- Hardcore Punk, Post-Hardcore, occasional Rockabilly, Surf Music, Glam Rock, Grunge and New Wave Music influences
Pop Punk is Punk Rock at its most accessible.
Perhaps the first ever Pop Punk band were The Ramones, who melded the simplicity of rock'n'roll with breakneck speed, but maintained enough pop sensibilities to achieve great acclaim and cult status.
Other bands, namely the Descendents, played a significant part in the influence of bands in Southern California who made up the 90s Punk Revival - Bad Religion, Pennywise, NOFX, The Offspring, Rancid. Many of these bands were also part of a subgenre called Skate Punk, which combined pop punk elements with Thrash Metal riffs, and as the name suggest were associated with skateboarding subculture.
Bands like this played a large part in influencing Green Day, who premiered at 924 Gilman Street, Oakland, a renowned all ages venue. Before long, the radio was full of bands like blink-182 and Sum 41. After the mainstream success of Pop Punk, certain parts of the punk subculture started applying a "Pop Punk, not Punk" mentality to the genre, claiming that putting the style of music for sale was an anti-punk action and therefore not "true" punk.
During the mid-2000s, Pop Punk largely supplanted the late '90s-to-early '00s Boy Band craze. Young female listeners flocked to pop punk bands for largely the same reasons why they were into boy bands. They weren't without detractors, but since they were formed organically, not by a label, and actually wrote their own songs and played their own instruments, they had much more artistic credibility than boy bands ever did, and were much more appealing to males.note
Today, Pop Punk is past its peak in terms of commercial success, though is still a fairly active genre if you know where to look. Recent pop punk acts such as Man Overboard are insistent that pop punk is required to be defended at all times, mainly from jerky hipsters and elitist hardcore punkers. For more information on this new scene check out defend pop punk which is the modern form of the genre (containing elements of melodic hardcore and emo). "Easycore" is another recent development that fuses the genre with melodic hardcore and metalcore; the genre was largely created by A Day to Remember and Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!, and while the former has since grown into a major act, the easycore genre itself largely fizzled out by the mid-2010s, with only I Prevail finding anywhere close to the success of A Day to Remember.
In order to dodge the classification, many Pop Punk bands claim to be "Power Pop" instead. Don't believe them. There is also some overlap with the Emo genre which combines elements of this with post-hardcore and emotional relationship oriented lyrics. Although many bands are resistant to the label due to the internet giving it negative connotations. Form your own opinions on whether a band is emo or not, it really doesn't matter in the long run.
Bands generally agreed to be pop-punk include:
- 5 Seconds of Summer (the most successful pop punk band in the 2010's, though that's largely due to them being photogenic young men playing for female listeners. Note that they aren't technically a Boy Band, but their marketing targets largely the same demographic for the same reasons.)
- A Day to Remember (along with melodic metalcore, and a likely Ur-Example for "easycore")
- The Academy Is
- The Adicts
- AFI as of "Crash Love"
- ALL
- All Time Low
- The All-American Rejects
- American Hi Fi
- An Cafe
- The Ataris
- Bad Religion (combine this with Hardcore Punk)
- Billy Talent
- blink-182 (mixed with more traditional Alternative Rock since the self-titled album)
- Bowling for Soup
- Boys Like Girls
- Brand New
- Busted
- Buzzcocks
- The Cab
- CAKE
- Charli XCX
- Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! (easycore)
- Cobra Starship
- Coheed and Cambria (mixes this with Progressive Metal)
- Crimpshrine
- Crystalyne
- Descendents
- The Dickies (one of the earliest examples to form. Also New Wave.)
- Die Ärzte
- Doll Skin
- Ellegarden
- Eve 6
- The Exploding Hearts
- 2003 - Guitar Romantic
- Face To Face
- Fall Out Boy
- Fastbacks
- Four Year Strong (easycore)
- The Get Up Kids (considered to fall into second wave Emo Music as well)
- Gob
- Good Charlotte
- Green Day (arguably the genre's Trope Codifier)
- 1994 - Dookie
- 1995 - Insomniac
- 1997 - nimrod.
- 2000 - Warning
- 2004 - American Idiot
- 2009 - 21st Century Breakdown
- 2016 - Revolution Radio
- Guttermouth
- Hawthorne Heights
- Hey Violet
- Hüsker Dü
- Offshoot band Nova Mob count as well.
- I Prevail (easycore)
- Isocracy
- Jawbreaker
- Kenickie
- A Kiss Could Be Deadly
- Avril Lavigne
- Lemonheads
- Less Than Jake (whenever they're not dabbling with ska)
- Lit
- The Lookouts
- Man Overboard
- Mae Shi
- Marianas Trench
- Mayday Parade
- Motion City Soundtrack
- The Movielife
- My Chemical Romance
- MxPx
- Neck Deep
- Nerf Herder
- New Found Glory
- NOFX
- The Offspring
- Panic! at the Disco
- Paramore
- Patent Pending
- Pennywise
- Pinhead Gunpowder
- Plain White Ts
- The Ramones (well, they started it)
- 1976 - Ramones
- 1977 - Leave Home
- 1977 - Rocket to Russia
- 1978 - Road to Ruin
- 1980 - End of the Century
- Redd Kross
- The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
- Relient K
- Saves the Day
- Say Anything...
- Screeching Weasel
- Set It Off (combined with symphonic and orchestral rock, of all things)
- Shonen Knife
- Simple Plan
- Smash Mouth
- Soul Asylum (at least in their early days- think Hüsker Dü meets The Replacements)
- Spitalfield
- State Champs (a 2010s example and one that's gained a fair amount of popularity as of late)
- Sum 41
- Superchunk (they combine it with Indie Rock)
- Superdrag
- Skye Sweetnam
- Teenage Bottlerocket
- TrebleCharger
- The Undertones
- The Used
- The Vandals
- We Are The In Crowd
- Weezer
- 1994 - The Blue Album
- 1996 - Pinkerton
- 2001 - The Green Album
- 2002 - Maladroit
- 2005 - Make Believe
- 2008 - The Red Album
- 2019 - The Teal Album
- Waterparks
- The Wonder Years
- Yellowcard
- Zombina And The Skeletons