When 5 Seconds of Summer were invited to join the nostalgia-heavy When We Were Young Festival in 2023, their immediate response was an eager yes. They likely would have ended up on the Las Vegas Festival Grounds even if they weren’t performing. The bill was an exhaustive list of nearly every band they loved and learned from while growing up in Sydney, Australia. 5SOS would be taking the stage after Yellowcard and preceding sets from Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and headliners Green Day. It was a no-brainer.
But once their initial enthusiasm dissipated, they were slightly perplexed by the offer.
“The question comes up of, like, ‘Do we fit?’” guitarist Michael Clifford tells Rolling Stone. “And, I mean, the answer was still no.” Glancing at the barricade, he could tell who was clearly there for the more veteran acts performing later that night, who first discovered 5SOS during the three years they spent touring with One Direction, and who came across “She Looks So Perfect” during one of its recurrent viral surges on TikTok. They couldn’t quite nail down their own classification: “Are we an alternative band? Are we pop stars? Are we rock musicians? Are we a boy band? Are we nostalgic?” Everyone there might answer those questions differently, depending on their own entry point into the intersection between pop and punk.
The two genres perpetually orbit each other. Every few years, punk goes pop (or vice versa), by way of an unexpected crossover hit or comeback. Veteran acts shift their sound and break into a new era, or a younger generation will capitalize on the hunger for nostalgia. The waves rarely last longer than a few months in the mainstream, but the surge always returns. Territorial fans who didn’t want commercial pop audiences infiltrating their scene in the first place are never too thrilled about new listeners or the pop-leaning pivots from their rock gods. But others who may have once found the genre unfamiliar are introduced to the thrill of hearing a killer pop chorus filtered through riotous guitars and punk percussion.
Clifford’s earliest pop-punk memories include playing Guitar Hero and watching Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker cover “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” on YouTube in 2007. That same year, Paramore released the disruptive LP Riot!, Fall Out Boy teamed up with Jay-Z and Babyface on Infinity of High, Avril Lavigne became The Best Damn Thing to hit pop in a while, and Boys Like Girls were making “The Great Escape.” Over the years, the route pop-punk could take to the mainstream was similarly altered by crossover hits from Machine Gun Kelly, Lil Peep, Halsey, Willow, and more. Each new surge showed straight-laced pop fans that there was always more happening on the outskirts of their favorite genre.
“With songwriting, it’s interesting because the pop punk and emo genres [have] simple chord progressions, not a lot of parts, very clear concept, good emotional lyrics, really catchy melodies, are highly energetic — that’s essentially pop music,” says producer and songwriter Andrew Goldstein, whose collaborators have spanned from Blink-182 and Bring Me the Horizon to Addison Rae and Britney Spears. “Most pop music is three to four chords, a really catchy melody, and a concept that almost anyone can understand. That’s what really connects with people. Those similarities are what really allows for these artists to become a lot bigger.”
Pop-punk first sunk its teeth into Goldstein at the turn of the millennium. He came across New Found Glory and Sum 41, as well as emo leaders Taking Back Sunday and Thursday, but it was Blink-182 that rewired him musically. Finding them right on the cusp of Enema of the State made him want to pick up a guitar and connect with an audience the way that his new favorite band did with him. “I remember my friend’s older brother was like, ‘Oh, they sold out,’” he says. “If somebody becomes popular, it’s easy to say that they’re selling out because there’s different steps you have to take to accommodate the fan base.” Playing bigger venues, mass ordering merchandise, recording in high-tech studios — all of that could be considered selling out. For pop fans, it’s unfathomable that anyone would want anything else.
That was the case with 5SOS. “We always said from the beginning, we want to be as big as fucking possible,” Clifford says. Coming from Australia, they had to make their shot count. Before they’d released any music of their own, 5SOS shared A Day to Remember and Go Radio covers alongside renditions of One Direction and Justin Bieber tracks on YouTube. Green Day and Blink-182’s influence was impossible to ignore across their self-titled debut album, released 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. But their sticky melodies and hooks always wore the touch of pop, too.
“That style of music had taken such a downturn, and nobody was into it,” Clifford says of the pop-punk scene at the time. “We were like, ‘Well, hold on, we have a good idea where we can bring that back into the mainstream.’ And, yes, there are going to have to be some changes when you evolve to bring that style of music somewhere else.” 5SOS leaned into “the traits people were liking about boy band culture” since it was “all anyone would fucking talk about,” anyway; but they were still “longing for acceptance from a community that we were so passionately representing.” It came at a cost. “We were just shunned by the community instantly,” Clifford says. “They sort of just looked at how we looked and wrote it off.”
If the genre wanted to thrive and survive, it couldn’t keep treating pop success like a death sentence. “Sometimes people are ahead of the curve, and it takes time for them to realize the brilliance of a record when it comes out,” says producer-songwriter John Feldmann, whose sprawling credits include Panic! at the Disco’s Vices & Virtues. Change can be hard — and there was no tougher time for OG pop-punk fans than 2013. They were already reeling from My Chemical Romance breaking up and feeling disconnected from Panic! at the Disco’s directional shift on Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die. They were also being reintroduced to Fall Out Boy following an extended hiatus while Paramore marked the beginning of a creative transformation with an explosive crossover hit.
Feldmann saw Paramore lay the foundation for that moment years prior, when he first heard “That’s What You Get,” a blazing rock track from Riot! with an undeniable hook. He remembers Fueled by Ramen founder John Janick telling him, “We can’t put this out. It’s too early for this band. They can’t be that popular quite yet.” They’d already broken through with “Misery Business,” but this could have gotten them stuck on the other side. “With pop, it’s harder to create a legacy because it takes a lot of time,” says Goldstein. “It takes a lot of fans.” Fans in the pop-punk scene fostered a different sense of loyalty than pop did, and they expected it to be reciprocated.
Paramore’s progression to that point needed to be natural in order for it to work. “You can really see the writing on the wall with that song,” Feldmann says. “You know how ‘Still Into You’ became one of their biggest songs? That was already set up with ‘That’s What You Get.’” By 2013, Paramore were on their fourth album and umpteenth lineup change. They’d get nothing but false security out of moving backwards and rehashing the music they already made while clearly yearning to evolve. It’s understandable why listeners would crave the kind of music they discovered during their formative years. “Those are the records that shape your whole existence,” Feldmann adds, but notes that “every artist should be able to experiment and not be harassed for expanding their sonic horizon.”
It’s the same crossroad Fall Out Boy faced when they recorded their fifth album, Save Rock & Roll. “I wasn’t interested in making a pop punk record with anybody. I was kind of burned out on that, just like I think most people were,” producer Butch Walker tells Rolling Stone. “They didn’t care about that. They were like, ‘No, we’re gonna lose a lot of fans, but we need to make new fans. We need to appeal to a whole new generation of people. Or why are we doing this? We’re not growing as a band.’” When they re-entered the pop arena at the time, it was dominated by artists like Rihanna, One Direction, and Macklemore. Their lane was wide open.
For an entire wave of pop fans, the band helped translate pop-punk into a format they could easily access. When Fall Out Boy released “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark,” Taylor Swift told her 25 million Twitter followers that she’d listened to it 43 times in one day. “I love Fall Out Boy so much,” Swift told Rolling Stone in 2019. “Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it.” The two acts shared a collaborator in Walker, who can recall the first time he heard Green Day’s Dookie in a Nebraska parking lot as clearly as he can remember Swift showing him “Everything Has Changed” the morning she wrote it.
As producer, he had “no notes.” The Red single arrived in near-perfect shape, even with the bathroom tiles reverberating through the voice note. Walker ranks Swift as “one of the best songwriters in pop music ever,” and expresses the same enthusiasm when praising Pete Wentz. “She made the right call by being influenced by that, because I think that is the DNA in her music,” he says. When Walker first encountered Fall Out Boy, they were unsigned, “a fucking trainwreck on stage,” and already writing ingenious lyrics. “How are they thinking this big and how are they thinking this poetically?” he remembers wondering. “Pete has just got a way with words like no one else.”
“My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” ended up being Fall Out Boy’s biggest hit since “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs.” For Walker, it represents “a classic example of a band taking the guard rails off, taking the boundaries off, pushing the walls down.” The song started with John Hill during pitch sessions for another artist’s album, but collected dust for a year before Walker played the rough demo for the band. They lunged for it. “The guys were like, ‘That’s our sound. That’s our new record. Urgent, powerful, hooky, dirty, loud, aggressive — but poppy.”
During our call, Walker digs up that original voice note and hits play. It confirms that the melody of the chorus has always been that irresistible. “Do you want to hear the punch line?” he asks. “That was actually written for Rihanna.”
It’s intriguing to imagine what the pop star could have done with it. The closest we’ve gotten to Rock Rihanna is Rated R’s “Rockstar 101” with Slash and “Disturbia” — not the original Good Girl Gone Bad single, but the cover The Cab recorded for Punk Goes Pop in 2009. “Punk Goes Pop was such a tremendous thing,” Goldstein says of the Fearless Records compilation series in which pop songs get rock makeovers. “It showed the strength of good songs. It was a big gateway into pop music for people to be like, ‘Wow, I like the song, it’s just maybe I don’t like the presentation of it.’” Mayday Parade and Pierce the Veil reimagined Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” and years later State Champs revamped Shawn Mendes’ “Stitches.” Punk Goes Pop offered the best of both worlds.
“There was something about these pop songs that I already knew all the lyrics to because they were constantly on the radio suddenly having screams and heavy guitars and drums,” says Ada Juarez, drummer in the pop-punk band Meet Me @ the Altar. During their live shows, they often cover Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Jonas Brothers’ “Burnin’ Up” with an intense rock edge. 5SOS, who they joined on the road in 2023, did the same with Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” early in their career. “Everyone who would come see us was like, ‘Dude, if you guys could write a song like ‘Teenage Dream,’ you’d be the biggest band in the world,” Clifford recalls. “And I was like, ‘Well, that is the hardest fucking thing to do.’”
And while it’s essential for a song to be great, the performance has to be convincing, too. “If you go to completely what your fans want, you could please them very well, but it might not connect,” says Goldstein. “But if you go too far into, ‘Man, I’m going to make something mainstream’ or ‘What do people want? What’s relevant right now?’ — that’s when you can get in trouble. It doesn’t sound real anymore. I can tell what you were referencing and it’s that song that was out six months ago. By the time the record comes out, whatever sound you were going for is done.” When pop-punk surged back into the mainstream in 2020, fueled by lockdown angst and Machine Gun Kelly, corners of the industry rushed to capitalize on it.
“You guys have to jump back on and do what you did in the beginning,’” Clifford recalls being told. 5SOS are more pop than punk these days, though the guitarist’s recently-released debut solo album Sidequest does revive those influences. “We were all very clearly like, no,” he says. “It wasn’t our place.” Other artists figured it was worth a shot. For years, Demi Lovato’s OG fans yearned for her return to rock. Her Disney-era records were influential in showing a young audience that they could be rockstars, too. But when she finally gave in with Holy Fvck in 2022, it failed to crossover despite her pop capital and emo kid roots. “It definitely felt just like a cash grab, in a way,” Meet Me @ the Altar’s Edith Victoria says. “Had she done that years prior, I think we all would have loved it.”
The prior year, 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 Hot 100, establishing her as a genre-transcending force. “Olivia Rodrigo pushed that genre further than anybody else in as long as I can remember,” Clifford says. “She took the DNA and the foundation of what made pop-punk and gave it this fresh new life.” When she leaned into the sound even more on Guts, it never felt contrived. Feldmann praises “All-American Bitch,” drawing parallels to the alternative edge of Sonic Youth and Green Day. To his credit, Machine Gun Kelly also “opened the doors for a lot of people to be influenced by him, to make whatever pop-punk music will turn into in the future,” Juarez says, just like Paramore and Pierce the Veil did for them. “It’s just evolving forever.”
At this point in 2025, nothing on the Hot 100 sounds even slightly reminiscent of pop-punk. The familiar is prevailing. But another surge could be right around the corner. The hardcore punk band Turnstile could open the gateway with their new genre-blurring album Never Enough, or Pierce the Veil could ride the unexpected viral fervor swelling on TikTok around their deep cut “So Far So Fake” straight through pop’s barricade. If the next installation in Beyoncé’s genre-shifting album trilogy really is rock, that could be another prominent entry point for the bands who can’t wait to sell out. They don’t have to fit into the pop landscape immediately. They just have to go for it. It’s that passion that keeps pop-punk’s perpetual love affair alive.
