No one expected the When We Were Young festival to break the internet like it did. People were too busy grappling with the fact that it could actually be real.

“Going through that whole lineup was fun,” says Patrick “Pulsar” Trout, the concert promoter behind Las Vegas’ Pulsar Presents. “From a visual standpoint, the flier was really effective. The way your eyes work, they’re looking down the middle, because that’s where the headliners are. Then you find yourself catching all these different acts, and you find yourself doing double takes.”

My Chemical Romance. Paramore. Avril Lavigne. Jimmy Eat World. Taking Back Sunday. AFI. Dashboard Confessional. The Used. Story of the Year. The Maine. Mayday Parade. And on and on and on. The lineup of early-2000s emo and pop-punk acts stretched on—as did the buzz. Within hours, the one-day festival had sold out. Live Nation followed up with two additional dates, and those tickets quickly vanished, too. Trout says he wasn’t surprised.

“This was a concept that had been kicked around by people, but no one had really run with it yet or been able to do it on this scale,” he says. “I figured the first one [who did], especially with it being a destination event in Vegas, would sell it out, and I’m glad it did. Seeing that there is demand for festivals put together like this is really encouraging.”

It’s also uplifting for Trout. The 37-year-old got into the Las Vegas music scene in the early 2000s, “around the time new metal was starting to fade off, and pop-punk and metalcore were really coming into their own in a big way and in the Warped Tour era,” he says.

Back then, beloved music venues like the Huntridge, the Castle and Jillian’s were his usual haunts, drawing bands like the pre-signed Killers, Bowling for Soup and Hatebreed. By the time Trout began booking, plenty of bands of the Warped Tour variety were out on the road—and he had an eye on them. “Some of the first shows I did were with bands like The Bled and Cute Is What We Aim For,” he says.

As nationally touring bands passed through Vegas, the local scene heated up. Homegrown successes like Escape the Fate and Panic! At the Disco broke out. And bands like Mercy Music and The Higher, the latter of which toured with the Warped Tour circuit and Panic!, weren’t far behind. “It felt like in that mid-2000s, late-2000s time, there was a real spotlight on Vegas for the first time, especially in the all-ages scene,” Trout says.

Listeners praise Mercy Music for its addictive pop-punk melodies and poignant lyrics today. But a lot of that catchiness stems from frontman Brendan Scholz’s exposure to the genre’s earlier explorations. “I was brought up on The Jam and The Ramones, Elvis Costello and Squeeze,” he says. “As I got older, I discovered the second wave, which would be your Green Day and your Rancid, and I went from there.”

Pop-punk owned the airwaves up until the 2010s, when its popularity waned. Until recently, that is.

“This is gonna sound silly, but Machine Gun Kelly doing a pop-punk record I think really put the genre as a whole on a lot of people’s radar that it otherwise wouldn’t have been,” Scholz says.

MGK went from rap to pop-punk seemingly overnight with 2020 album Tickets to My Downfall. The LP, which featured Blink-182’s Travis Barker and a cover of Paramore’s “Misery Business,” helped open floodgates of nostalgia. Out spilled Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 breakout album, Sour, which gained prominence for its pop-punk influences. That same year, Willow Smith collaborated with Barker and Lavigne on her punk record, Lately I Feel Everything.

Fast forward to 2022, and the second coming of pop-punk has arrived. My Chemical Romance is touring again, and When We Were Young 2023 has already been confirmed for another Las Vegas run.

“People are ready to do stuff again. Everyone was so cooped up that even the artists who said they were never going to play again are open-minded,” says vocalist Seth Trotter, who recently reunited his own Vegas band, The Higher. “Mark my words, I guarantee there will be another Blink-182 reunion tour that will have [singer] Tom [DeLonge] in it.”

Days after he made it, Trotter’s prediction came to pass: Blink-182 has a national tour booked, including a headlining set at When We Were Young 2023.

“A big difference between our generation—the Warped Tour generation—and this new generation of artists and fans is that they don’t gatekeep,” Trout says. “Twenty years ago, it was like, ‘You can’t like punk and like metal. You can’t like metal and like rap.’ Now, with TikTok, you’ve got a generation of kids discovering not just current new music, but music from all eras, and that’s influencing the music they’re making.”

All Time Low’s 2007 hit “Dear Maria, Count Me In” went viral on Tik Tok recently, with users shouting the phrase “Mom, it was never a phase. It’s a lifestyle!” and then singing along to the song. That about sums up this resurgence.

“A big appeal to it is its relatability,” Trout says. “Everyone’s had their heart broken. Everyone’s been frustrated with their parents or with an authority figure at some point. Everyone’s struggled with mental health and trying to figure out who you are.”

Pop-punk’s early pioneers created what Trout calls the “soundtrack” that got so many teens through their tough years. “That builds an internal loyalty that never really goes away.”

Kittie, a Canadian metal outfit that will play When We Were Young, is one of those influential acts with which Trout grew up—and which he later booked. “They came out at a time when the metal scene was not very welcoming to women in bands,” he says. “Now, 20 years later, you look at the Grammy nominees for Best Metal Performance, and three out of five of them have women in the band.”

Times certainly have changed. But if When We Were Young is any indicator, our tastes, faithfully, have not.

“When a band can make me feel when I’m listening to them at 37, the same way I would have felt listening to a band at 17, that’s a good sign,” Trout says.

When We Were Young October 22, 23 & 29, Las Vegas Festival Grounds, whenwewereyoungfestival.com.

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