@Peter Pagano

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.

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

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.

The Descendents' noisy punk echoed up and down the West Coast and beyond—and touched just about substrain of the genre. Their melodic structures are alive in everything from Waaves' and FIDLAR's scrappy indie pop to Fall Out Boy's and Blink-182's pop-punk. Their rockier experiments can be heard in the post-hardcore epics of My Chemical Romance. And from the start, Green Day, NOFX, and The Offspring all took notes on the L.A. band's penchant for hyperspeed drums and cynical sneers.