The world might look a little different than it did in the early 2000s - OK, a lot different - but the music that defined a generation has stood the test of time. While the Bamboozle music festival no longer exists and skinny jeans might be out of style, Warped Tour is alive and well, and the headbanging songs of yore are making our Spotify Wrapped lists cool again. Was 2025 the year that emo came back? The answer, unequivocally, is yes. Just look at the When We Were Young festival, which became a Las Vegas staple in 2022, for proof: The event actually originated in 2017 as something much different, but it's since become a scream-filled, two-day reunion for bands and emo fans alike. "That's our nostalgia," Jac Vanek, who you might know as the original scene queen, told Us Weekly about the festival. "That's literally where my heart lives. I've never graduated from it." Vanek, 38, found her niche within the larger community by selling those thick rubber bracelets (you know the ones) and graphic tees with kitschy slogans like "Sorry for Partying." Her merch has since matured (she's now selling shirts reading "Elder Emo"), but her music taste has stayed the same. "I love it so much. I'm glad that everybody else is coming back around to it. There's no better music than that," Vanek said. "Emo kids, we get it. We're different." All Time Low's New Song With JoJo Is a 'Full-Circle' Moment for the Band Over the past several years, more "mainstream" artists have fearlessly revealed their emo kid pasts. MGK was the first to have a headline-making genre switch with his 2020 album, Tickets to My Downfall. He teamed up with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker for the pop-punk record, which is still widely celebrated five years on. The singer is set to perform Tickets to My Downfall in full during select shows during his Lost Americana Tour - a festive way to end out the year if you ask Us. His Lost Americana record, which dropped this past August, also took inspiration from his emo past: He even sampled Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" for the track "Starman." The Jonas Brothers also made a surprise appearance in the emo comeback of 2025 by inviting All-American Rejects and Boys Like Girls to open for their Greetings From Your Hometown Tour. Bands like Cartel, Dashboard Confessional and Sum 41 have since taken the stage with Nick, Kevin and Joe Jonas during various tour stops. Nick and Joe even discussed how they were inspired by the emo and pop-punk genres during the early days of their career during an August appearance on the "Behind the Wall" podcast. "It really started to become clear to us that if the album we made was more like garage, grungy punk rock, we wanted to land somewhere closer to the emo pop sound," Nick explained of the band's 2006 debut LP, It's About Time, citing bands like Switchfoot, Paramore and Hawthorne Heights as influences. Ashlee Simpson Sings 'Pieces of Me' With Jonas Brothers Amid Music Comeback Emo music defined a very specific generation, and those listeners are now realizing that it wasn't just a phase. The lyrics to songs like "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" by My Chemical Romance resonated with early 2000s teenagers because of their angsty truths. In a time before it was the norm to discuss mental illness and - gasp - going to therapy, Gerard Way encapsulated what it feels like to go through something while sarcastically pretending to be "OK" when there's actually a lot going on underneath the surface. "I think for a lot of people, that time in their lives was important and formative. Emo, pop-punk, punk - whatever you want to call it - that music really spoke to that moment in a lot of people's lives, and it latched on," All Time Low singer Alex Gaskarth explained to Us when discussing the genre's resurgence. "Then, people got older, and I don't want to say outgrew it, but just life got bigger for them. So, it wasn't as big of a part of their lives." But while listeners may have outgrown the dilemmas of adolescence, they're still going through it as adults - especially in a time when every day brings a new wave of panic-inducing headlines. Gaskarth, for his part, points to events like the coronavirus pandemic as a possible reason for the renewed popularity of emo, speculating that people are "longing for nostalgia" and "finding their place again" in a post-COVID world. Alex Gaskarth of All Time Low ZUMAPRESS.com / MEGA "It was a perfect storm of people needing that comfort again," the singer, 37, added. "A lot of people circled back to it, and that brought all of those bands to the forefront again." The explosion of TikTok, of course, also allowed a whole new generation to find solace in this type of music. All Time Low, who has been a band for 22 years, now jokes on stage about fans discovering them on the app because "Dear Maria, Count Me In" - which was originally released in 2007 - went viral a few years ago. (Their 10th album, Everyone's Talking!, was released in October.) "You've go