What tipped the scale for me was when North West wore a tail. It wasn’t in the traditional tail position; it was hanging as a charm from her Balenciaga City bag rather than off of her most distal belt loop. But seeing it there — alongside her oversized black cargo pants and graphic long-sleeve tee — stirred a sense of recognition.
A similar thing happened when I discovered the stylings of Chris Huang at TogenQ hair salon in Williamsburg: the technicolor racoon dye jobs and anime cuts that define their work. Or when Raf Simons sent a cascade of incredibly narrow pants down the runway for Prada’s Spring/Summer 2027 show. Or when I met the 20-year-old UK-based rapper Feng and learned that he wears skinny jeans and Vans and listens to MGMT. Or when I encountered Julia Wolf and saw the art for her album, Pressure. Because, if you squint, doesn’t that look like Flyleaf’s Flyleaf from the year 2005 — and sound a bit like it, too?
I’ve always been drawn to flashes of the alt culture of my youth. (For context: I am 33.) I think it’s confirmation bias: You want to see something, and so you see it. Everywhere. But lately, the flashes have been getting more frequent, turning into a contiguous picture. This is more than the 76th My Chemical Romance tour, fueled by millennials who can now pay exorbitant prices to feel a hint of the feelings they once felt. This is actual cultural momentum, tied to and initiated by a generation discovering these sounds and aesthetics for the first time. This is 13-year-old North West and her 1.5 million Instagram followers embracing mall-core. Making it the core.
I should explain that I’m painting with a pretty broad brush here. Each of these signs is technically derived from a different corner of the alt movement: Huang’s hairstyles are very scene-kid, as is North West’s tail, while Wolf’s vibe is arguably a blend of third-wave emo and alt-rock. There’s a lot of discourse over which artists and looks belong under which segment of the broad “alternative” umbrella. And I am choosing not to weigh in on it mostly because that’s not the way culture works. Most young people aren’t picking and choosing the things they like according to a label. They’re going with what speaks to them, blending different elements into their own mishmash.
I wanted to find out how, and why. So, I decided to travel to the place that was once the white-hot center of my own alt-lite teenage suburban life: Vans Warped Tour.
As my boss, Editor-in-chief Noah Johnson, pointed out, Vans Warped Tour is not necessarily for the real heads. (He should know; he is one.) They wouldn’t be caught dead at such a well-organized, well-funded corporate event. But I wasn’t necessarily interested in finding the real heads so much as I was interested in finding the masses. I wanted to talk to the buying public: the 15- and 18- and 26-year-olds directly and indirectly fueling demand for brands like Hellstar and Satoshi Nakamoto, and bands like Beauty School Dropout and The Paradox. The people who remind me of my younger self but who are, in many cases, more plugged in than I ever was at their age.
On July 24, therefore, I decamped to Long Beach, California, where I hoped I would find them — and not, as Noah cautioned, just a bunch of nostalgic “olds.”
Luckily, I did. And they had a lot to say.
**
Around 130,000 people attended Vans Warped Tour Long Beach this year, the second year of the festival’s revival after it shut down in 2019. And at first, I’m worried they’ll all be who Noah predicted.
When I arrive at The Fairmont Breakers Long Beach on Friday afternoon, I find myself in a check-in line with multiple Vans Warped Tour-ists, all of whom look to be in their late 30s or early 40s. One guy is dressed in all black with a white puka shell necklace and a flat brim that reads “Ghost.” (It is not, I learn, a reference to the Swedish rock band, but to the energy drink company where he works that has a tent at the festival.) A woman in a purple trucker hat declaring her a “LOCAL MENACE” stands next to a heavily tattooed man. They traveled here from Austin — their second Vans Warped Tour in two years. Up on the pool deck, three bros sporting faded ink chug beers and talk about a 40th birthday party. “Wow,” says one, “I can’t believe that was seven years ago.”
Things start to turn around when I head to a different hotel to pick up my festival pass. The line stretches out of the ballroom and into the hallway, and it’s studded with people who look (I hope) to be in their 20s. One mom stands behind me with her teenage son; they won tickets just a few days ago.
All doubt evaporates when I walk into the festival on Saturday. One of the first people I meet, among the crowds streaming to DeathbyRomy’s 12:30 p.m. set, is Allie, a 24-year-old from Dallas, Texas, who's been “obsessed” with Vans Warped Tour since age 12. “It all started with Paramore on Pandora radio,” she tells me. “Then, Pierce the Veil. Then, I just branched out.” She started dressing like her favorite bands. In one photo from middle school, sometime in the mid 2010s, she has a Tumblr-era side part and is wearing a Pierce the Veil T-shirt. “That was the beginning of fashion for me,” she says. (Today, she’s in pigtails, a tattoo choker and chains, and a ripped black top with camo shorts and fishnets.)
Allie begged her parents to let her go to the festival when she turned 18, but they said no. So as soon as she could, she recruited two friends — 24-year-old Lexi and 27-year-old Maddie — and made the trip. She’s excited to see Slay Squad again, and while the other two mostly came along for fun, Lexi is starting to see the appeal. “All these artists, they’re very themselves,” she says. “Their music is very them. And I think people appreciate that now more than at any other time — the originality and how they’re so genuine.”
I hear this several times: that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are connecting with alt culture because it feels real, and because — after a decade of manufactured pop stars where one of the most damning accusations one can hurl is “industry plant” — that’s what they’re craving. “A lot of music these days, you can tell,” says Alex, a 24-year-old from Oceanside, California, who’s there with his siblings: 31-year-old Angel and 23-year-old Lay. (Angel got into heavier music — specifically Underøath — through youth group at West Coast Life Church and inadvertently got his younger siblings hooked.) “I mean, there are some [modern] artists who carry their authentic self and their own sound, but it’s kind of hard to compare,” Alex says. When he learned to play guitar, he found himself gravitating to music from the 2000s or earlier. “Something about it feels like there’s more soul,” he says.
“Our generation appreciates authenticity,” says Brooke Mendes, 20, a junior at the University of Southern California. And rock, or emo, or pop-punk, or whatever you want to call it, is “just one of those genres where you can be authentic.”
“People crave DIY now,” says Ellen Petrosyan, 21, a classmate of Mendes’. “They crave individuality.” Meaning that a movement all about self-expression in aesthetic and sound was always going to resonate.
It also might just be an accident of timing, the fact that a good chunk of millennials were raised on pop-punk, emo, and metal, and their kids and younger siblings are now coming of age. Twenty-year-old Ray, from California’s Inland Empire, was indoctrinated in middle school by a sister 11 years their senior. Their friend Sophia’s mom has always had dyed hair, tattoos and piercings; she brought Sophia to a Vans Warped Tour in Pomona when Sophia was 11, before the festival closed down. “I remember seeing Falling in Reverse and Neck Deep,” Sophia says. “I think it’s a cultural thing: growing up in a Hispanic household, living in LA. They kind of expect one thing of you, but I want to do the other thing. And I’m going to do it.”
Sophia is describing a classic kind of teenage rebellion — and one that’s likely magnified in this current era of war and inflation and growing economic disparity and general political disaster. “We have a whole generation grasping to stand for something while the world’s so out of control,” says Kevin Lyman, 65, the founder of Vans Warped Tour and a professor at the University of Southern California. He teaches everything from marketing to festival design and management to a class on DIY touring and has heard these conversations play out among his students — including Mendes and Petrosyan — firsthand. “There used to be people who were somewhat rational or could give you answers,” he adds. “Kids are still looking for an answer. But no one has it. So you have artists like Grandson, they’re fucking pissed off. They’re the new Rage Against the Machine.”
Also: artists like DeathbyRomy, the stage name of Romy Maxine Flores, a 26-year-old singer from Los Angeles who strikes me as a blend of Sleigh Bells and Lady Gaga and a rageful, guttural scream. “The world has never given us more reasons to be angry,” she tells me backstage at the festival. “Or it hasn’t in a long time, you know? The collective conscience is over pop music; it’s over things that are artificial. We want things that are cathartic, that allow us to express anger and the uglier emotions that we were told to suppress for so long.”
**
Long Beach this July is hot — hotter and more humid than normal, I am told repeatedly by the people who live here. So the line for the frozen lemonade stand is especially long. That’s where I meet Dalton and Jack, best friends who are both 15 and who’ve traveled here from Las Vegas. Dalton has a hairstyle that I recognize immediately: a sweep of ice blonde underset with dark brown that’s almost black. “I did it myself a long time ago, and I just got better at it,” he tells me. “My mom is Hispanic and Christian so she didn’t really like it. But she doesn’t mind now because there’s no stopping me.” (Dalton also has a septum ring and snakebite lip piercings and is wearing a Fall Out Boy T-shirt from 2006.)
Jack has a similar hairstyle; they both cite anime as an inspiration. Plus, Jack’s dad and older sister are both in the punk scene. “Sunny Day Real Estate — that’s all I was about since I was like 12,” Jack says.
There’s a pretty big alt scene in Vegas where they both go to school — Jack describes once almost getting into a fight with a “deathcore” kid a year older than he is — but it’s also massive online. “It’s huge. That’s how I know most of my friends who are into this kind of stuff,” Dalton says. “It really took off again. There’s a whole bunch of teenagers getting obsessed with 2000 aesthetics.”
Dalton’s theory is that a lot of this obsession stems from archive accounts: the proliferation and availability of 2000s-era imagery. He references Audrey Kitching, the model who briefly dated Panic! At The Disco frontman Brendon Urie. “She’s really popular. Everyone tries to recreate her look. It’s a bunch of people archiving those kinds of girls, using them as info,” he says.
I hear from at least one person that this was their way in: Venice, a 16-year-old from South Florida. “When I was younger, I started seeing images of old scene queens from MySpace circulating on Pinterest and Instagram,” they say. “And I was like, ‘Wait, I want to do that.’” Today, they’re sporting a short, dark pixie with a shock of electric blue spread on top. Also, a zebra-print corset with blue ribbon lining and knee-high furry black boot covers. “A lot of my friends, after they become friends with me, they’re like, ‘Wait, I can be alternative, too,’” Venice says. “If they’re ever like, ‘I like your style, but I could never do that,’ I’m like, ‘No, you can.’ Everybody worries about getting bullied, but I don’t see it as that big of an issue. If somebody makes fun of you because you look cool, what’s the problem?”
Venice is here with their friend Adina, who’s also 16, and who has pink bangs to match her black-and-pink-checked tank top and studded belt. Adina’s dad was into Avenged Sevenfold, so she got into Avenged Sevenfold, which eventually led to a Fall Out Boy obsession: “My room was covered in posters of Fall Out Boy. I spent so much money on printer ink because I would print out pictures of them and [hang them] all over my walls.” She started dressing to match the band’s ethos, building up her wardrobe with thrifted items and discovering new musicians in the process. She still gets some funny looks in Florida, but lately, she’s started to see her own aesthetic everywhere. “With TikTok and Instagram, people are finding bands but not actually listening to the music — just the one famous song,” she says. “There are a lot of poser-ass people who dress it to dress it and don’t actually believe in the ethics of the alternative [community].”
There’s a certain charm to hearing this kind of thing come from a teenager’s mouth: We’re real; they’re faking it. It’s a concept that has preoccupied all alternative cultures — all concerted movements, even — since they first became a thing. Jack used to make fun of Dalton for being a “poser,” before he got into certain types of music himself. And the millennials who first embraced 2000s-era bands are not above expressing the same protective instinct.
Varun Chandrasekhar, a 31-year-old PhD candidate in music and the co-founder of the academic conference Emo Con, says he has mixed feelings when he sees his students encounter the bands and influences of his youth. “Now that things are online, we’re the first generation to have this long-stage cultural memory,” he says. “A lot of these younger fans are finding it through the internet, and not through any sort of scene or elder.” Stripped of context, if you will. “At my most open I’m like, ‘This is great. This is what the kids should be doing,’” Chandrasekhar says. “And at my most old-headed I’m like, ‘Yeah, but what do you actually know about Taking Back Sunday?’”
Of everyone I spoke to, Chandrasekhar gave me the most definitive answer for why alternative culture is back in a big way. One reason is because the younger generations are also the queerest, and the alt scene, while not always exemplary in terms of representation, does at least give LGBTQ+ kids a way to subvert traditional masculine and feminine norms. Another is your basic societal disaffectation: the fact that working a 9-to-5 job is now no guarantee of upward social and economic mobility. And the third, of course, is that alt culture aligns so well with the culture of the internet, and we’re talking about a bunch of digital natives. “Those are the three big things that triangulate,” Chandrasekhar explains.
But also, as with so many things, there might be an even simpler explanation. Both Chandrasekhar and Petrosyan, the USC student, reference the idea of the 20-year trend cycle: things coming back into fashion every two decades. Believe it or not (I sometimes choose not to), we have arrived there with the bands and the styles of the early 2000s. “It’s literally copy and paste,” Petrosyan says.
Which is not to overlook the simplest, basest explanation of all: a feeling deep in the chest. “I learned about the community, and I fell in love with it,” says Petrosyan, describing her quarantine-era foray into alt music. “I felt heard. I felt seen. I felt safe.”
