The Wonder Years, Set Your Goals, Man Overboard, and This Time Next Year are currently out on the Pop Punk’s Not Dead Tour with New Found Glory. In a new interview, members of The Wonder Years, Man Overboard, and This Time Next Year discuss how the pop-punk community is different from many others in the broader scene. Read the full interview here and a snippet of it below by clicking “Read More”.

Justin: We’re just at an advantage in general, coming from punk scenes which are really supportive, whether it be punk or pop-punk or hardcore. There’s a great scene in Philly and there’s a great scene in Jersey and in California.
Brad: Everyone’s just got each other’s backs. I think the hardcore thing is a perfect reference. It’s like, we’re okay with going out – all of us have done tours where we go out and play a show with 50 kids – but you stick your average whatever other kind of band in there, and they’re like, “Yo, there were only 50 kids going off for our band tonight?” We would play shows, and I tell this story a lot, on our first tour ever we played a warehouse in Colorado Springs and there were like, maybe 30 kids there and 10 of them were going off. And we were like, “Holy shit, we’re in Colorado playing a show to 30 kids and 10 of them are freaking out. Two of them knew the words to every single song.” It’s like…not everyone, I feel, can have that appreciation. The difference with us is that I think we can all accept that that is awesome.
Dan: I feel like there’s two points to be made. One is, our band at least, has literally nothing to do with hardcore music. We’re not a hardcore band, we just aren’t. Whereas, like, there are metalcore bands that have “core” in the name, they have a lot more to do with hardcore I guess, to an extent, but those bands in that scene have never played a show not on a stage. They’ve never played on a floor, they’ve never played a VFW. We came up playing basements together, and if we have to, we’ll go down playing basements together.