Emo gods, listen up.ĭid you ever think you’d see the day when 3OH!3 had a noticeable, good influence on music? Well, the dawn has come thanks to groups like 100 gecs, and on top of it all, the crunkcore originators themselves are back - with music that’s as chaotically fun as ever. And when it comes to the Warped veterans, we’re only including those who are still making music that would fit into Warped Tour just as well now as then - so not bands like Paramore and Fall Out Boy, who’ve pivoted to poppier material. Rather than deciding what’s emo and what’s hardcore and what’s punk rock, we’re trying our best to color within the line that is that hyphen between pop and punk. Call it “Varped Tour ’21.”Ī few quick rules: Although Warped Tour spanned everything from ska to hip-hop, we’re focusing largely (though not exclusively) on pop-punk artists. But when was the last time we needed a Warped Tour more? We can still dream, so at Vulture, we’ve made a list of 25 musicians that would play our ideal Warped Tour this summer. As of now, it looks like the closest we might get is a 20th-anniversary edition of New Jersey’s Bamboozle Festival come … 2023.Īnd let’s be real, there’s still no way a massive, multi-stage festival could tour the country by this summer - and definitely not with all the moshing us touch-starved music fans would be doing. (It returned for two 25th-anniversary events in Atlantic City, New Jersey and Mountain View, California, in 2019.) Rumors of a revival under new leadership have swirled since, but little has been confirmed. But absent from that group is Warped Tour, the Vans–sponsored touring pop-punk festival that made its last round in 2018, upon founder Kevin Lyman’s retirement.
The country’s accelerated vaccine rollout has also brought a wave of returning festival announcements, after over a year largely devoid of live music altogether. While its return to the mainstream has been brewing for years, thanks to emerging artists like YUNGBLUD and nothing,nowhere., in the late 2010s, it feels like no coincidence that the new wave is reaching a critical mass as we return to social life with infinite more angst.
begins to emerge from quarantine in 2021, another revival has arrived: pop-punk. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by GettyĪs the world spent much of 2020 inside and isolated, disco experienced a resurgence like it hadn’t seen in years, providing escapist joy when reality looked like hell.