Getting into music as a kid, my journey was flanked by a chorus of older dudes chanting “they don’t make it like they used to.” I brushed it aside as grumpy old man complaining, because of course there’s still great music being made. But in the last few years, I’ve started to see more and more of my own peers joining that old refrain, assigning it to ’00s emo and pop punk instead of classic rock.
But my reaction remains the same. There’s tons of great music being released now, much of it checking off the same boxes of the music they loved as adolescents.
Take for instance Floorbird. They’re a newer act, but if you were to tell someone that they played Warped Tour in 2003, they’d likely believe you. Fall Apart Anywhere was released in 2020, but it pulls off the same sort of hooky blend of emo and pop punk as Dashboard Confessional, The Ataris, and Jimmy Eat World.