Pop-punk has never been respected by anyone anywhere, and for good reason. Songs about girls, toilet humor, and somewhat low musical ability are fairly common to this style of music. To the critics and naysayers I say: what have you done with your life that’s so great? I recently heard someone rag on my beloved genre of music and a sentence later share their love for REO Speedwagon. That’s like someone railing against hot dogs and then eating a diaper. Yes, hot dogs are unhealthy. They are cheap and convenient. I have great memories of hot dogs as a kid and I have never stopped enjoying them. If you don’t like them you don’t like America, plain and simple. Not to mention that a hot dog created rightly can be a masterpiece for the mouth! We’re talking corn dogs, chili dogs, Chicago dogs and the such.
Pop-punk music is represented as hot dogs in this analogy. If you don’t like this music it is understandable, but it also means you are probably a picky snob that cannot enjoy something simple and is also loaded with parasites. Come on, let your hair down and enjoy simplicity! Don’t criticize it because you think it lacks creativity. If it were as simple as you think it sounds everyone would be writing songs, but it takes talent to write catchy short songs that stay with people for years. Played fast its the sugared up ADHD cousin of hardcore, played slow its doing an impression of 60s bubblegum pop, and played through enough slick production it was a product music industry people could make money off of.
This brand of music is closely related to the high school experience, partly because so much of it has been popular with the kids of the era it comes out in and because its content speaks to what they’re living (or wished they were living). I cannot separate the music itself to where I was in life, so every description will speak to that. Once a band has been mentioned they cannot make the list again, which I do with every list I make (except for Jazz-I made an exception for Miles Davis. If any of these guys or any band in rock music can be Miles Davis I’ll make an exception for them too.)
So that being said here is a list of my favorites.
1. Forty Hour Train Back To Penn- The Movielife: Senior year of high school this was my favorite album, the perfect bridge between hardcore and pop punk. These guys wrote the best sing along songs ever! It came out in 2003 towards the end of summer, but they broke up a couple of months later. I never got a chance to see them as a teenager. One of my favorite concert moments ever was in 2017 when they reunited and played most of this album. I finally got to be a senior in high school again.
2. New Found Glory- New Found Glory: Summer after 9th grade my friend exposed me to the nasally sugary goodness of NFG with this classic. The guy who produced it said “During pre-production, we’d get in their van for lunch and they had a poster of Britney Spears up. They wanted the music to be heavy, but the vocals to be super-pop, that was the goal.” Perfect description of what this sounds like. A lot of people rag on these guys, but they put on one of the greatest shows I have ever seen. I’ve never stopped defending them or this album. They inspired dozens to try the same thing, be a hardcore band making pop music. No one did it better than New Found Glory.
3. A Place In The Sun-Lit: 8th grade was the worst year of my entire school career. I am super thankful I found something I could enjoy as I navigated that painful awkwardness. I borrowed the cd from a kid in my school I was doing a project with. He didn’t do any of the work he was supposed to do, but let me borrow this to make up for it. After listening to it on repeat for about 6 months (I didn’t have a lot of cd’s in my collection yet) I had to give it back and go buy my own copy. The guitar parts are unbelievably catchy, I spent a lot of 8th grade fantasizing about learning to play and start a band just like Lit. I think there’s only a couple of other albums I’ve listened to more in my history with music.
4. Make A Sound- Autopilot Off: Just a couple of months before I graduated high school this album came out. It was so good, I was sure they were going to catch on and be the next big thing. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, and I feel this band never got the attention they deserved. It was really straightforward and unpretentious, which is probably why bands like Fall Out Boy got popular instead of this. Great simple songs that you could catch onto after a couple of listens; but after 100 listens the charm didn’t wear off.
5. Life In General- MxPx: This had already been a Christian rock classic for years before I got into it, but I never listened to it until a loose copy was given to me by a friend my sophomore year of high school. It was literally loose and beat up in this kids car, only the first half played because it was so scratched. It took me months to actually listen, but another kid at school told me MxPx was his favorite band and it made me go back and listen. These guys have been making music for 30 years, most of it isn’t that great. On the contrary this album is incredible and stands as the pinnacle of their career. Fast, short, and full of teen angst are common qualities in pop-punk, but in the right hands it can be uniquely fashioned into something entirely relatable. I finally did get a copy I could listen to all the way through.
6. Through Being Cool- Saves The Day: A friend burned me a copy of this when I was 20 and had a mohawk. I have made a few other albums list, and this is the third time Saves The Day has made the cut. My very first list from 2015 was about ‘emo’ albums that featured a Saves record I felt was more akin to that genre (check it out, I’ve hopefully grown as a writer). An all time list I made in 2018 featured what I think is their best work, the sublime ‘In Reverie’. I am talking about pop-punk music here, and ‘Through Being Cool’ is their best in this category. People go nuts for these guys at their shows, but especially when it’s any song from this one. Listening to this brings me back to a very happy time in my life, when I was dating my wife. It also reminds me of when my oldest daughter was born. So it does something right in marking important times in life.
7. Dookie- Green Day: Although this was hugely influential to hundreds of bands, helped launch a whole genre into the mainstream, and was diamond certified in sales (10x million in America, millions more elsewhere) I had never heard it before. I was in 2nd grade when this came out and didn’t have a much older brother to show me music or anything. Secular music was contraband when I was younger, but as that ban was lifting I finally did hear the song ‘When I Come Around’ during a late night radio listen and lost my little 9th grade mind. I bought a copy and listened to it like it was brand new. Like Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, it’s a piece of rock history in that you can hear it in so many other things. Every band on this list was probably influenced by this album in one way or another.
8. Avalanche United- I Am The Avalanche: I was a young dad that didn’t have a lot of money to spend on music, so at Christmas when my wife took me to the record store to pick some things I had to carefully pick. I thought that these guys stopped making music. I was a fan because the singer was the singer for the Movielife, I would be able to follow him to whatever band he was in. I was pretty confident in this pick, I am so grateful for this record to this day. It was a perfect sound for what I was walking through at work, feeling unappreciated but making something beautiful out of it. Unable to polish the rough edges, unsophisticated but at the same time naturally sweet. I regret I never got to see them perform, but I’m sure at some point they’ll reunite and I can be nostalgic.
9. They Came From The Shadows- Teenage Bottlerocket: I had read about them sounding like the Ramones and being from Laramie Wyoming, so I was sold. Another timestamp of being a young dad with a perceived dilemma. I did not want to be like so many other young dads and give up on music, so I knew I had to find something I could listen to that displayed defiance but that I would genuinely enjoy. They fit the role of a new band (to me) to prove to myself I still like music. It’s a comical and silly punk rock sound, it never gets serious or slows down. Although it’s super repetitive I can’t dock it points on that front (or most of these albums would be doomed) because it’s part of the charm. I thought that all Teenage Bottlerocket recordings would be equal because of this sound, but it’s not true. Nothing else they have done comes close. This really is a great record and is this bands best.
10. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket- Blink 182: It was that wonderful summer of 2001, pre 9/11 America. The same summer I discovered New Found Glory. This was a dirtier content cleaner production version of NFG. Mostly these guys annoy me, I almost didn’t include this album in my list. I wouldn’t waste my time with most of the material these guys put out, they really are the lamest group of the list. Why include it? Undeniable to me is how it takes me back. It is a pretty good soundtrack to many high school events, and Travis Barker’s drumming is top notch. Not every song is a winner, but the ones I love knock it out of the park. Half the album has jewels that put it in my top ten. Unfortunately it was the more popular songs that I feel fall short. I know the fan favorite is ‘Enema Of The State’, but I feel this is superior songwriting.
Honorable Mentions- The Starting Line- Say It Like You Mean It, Fall Out Boy- Take This To Your Grave, No Use For A Name- All The Best Songs, Box Car Racer- Box Car Racer
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