The thing I really don’t understand about the current pop punk revival is why people are calling it a pop punk revival.

For the record, I don’t have a horse in this race, since I feel ZERO nostalgia towards Californian pop punk. This is just a thing I’ve noticed.

Like, I know nostaligia-based genre revivals rarely sound all that similar to previous waves of that style. 80’s pop-rock never really sounded that much like Plastic Hearts. Get Lucky would’ve sounded like a weird track if it came out at the height of disco. The ultra slick production on Uptown Funk makes it sound far bigger and more bombastic than either classic 70’s funk or 80’s synth-funk, both of which it borrows from in its instrumentation.

So I do get that the new pop punk revival, like all those others, is more about capturing the general vibe, rather than the specific sound…

But what vibe are they going for?

All the stuff I’ve heard from this new revival has been really melancholic, richly-produced ballads with heavy reliance on acoustic guitars and big hooks.

Is that how people remember pop punk Because that’s not what pop punk was like, at all.

Most pop punk, especially the bands that people still seem to talk about, were almost relentlessly upbeat. Fast, extremely happy-sounding songs with simple, powerchord riffs, coupled with a weird abundance of “I can’t get laid” lyrics considering these songs were written by multimillionaire rock stars.

Honestly, if the music press didn’t keep insisting that these artists were part of a pop punk revival, I’d never describe it as such.

From what I can gather, this “pop punk revival” sounds more like Sam Smith + emo rap + Imagine Dragons, which really isn’t the vibe I remember.