50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums
By John Wilmes, Emily Lever, Damon Agnos, Chris Alarie, Leaf House, Adithya Pugazhendhi, Louis Keene, Alex Siquig, and Corbin Smith
From Twink-182 to the Good Harlot to Cum 41, we count down the best of punk’s most lovable, lovelorn offshoot.
#1: The first best pop punk album of all time is my god damn dad. He is always trying to steer my rebellious urges into more populist, commercially friendly sounds! I love track 4. It’s about how when I said “fuck you” to my math teacher I should have used logic instead. He said I should have demonstrated his faulty methods with syllogism. The song is called “Father’s Rubric” and it has a piercing solo. My mother hates the solo and doesn’t even think I should present alternative thinking to my math teacher; she thinks I should accept whatever he says. I saw a Blondie t-shirt in my mother’s laundry once and I wonder what happened to her.
#2: The Offspring. Pretty, pretty, pretty fly!!!!!
#3: Boxed Wine (blends only)
#4: Eating spaghetti with your hands (that are bleeding)
#5: Green Day American Idiot — Very reminiscent of American Idiot: The Play
#6: Green Day American Idiot: The Play — Very reminiscent of season 3 of Frasier.
#7: Louis Keene, Shocker staff writer
#8: Puberty
#9: Choking Victim: No Gods/No Managers
#10: Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century
#11: Being the fourth kid in your middle school to own Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
#12: Holding hands in front of, like, everyone
#13: Kuru disease
#14: That one Joy Division album cover/t-shirt
#15: The Air Raid Offense
#16: Jake Tapper
#16.5: Less Than Jake Tapper — More Than a Jake
#17: Lagwagon Hoss
#18: You in your car screaming the chorus to “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”
#19: Akira, but only the manga version (but also only the anime version)
#20: Bob Marley Legend — Because it’s on every list. In fact, I think that is required as per the constitution. It’s somewhere in the back.
#21: Going to a shisha bar on a first date and smoking two shishas for an average of one entire shisha per person and making peace with the fact that your young lungs are toast but figuring that on the balance, the sweet apricot-guava-passionfruit-strawberry scented poison was worth it [ed. note: I hate myself]
#22: Making out with your high school’s resident Lothario behind a dumpster on a day school let out early
#23: The Communist Manifesto, a poignant fusion of harsh truths and an unapproachable exterior with catchy songwriting (who can forget the earworm “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism” ?)
#24: Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Versions of Metallica
#25: ALF Sings the Pop-Punk Hits — the year was 2005 and America was bogged down in another obscenely cruel and bloody imperial quagmire when lovable TV extra-terrestrial ALF returned to lift our spirits with his covers of such classics as Offspring’s “Come Out and Play”
#26: Participating in a cryptocurrency scheme to raise money to get pretrial detainees out of jail
#27: “Wondering About Getting a Haircut” — Not an album, per se but very much important to the whole ethos of pop punk.
#28: Green Day Insomniac — An album for wondering about getting a haircut.
#29: The Shinbones: I Wanna Be a Shinbone — Classic LP from the Michigan Quartet combines guttural catchy masterworks (“Fuck Mom”) with pop punk tributes to The Dick Van Dyke Show (“Laura” “Rob’s At Work” “Alan Brady’s Toupee” “Sally Rogers Be My Wife” “Richie Petes”)
#30: Green Day: Daakie- Hit after hit after hit, including “Burnaut,” “Langview,” “Welcame to Paradise,” “Sassafras Raats,” “When I Came Araund,” “Caming Clean,” “F.A.D. / All By Myself.”
#31: The Stonecutters Song from “The Simpsons”
#32: My best friend’s boyfriend’s band’s demo — It’s just a burned CD with 4 songs but, like, they’re gonna save up to go into a studio to record the full length soon.
#33: Pizza with your best friends the night before you move out of your hometown. Slumber parties, gossip, being horny but in a cool way. The suburbs! Slightly askew stop signs! The bar your older siblings are always talking about! This was what inspired Fall Out Boy.
#34: Having a crush on me
#35: Eating veal whilst you have a crush on me
#35.5: Vegan Jizz
#35.7: Sepp Blatter — Deviated Sepp Tomb
#35.8: Sepp Blatter — A Little Splatter of Blatter
#35.85: Sepp Blatter — Blatter Infection
#35.87: Sepp Blatter — Sepp, Tick, Tank
#35.91: Sepp Blatter — One Sepp at a Time
#35.93: Sepp Blatter — Blatt on Both Sides
#36: Genuinely enjoying new Weezer albums
#37: Worrying about if the Warriors had ended up having to draft Jordan Hill
#38: Chugging a whole beer in one go the first time you try alcohol and not even gagging once
#39: The Juilliard Quartet Elliott Carter: the Five String Quartets — Not sure how that got on here but it’s canon now.
#40: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Original Soundtrack
#41: That diner in Emeryville that the guy from Green Day owns
#42: MRSA Teletovic — STREAKY SH00TER
#43: That stupid cover band that the guy from NOFX had One of their albums
#44: That time when Billy Corgan went on InfoWars
#45: Jawbreaker Unfun — Because we really, really want you to think that we’re cool…which we are!
#46: Johnn Lennnnonn — Workinng Class Hero
#47: Kevin Corrigan — Simultaneously the most pop and the most punk of character actors.
#48: That youtube video where it’s all the Beatles songs played at once
#49: All the other Green Day albums that haven’t been mentioned yet
#50: Merzbow- Anal Baroque
