995, the mainstream called it a 'punk revival' because it was the first time that punk had a real mainstream presence since the first-wave '70s bands.

Pop goes punk discography