Punk Finds a Pulse: What’s Behind the Genre’s Latest Comeback?

In 2010, six years into his career as a music agent, Mike Marquis was a punk-rock fan who did not want to sign punk-rock bands. My Chemical Romance, New Found Glory, Taking Back Sunday and the rest had come and gone, and music had moved on. “Any genre that has a gigantic breakout moment, whether it’s emo in the 2000s, or EDM in 2012, or nu metal in 1999, it just can’t exist forever,” says Marquis, now of CAA. “That bubble, culturally, pops.”

Still, he remained a fan of punk and emo band All Time Low, which he signed in 2018 even though it hadn’t had a hit single since 2009’s “Damned If I Do Ya (Damned If I Don’t)” or a hit album since 2012’s Don’t Panic. But it turned out like buying a stock before the market took off: Punk came back, the band’s “Monsters” was No. 1 on Alternative Airplay for 18 weeks during the pandemic, and “Sleepwalking” hit No. 1 on that chart in 2023. “I have a 10-year-old son. To him, All Time Low is this old cool band,” Marquis says. “When I process ticket requests for my friends’ kids, they want to see Gracie Abrams, but they also want to see Green Day.”

After hip-hop’s and EDM’s longtime cultural dominance, punk, pop-punk and emo bands are experiencing a commercial comeback — their first in decades.

When We Were Young — a festival first held in 2017 in California and now based in Las Vegas whose headliners include blink-182, Panic! at the Disco and All Time Low — recently added a second day in October due to high ticket demand. As of June, the Warped Tour, which shut down in 2018 after nearly 25 straight summers of punk bands, sold 240,000 tickets for its comeback shows in Washington, D.C.; Long Beach, Calif.; and Orlando, Fla., and announced it would return next year.

Punk bands make the bulk of their revenue from concert ticket sales and “an absolute killing on merch,” says Ali Hedrick, agent for Lambrini Girls. And the bands taking advantage of this surge in audience size with 2025 tours include blink-182, Social Distortion, Yellowcard, Less Than Jake, Black Flag, Bad Religion and a Johnny Rotten-less Sex Pistols.

“Our business is bigger than it’s ever been, as far as live shows are concerned. It’s definitely a really good time to be in a pop-punk band,” says Jaret Reddick, frontman for Bowling for Soup, also on tour this year. “We all had records that came out 20 years ago and everybody is celebrating these anniversaries. There’s a nostalgic aspect.”

That wistfulness may also explain why the reissue of My Chemical Romance’s landmark 2004 album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, hit No. 6 on the Billboard 200 in June, selling 37,000 albums in its first week, according to Luminate, more than three times its first-week sales in 2004.

Kevin Lyman, founder and producer of the Warped Tour, which is working with EDM festival giant Insomniac to promote this year’s events, says he doesn’t think punk’s popularity “ever went away,” adding, “Does it drift back into the underground once in a while? Yeah. And all of a sudden, someone pops out with a song or sound that crosses over.”

Erin Kelly-Burkett, whose longtime punk label, Fat Wreck Chords, recently partnered with Hopeless Records to put out albums by established label stars such as NOFX, is among those genre veterans who says punk’s “cyclical” rebound is at least partially due to the current political climate. “When people feel let down by their government — when they feel their interests are not being represented — they look for community. Punk rock’s always been at the heart of that,” she explains.

Ken Casey, frontman of Boston’s venerable Dropkick Murphys, has spent 2025 trashing President Trump as a “rat and a coward,” among other insults — and the band’s new For the People hit the top 10 on Spotify’s rock album chart and Apple Music’s pre-add chart. Its lead single, “Who Will Stand With Us?,” scored 826,000 Spotify plays and 350,000 YouTube views in its first six days. “Our streaming numbers have never been bigger,” says the band’s manager, Jeff Castelaz.

Castelaz, who is also harshly critical of the Trump administration, suggests more punk-rock stars should follow Casey in revealing “what they stand for.” Invoking classic bands like The Clash and Subhumans, which emerged during the similarly heavy-handed Margaret Thatcher era in Britain, he says, “Punk rock is a great pressure-release valve for society. It’s one of the reasons punk has always been with us.”

But Michael John Burkett, the NOFX frontman known as Fat Mike, who is also a partner in Fat Wreck Chords, says the current political atmosphere has had a chilling effect on the genre. “How politics are right now, it’s not good for punk rock,” he says. “A lot of bands are scared because of Trump and his followers. They love to hate and take revenge.”

Another reason for punk’s recent resurgence: Exciting new bands, including Turnstile (hardcore), The Paradox (pop punk), The Bug Club (indie rock) and Lambrini Girls (a combination of those) have been going viral, selling out club tours, playing festivals and opening for established headliners.

After forming in Atlanta a year ago, The Paradox covered cartoon theme “What’s New Scooby-Doo?” (a minor 2021 hit cover for Simple Plan) on TikTok and landed millions of views, en route to a social media following of 811,000 on TikTok and 833,000 on Instagram. Since then, manager Darrion Tate has helped the band sign with CAA and its label, Hundred Days Records, and land slots on Warped Tour and When We Were Young as well as opening dates this fall with All Time Low. In Tate’s view, the new punk audience is a combination of rebellious Rise Against fans and more laid-back Simple Plan fans. “There are people who just want the music and are sick and tired of the politicization,” he says. “Some of this music is just feel-good music.”