It was one of those years like 1994 ( Dookie, Smash, etc), 1999 ( Enema of the State), and 2005 ( From Under the Cork Tree, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, All We Know Is Falling) where the genre reached a new level of mainstream prominence, and inspired a new generation of kids in the process. With bands watering down the genre in the hopes of achieving crossover success, it wasn't all good stuff, but it was undeniably a pivotal year in punk history and arguably an exciting one too. They had just released punk rock's first chart-topping album a year earlier with Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and that level of success opened the floodgates for 2002 to have more pop punk competition in the mainstream than any year prior. Dragging the Lake, 2002 was the first year since 1998 that blink-182 didn't release anything, but their influence was everywhere. As I was recently saying when discussing the 20th anniversary of Atticus.

This edition of 'In Defense of the Genre' looks at 10 of the biggest pop punk hits that turn 20 this year, ranked from 'keep that shit in 2002' to 'holds up!'Ģ0-year anniversaries always spark tons of nostalgia, and the sound of early 2000s pop punk is in the air right now - from the very fun Avril Lavigne comeback album to the chart-topping Machine Gun Kelly album to nostalgia-baiting festivals like When We Were Young, Emo's Not Dead, and Hawthorne Heights' Is For Lovers, to 20th anniversary album tours from New Found Glory and Simple Plan & Sum 41 - so I assume I'm not the only one with pop punk's banner year of 2002 on the mind lately.

Pop goes punk discography