@Scott Arreola

Songs to help you relax and unwind. Updated every Sunday.

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

Whether it’s a weekday morning or Saturday night, get going with this personalized set of upbeat music. Refreshed every Monday.

The initial furnace blast of mid-’70s punk in the U.S. and U.K. wasn’t all sonic chaos. Rabble-rousing bands Buzzcocks and Ramones cherry-picked popular music elements they loved—sticky melodies, lovely harmonies, buoyant tempos—and created pop-punk. The genre’s angsty, heartbroken lyrics would in time become a beacon for the bored teenagers who congregated in all-ages concert spaces, including 924 Gilman in Berkeley, California, to see bands such as Green Day. However, pop-punk’s pogoing rhythms and irresistible hooks also resonated with grown-up audiences: blink-182 hit big in the ’90s, and a mid-2000s mainstream wave swept up bleeding-heart romantics Fall Out Boy and Paramore, whose success would continue throughout the 2010s. Yet what’s most remarkable about contemporary pop-punk bands is how much they have in common with the early ones: As it turns out, buzzsawing riffs paired with insecurity-riddled sentiments are timeless.

It took a trio of young, snotty punks from the Bay Area to thrust punk straight into the mainstream and transform the genre into the commercial giant it is today. Green Day was the first American band to take punk snarl and add to it the kind of melodic pop hooks that sounded equally at home in a dingy club as blaring from stadium-sized speakers. The band's huge success paved the way for pop-minded punks like Sum 41, MxPx, Yellowcard, Blink-182, and many others to follow.