Emo is back at Warped Tour. Millennials are paying to reminisce.

Simple Plan released its debut album, No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls, in 2002. More than 20 years later, the band was among the first announced to join a bill of pop-punk mainstays like the Starting Line and Bowling for Soup at the 2025 Vans Warped Tour.

Warped Tour isn’t the only place to catch beloved bands of emo’s past. Weezer is headlining the inaugural Minnesota Yacht Club Festival alongside Fall Out Boy and Green Day in July. Come October, Blink-182 and Panic at the Disco lead the roster of bands playing at the When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas. The festival’s website says Panic at the Disco is playing its 2005 album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, in its entirety.

If these festival lineups are any indication, emo is back in a big way — and nostalgia is driving its resurgence.

Recognized as a subgenre of punk rock, emo emerged in the mid-1980s in Washington, D.C., and is characterized by emotional and personal lyrics. The genre entered mainstream culture in the early 2000s as bands like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World signed with major record labels and had pivotal performances on television shows like MTV Unplugged and Saturday Night Live, respectively. As the decade continued, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and Paramore took the genre to unprecedented popularity.

Not only a style of music, emo is also an aesthetic. Members of “the scene,” or community, often wore T-shirts with band names or logos, skinny jeans and shoe brands like Vans or Converse during the subculture’s peak in the mid-aughts.

“Emo as a popular genre only goes back to the turn of the millennium. So I think pretty much as soon as you could have nostalgia for it, you started seeing it with tours in the 2010s,” Chris Payne, music journalist and author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008, told Yahoo Entertainment.

More than offering fans the opportunity to reminisce and dig back into their favorite genre, festivals that use nostalgia for their lineups “[make] a lot of money,” Payne said. But running a music festival of any scale has become increasingly difficult.

“In the 2010s, it was sort of this boom in the festival industry where everyone in industry circles [was] like, ‘When is the bubble going to burst?’ It was all these huge festivals that were basically based on Coachella and Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, where [the acts were] across all genres,” Payne said. “So many of them were popping up all over the country.”

Among those music festivals were Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Del.; Panorama Music Festival in New York City and Sasquatch Music Festival in George, Wash. Payne explained that these events were canceled, in part, due to the “overconsolidation of the music industry” and “the need to ‘scale’ everything.”

“As the 2010s went on and especially post-pandemic, that bubble kind of burst. What you see now is the more specialized festivals are the ones that are doing much better, because that big model just wasn’t sustainable,” he said. “You couple specialized festivals with nostalgia … and that, I think, is really a reliable moneymaker.”

Payne said the demographic buying tickets for these tours, now in their 20s and 30s, “are the ones who have the money to spend now.”

“The people who were the core fans of the music when it was at its commercial peak … they’re [a] much more bankable demographic now,” he said.

This summer, Warped Tour is back for the first time since 2019 to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Rather than return to its traveling festival roots, it will instead consist of three pop-up festivals in Washington, D.C., from June 14 to 15; Long Beach, Calif., from July 26 to 27; and Orlando from Nov. 15 to 16.

“I think a really important thing to highlight with this is just how grueling Warped Tour was when it was a touring festival,” said Payne of the toll it took on bands performing. “There were so many shows in so few dates. The tour was so grueling just on your body. Getting up so early, driving all night, getting very little sleep, being in the sun all day. When you’re not playing, you’re trying to hustle to sell things and set up. … Once alternatives to that arose, artists just didn’t want to do Warped Tour anymore.”

From Jan. 27 through Feb. 26, artists playing the 2025 Warped Tour will be unveiled daily as part of the “30 Days of Warped” campaign. The rollout strategy has received mixed responses from current ticket holders and past festival attendees who say they’d rather know the lineup up front.

“I think their rollout has been terrible,” Pat Egan, 35, from Philadelphia, who was once a regular Warped Tour attendee, told Yahoo. “Obviously there will be bigger artists that get announced. I think we’ve seen one to two of those. But for me, personally, there hasn’t been a band announced so far that would make the ticket, travel, hotel, et cetera worth going.”

Egan says this year’s tour is “Warped in name only.”

“You’ve got people forking over a lot of money to go relive their youth and, if the price were $40, and it was hitting 35 cities, it would be great value,” he explained. “But it’s not. It’s over $200 and that’s why I think a lot of folks are having buyer’s remorse.”

During Warped Tour’s peak, it cost between $20 and $30, on average, to see 70 to 100 bands play over the course of a day, Pollstar reported. Ticket prices for this year’s Warped vary by location. Two-day general admission passes for the now sold-out D.C. and Long Beach dates started at $259.98. For the Orlando dates, two-day general admission passes start at $229.98.

The festival’s founder, Kevin Lyman, hasn’t spoken out about the rise in Warped ticket prices. But Pasquale Rotella, the founder of Insomniac, a music event promotion company, told Rolling Stone, “[Lyman’s] been really committed to making this about the people, and making sure that people can afford to come.”

In comparison, When We Were Young, a one-day festival that boasts more than 50 bands, costs $325 for general admission. Tickets are now sold out. The festival’s organizers are considering adding a day two to accommodate demand and have asked fans to join its waitlist.

Tickets for the Minnesota Yacht Club have also sold out. The festival’s general admission passes started at $295, allowing fans to see 25 bands over three days.

Elder emos, it seems, are willing to pay to see the artists they love — some may prefer to know what to expect.

Emily Mejia, 24, from Lakeland, Fla., told Yahoo she welcomes the lineup’s slower rollout. She has tickets to attend the Warped Tour dates in Orlando. “I am very excited to be attending the Orlando dates. Unlike many people I’ve seen online, I’m already excited to see the majority of artists announced so far, so I’m just waiting to see what else we get,” she said.

Appeasing veteran Warped attendees and attracting new ones presents a challenge. Some older fans argue that continuing to spotlight older, more established artists in the scene is robbing the community of up-and-coming talent, which they believe is the whole point of a tour like Warped.

“If Lyman brought back Warped Tour the way I remembered it, I wouldn’t go,” said Egan. “There wouldn’t be enough bands for me where it would be worth it. But I desperately want him to bring it back because not having [Warped] the way it was is depriving the current teenagers who are into the scene, and it sucks.”

Teenagers constituted a large portion of the ’00s emo subculture. At the time, “lack of female representation and abuse in the scene” were, according to Payne, “part and parcel” of the culture. Since 2015, members of various bands have been accused of sexual misconduct, including with minors, at Warped Tour. The culture of pop-punk tours has been increasingly scrutinized in the years that followed.

“It’s a strange part in punk’s history because if you trace it back, so much of this was founded on standing up for marginalized people and having a safe scene. And as the subculture gets more mainstream, it becomes more difficult to keep those progressive tenets alive without the roots getting severed,” explained Payne. “Unfortunately, a lot of that did happen as the music got more popular. A lot of those roots were getting severed.”

While Payne believes the aughts were “a bit more repressed” than people remember, he’s noticed a shift toward increased safety and diversity at newer festivals.

“You can tell there’s a lot more queer people there,” he said of attending When We Were Young in 2023. “They probably were there in the years past too, in the aughts, but because of where the culture was at, people were probably less encouraged to dress how they wanted to or be themselves.”

The scene and festival landscape appear to be changing, but nostalgia remains at the center when it comes to music.

Simple Plan announced its Warped return by donning Dickies and Vans in an Instagram video as the band’s second single, “I’d Do Anything,” played in the background. Bowling for Soup released a surprise cover of Blink-182’s “Rock Show” to ring in its return to the festival. On Instagram, the Starting Line shared archival footage of themselves playing at prior Warped dates between 2003 and 2007 to celebrate being added to the lineup.

With Warped Tour 2025, looking to the past has proven to be a prominent way for older bands to drum up excitement in the present.