“Dolby’s Top 25 Pop-Punk Albums of All Time”

Pop-punk is making a comeback. That’s all there is to it. Well, what’s actually happening is just that the stigma is being lifted off of it — listening to it no longer garners implications of simplicity, stupidity or shallowness. I think we all deal with enough morons in our everyday lives to diffuse that ideal pretty well. Also, life is faster-paced today than ever before, calling for music that hits quick, and also possesses the power to vent some frustration. Let’s see trap foot the bill for any of that. 

Some of these artists are just considered straight-up “punk bands” that are on this list, so I guess I’m offering my definition of “pop-punk” as any punk rock that isn’t hardcore. Really, that is, it was always a style that owed some debt to the Beatles, who were also progenitors of the simple song structure and the penchant for getting your point across in a way that was so direct that it became contagious. Notably, though, the dancing rubric is significantly shifted for these proceedings. Cheers. 

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25 Dazy – OUTOFBODY

That’s right, folks — we’re living in the age of drones, ordering Taco Bell into the mountains and pop-punk units being solo acts. Hey, I never promised you High Fidelity 2. Anyway, the platitudes of convention are drowned away promptly by James Goodson and his arsenal of effects pedals and fuzzy textures. You won’t even notice the drums are programmed during classics like “Rollercoaster Ride” and “Motionless Parade,” catchy, unforgettable songs that will live in your head cheaper than a punk couch rat. 

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24 The Vaccines – Back in Love City

The Vaccines’ fifth album, springing into the world in 2021, is their most crisp, consistent and professional-sounding record yet, nary skimping on the meaningful moments of sacrifice, either. On “Headphones Baby,” the undeniable centerpiece, that is, Justin Young asks “Don’t you wanna die together?” The music’s got the force and reckless abandon of inner-city London, from which the group hails, as well as the pithy knack for being showroom-ready and universally playable and enjoyable, another earmark of that city.

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23 Oxford Collapse – Bits

Sadly, this was to be OC’s swan song, a 2008 blitzkrieg of half-finished pop-punk stew crammed with classic songs (“Children’s Crusade”), bizarre sense of humor (“Featherbeds”) and downright attempts to alienate the audience, a la the first minute and a half of opener “Electric Arc,” in which co-singers Mike Pace and Adam Rizer repeat the phrase “I can’t remember things / I can’t remember things / I just don’t know what to do” until you’re sure you’re dreaming. Other standouts include “Young Love Delivers” and its chorus of “oh-oh-oh”’s and the slowed-down, funky stomper “John Blood,” a refreshing change of pace on side B.

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22 MOTH – Provisions, Fiction and Gear 

Cincinnati rockers MOTH had a long and checkered path to semi-stardom (hey they did play Letterman one night), forming in the early ’90s and plugging away as among other things an industrial band, for a decade and change, before scoring a hit. They are like Lit in this facet. (One interesting additional note is that Welcome to Wasteland from ’97 happens to be a really solid industrial album, nothing like the style the band would eventually adapt.) Anyway, opener and lead single “I See Sound” always gets my head nodding, a sort of Weezer on coffee and acid type shin-dig, and “Burning down My Sanity” is absolute radio rock perfection with its hilarious self-deprecation and multifarious genus of studio wizardry.

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21 Head Automatica – Popaganda

I remember that when Head Automatica’s followup to 2004’s explosive Decadence fell into our laps, Popaganda, I was braced for extreme disappointment. Its predecessor had just been such a one-of-a-kind beast, with beats from Dan the Automator providing an ultra-rhythmic platform for some of the catchiest, hardest-hitting songs of the decade. Luckily, the penchant for classic songs carries on within this next record, with “Scandalous”; “God” and “Shot in the Back (The Platypus)” only the tip of the iceberg. And, sure, it’s too “punk” for pop radio, and too poppy for misanthropic moshers who slash their arms. But that’s not why I’m giving it props here. 

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20 Ted Leo & the Pharmacists – Shake the Sheets

Shake the Sheets (2004) isn’t my FAVORITE Leo album but it is his PUNK-est, not coincidentally following the onset of W. Bush’s 2003 war in Iraq. It’s an angry album that’s also direct, crisp and concise, the work of someone who’s been breaking wood blocks of radio pop in his spare time, all done organically with garage rock production, to sweeten the pot. Things get going kinetically right away with opener “Me and Mia”; but “Counting down the Hours” and “Better Dead than Lead” have got to be the highlights, a yin and yang of Apollonian battle cry and existential darkness to phenomenologically pillar this LP. 

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19 Weezer – Weezer (2001)

I can still hear that opening snare sound — that Ric Ocasek staple of ostentatious mike-ing and soundboard glory that drives a corkscrew into the heart of misanthropic snobs everywhere. Granted, I think people who hate this album are a dying breed. They’ve all either come around and realized the error of their ways or else probably are the types to sneak shots of Fireball on their five-minute break cashiering at Staples. The green album is 28 minutes of disciplined pop perfection, with the irony-laden “O Girlfriend” finale (the generic term “girlfriend,” per legend, employed to show the hopelessness of true attachment) sending things off into the night beautifully, and of course, the strange, wonderful beast “Hash Pipe,” a song the Deftones would have been glad to crank out if they didn’t take themselves so seriously. 

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18 No Age – Nouns

I’ve always hesitated to call this album “punk” in any way because it came out at pretty much the apex of the 2000s “indie” zeitgeist, when, at least in my opinion, there was no real “mainstream” rock against which to rebel against in “punk” form, as it were. (This would be contrasted sharply against Fugazi and No Use for a Name, in the ’90s, each of which saw the pinnacle of their popularity directly concurrent with that of grunge.) The songs are loud, fuzzy and concise, though — nobody would deny that. Crisp tunes like “Eraser” and “Sleeper Hold” help cement this band’s m.o. but the real “sleeper” for me has always “Things I Did When I Was Dead,” a “ballad” No Age-style which is nothing if not haunting.

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17 Mudhoney – Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge

This is actually one of many albums on this list that can qualify as “pop-punk” by bands who made other albums unable to fall under the category. That great Nirvana sense of twee-pop, though, informs the classic “Good Enough”; and “Shoot the Moon” is another great staple, with fuzzy guitar and quick turns, all over Nihistic lyrics. It’s a bath of irreverence and terse animosity laden with hooks that make it a career-defining statement. 

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16 Gladie – Don’t Know What You’re in Until You’re out

Philadelphia’s Gladie is actually a project of which I’d like to make a bigger endeavor. This Don’t Know What You’re in Until You’re out album, per se, from 2022, is packed with raucous, naughty punk rock, delivered vocally by this Augusta Koch who kind of sounds like a younger, more promiscuous incarnation of Kristen Hersh. From 2020’s Safe Sins, to today, she seemed to “grow up” in a way that’s really funny — like getting a lot meaner, more mischievous and more intense. The results are rhapsodic and glorious, from the irreverent shenanigans of “Mud” to the crisp hooks of “Hit the Ground Running” and all of this album’s solid mid-section. The full-band grooves and production are on their “a” games too, helping to make this an essential conduit between Green Day and the middle of the 21st century.

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15 The Clash – Combat Rock

Combat Rock is an interesting album full of a lot of classic songs and it’s also an amusing take just for its sheer nonsensical identity crisis. As compared to London Calling, which often gets the tag “punk” but is actually really poppy, and maybe even contemplative, by Clash standards, Combat Rock bills itself thusly and opens with politics and violence, in “Know Your Rights” and “Car Jamming.” Then, when you think you’ve got them pegged as militant outsiders, they throw in their two biggest singles to date, “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” the former doling their requisite one romantic theme per album. Combat Rock is the opposite of an album I’d recommend in order to turn a newbie onto The Clash and the epitome of one I’d recommend for someone who’s already a fan and wants to sit back and indulge in the band’s perplexing proclivity for variety and exploration. 

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14 Green Day – Nimrod

I like to take an “a posteriori” m.o. whenever possible in doing this sh** so I’ll just say that I put on Nimrod in the library recently and just like COULD NOT stop nodding my head to “Nice Guys Finish Last.” It was like a bodily reflex. This was when I was on a huge Green Day kick and listening to Father of All Motherfu**ers which had just come out, another excellent LP and which probably gets excluded from this list purely for that one track “Oh Yeah!” Nimrod, by contrast, while being the album that did bequeath “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” however buried said track at #17, and in general, rocks out with a rude, reckless abandon. And it’s got that instrumental surf rock track, “Last Ride in,” which is pretty bit**in’, you’ve gotta admit. 

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13 Goldfinger – Goldfinger

Like Rancid and The Suicide Machines, LA’s Goldfinger could get poppy and catchy and could play hardcore punk too (see the wild, obliterating “The City with Two Faces”). That dynamic is part of what makes this album classic, as are the skits, along with the excellent foray into ska, “Answers,” which is sure to get anyone’s head nodding. No singles are listed from this record on Wikipedia but “Here in Your Bedroom” seems to be generally held as the flagship and centerpiece, a taut, stalwart love song that seems to congenitally reinforce the inevitable frustration woven into such endeavors. On a closing note, this might not be the best band on this list but they’re the best band to get a t-shirt of, in my opinion, especially those ringer tees.

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12 The Suicide Machines – The Suicide Machines

One great thing about this Detroit band is their knack for making really distinct, cohesive albums. As compared, then, to Destruction by Definition, their ska-punk album, and War Profiteering is Killing Us All, their hardcore foray, this project here is undeniably pop, beginning with the classic, show-stopping opener “Sometimes I Don’t Mind,” one of the best songs about someone’s dog in recorded history, likely. From there, a keen, astonishing Beach Boys sense informs “No Sale”; “Green” is a crisp punk-rock run-through worthy of any Warped Tour mosh pit, and even the weird He**hole rap “I Hate Everything” has a way of working, bringing in what I believe is all of the band members for a little Vanilla Ice venting. The Suicide Machines is short, at 34 minutes, but tenders a gorgeous mixture of Midwestern grit and pop show tunes for a very unique and transformative experience.

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11 XTC – The Compact XTC

My first exposure to XTC was in a college class at IU, the featured song being “Making Plans for Nigel,” track six on this featured collection. And I fell in love with them right away — the originality, the depth, the complexity within the realm of loud but catchy radio pop. It was music lover’s punk rock, as fun as it was haunting. Just to get to the bottom of things, English Settlement (1982) is in my opinion their masterpiece, offering “Senses Working Overtime” and the sublime “Ball and Chain” to this best-of disc, but that album veers a little more toward post-punk and art-rock. In truth, you won’t go astray with these terse nuggets on The Compact XTC, either — brisk, brusque, goofy songs like “Are You Receiving Me?”, which features the best 12-second guitar solo of all time. 

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10 Women – Public Strain

This is probably one of the proudest cases ever of the band name being the deterrent. I have to admit, I kept seeing reviews for these guys and just being like, um, I think I’ll pass, without even noticing the score or any of the surrounding rhetoric. Then they were opening for my main squeezes Abe Vigoda in ’08 and out of boredom I went, to find it to be, um, easily the best rock set I’d ever seen. They were like Sonic Youth but better and what’s more, they were cool dudes — I got to steal a few words from the drummer after the show. Public Strain is one of only two Women records released before the untimely death of guitarist Chris Reimer and really establishes a much more consistent mode of songwriting and structure than their self-titled debut. Highlights include “Narrow with the Hall”; “Drag open” and “Locust Valley.”

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9 Rancid – …And out Come the Wolves

For some reason Rancid wasn’t really huge in South Bend when I was growing up and in high school — it’s historically not a very “punk” community, the cocky and raucous liable to get threatened really quickly around here. In college I had a couple of the singles downloaded on my computer, and, oafishly, just assumed they were the best songs on the album. Actually, it’s hard to sift the best and worst tunes on this record — it goes by like a high-speed punk rock drag race, with classic hook after classic hook exploding out of the speakers. One interesting note is that the band employ that technique of vocalizing the title of the album on a song that’s not a title track, sort of like Modest Mouse’s “Good news for people who love bad news”, and in general paint some pretty sociologically vivid pictures on tunes like “Olympia WA” and “Journey to the End of the East Bay,” largely illustrating why I’ve always preferred this band to Tim Armstrong’s prior project, Operation Ivy. 

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8 Weezer – Weezer (1994)

Ok I might be exposing myself as a huge douche bag but this was another band name that turned me off, for a while (until the release of the green album, actually… yeah I’m about to see how violent Weezer fans can get, although the Rancid fans are still probably scarier). So my perspective on it is that of a dumb Incubus fan, listening to this crap around 9/11 with a deer-in-the-headlights look and a really short attention span. Luckily, crisp gems like “Buddy Holly” and “Surf Wax America” crashed the party — tunes that don’t really require much concentration. “Undone – The Sweater Song” was always cool, I thought, but perhaps a little overplayed — it took until I was probably in my 30’s to realize the awesomeness of that “Ooh-ooh-ooh” part at the end that coincides with the 30-second eighth-note snare fill from Patrick Wilson. That’s about as virtuosic as he, or any of these guys, get, but they understood that the ’90s were a time to be conceptual, since nobody was about to be doing bona fide catharsis as well as Nirvana, anytime soon. 

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7 Green Day – Dookie

Billie Joe Armstrong and his band Green Day are kind of entities that are unapproachable, like an axis on an asymptote. Well, he lost his dad when he was 10, a tragedy touched on in “Wake Me up When September Ends.” And per “Longview,” the best song ever about masturbation with the possible exception of “Jerk it out” by the Caesars, he explicates a rather pointed boredom factor that fed into his eventual mania, perhaps lending itself to the pairing of “No one here is getting out alive / This time I’ve really lost my mind and I don’t care”. That might be an exaggeration, but still, I don’t think any of us have truly ever been the same since hearing and internalizing “When I Come around” and “Pulling Teeth,” the pristine, strident Beatles pop sense feeding into those hooks and song structures like a professional sarcastic dude who talks real loud, and stuff. 

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6 The Offspring – Smash

I was having this conversation one time with this Offspring fan regarding how lead singer Dexter Holland was like a genius and in line to get a degree in some really fancy subject… chemical engineering, or something along those lines, but then dropped out and started a band. And he was saying how the guy must have some really cool parents to let him do that… this is perhaps true, to an extent, but I more had the view like that logical, constricted perception of what “success” in life is represents the exact reason punk rock exists, to lash out against confining tropes and mechanisms and make sure you stand up and be yourself (I’m not a trendy a**hole / I do what I want / Do what I feel like”). It’s not their first album, but for some reason, Smash plays with the voracity and muscle of a debut album, to me — the dizzying palm muting on “Bad Habit”; the sheer, intimidating force of “Come out and Play” and the structurally expansive “It’ll Be a Long Time”; the band’s epic, choice cut from their catalogue. 

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5 AFI – Sing the Sorrow

Keeping it in Cali, here, we’ll go to a thoroughly classic major-label debut fronted by Davie Havoc, whom, I admit, I couldn’t discern gender on, for many years. Call him the punk rock Steve Perry, or Geddy Lee, perhaps, as it were. AFI rocks along with a little more intensity than Journey, though, and at least as many classic hooks, toggling deliberate pop (“Silver and Cold”; “The Great Disappointmet”) with balls-to-the-wall, visceral rocking (“Bleed Black”; “Dancing through Sunday) effortlessly and brilliantly, for an unforgettable rock LP that plays like a seven-course meal. It’s a great case of a punk band getting a major-label studio budget and coming through with a generation-defining collection of songs just when the world needed them. 

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4 Pretenders – Pretenders

Like Jimi Hendrix before her, Cleveland’s Chrissie Hynde jetted for England for purposes of rocking out, immersing herself in a band composed exclusively of British bandmates. Though it doesn’t have their best song, “Back on the Chain Gang,” the self-titled debut would likely be the most consistent listen, piping in with some standards (“Brass in Pocket”) and some diamonds in the rough (“The Wait”). “Tattooed Love Boys” is the fu**ed-up, and apparently true, story of Hynde getting gang raped at a mechanic shop in Cleveland, and likely the best song on the album, with an off-kilter 15/8 time signature and a great way of lyrically cloaking the atrocity in metaphor and sarcasm. “Private Life” stretches things out structurally, too, for a trippy, substantive album buffer preceding the Apollonian, radio-bound centerpiece. 

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3 Wire – Chairs Missing

Chairs Missing represents probably the absolute outer boundary of how dark, twisted and sinister an LP can be, and still qualify as pop-punk. But even though Wire’s debut, Pink Flag, is more concise and less prone to brooding, unapproachable dirges, when Chairs Missing gets catchy, it fosters the best songs of the band’s career, like “I am the Fly” and “From the Nursery.” And, in general, the moments of tension, such as “Practice Makes Perfect”; “Marooned” and “Being Sucked in again” contribute greatly to the album’s overall enjoyment level, like navigating your way through a mine field to approach a satisfying climax. Frenetic rockers like “Another the Letter” and “Sand in my Joints” help bolster the multifarious dynamic of this album and help it play like the bad acid trip that it’s supposed to be.

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2 The Clash – London Calling

Punk? Huh? The title track opener is sort of punk-y, I guess, and from there things get about as rockabilly as they can, with a Vince Taylor cover and then the lazy, ultra-chordal “Jimmy Jazz” falling next in line. It was at this point that I really doubted that I was actually listening to a punk album, but also agreed that my life would probably never be the same. Well, it’s got reggae, “Guns of Brixton”; like “Bank Robber” but amped up and jacked on danger and criminality, and more than likely the best song on the album. Does this album cohere? I actually wouldn’t give it the perfect rating it’s garnered, generally, from the press. It’s more like a really generous uncle who’s desperate to impress you, so he goes and buys you a bucket of spaghetti, and then some tequila and Margarita mix, and then a video game wherein you kill a bunch of people. It’s like, ok, I guess this works. ’Preciate it, dude! 

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1 Buzzcocks – Operator’s Manual: Buzzcocks Best

I’m submitting this edgy, unorthodox pick in favor of Singles Going Steady, on grounds that it has all the songs that one has and also has a bunch of other songs that rock, too. It’s so good that “Orgasm Addict” leading off doesn’t ruin it, if that gives you any idea. On a semi-related note, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photo of Kurt Cobain looking so nervous in his life as when he was posing with Buzzcocks singer Pete Shelley. These guys approached, coddled and emulsified pop-punk perfection, pounding out jagged, crushing and blistering riffs to perfectly accompany Shelley’s raspy, wolverine growl. Operator’s Manual is packed with concise, sugary gems (“I Don’t Mind”; “Ever Fallen in Love”; “What Do I Get?”) and epic, broad-sweeping rock classics (“Autonomy”; “Fiction Romance”; “Nothing Left”), each sector fully mastered, and, of course, reinforced by more indefatigable punk rock fury (“Fast Cars”; “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Life”), just to remind you that NOBODY else can do this sh**, even if just means no one else wants to drink this much god da** coffee anymore. 

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