Noise rock

Punk revival

Along with Nirvana, many of the leading alternative rock artists of the early 1990s acknowledged the influence of earlier punk rock acts. With Nirvana's success, the major record companies once again saw punk bands as potentially profitable. In 1993, California's Green Day and Bad Religion were both signed to major labels. The next year, Green Day released Dookie, which became a huge hit, selling eight million albums in just over two years. Bad Religion's Stranger Than Fiction was certified gold. Other California punk bands on indie label Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, also began garnering mainstream success. In 1994, Epitaph put out Let's Go by Rancid, Punk In Drublic by NOFX, and Smash by The Offspring, each eventually certified gold or better. Smash went on to sell over eleven million copies, becoming the best-selling independent-label album of all time. MTV and radio stations such as Los Angeles' KROQ-FM played a major role in these bands' crossover success, though NOFX refused to let MTV air its videos. Green Day and Dookie's enormous sales paved the way for a host of bankable North American pop punk bands in the following decade. The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U.S. mainstream.

Following the lead of Boston's Mighty Mighty Bosstones and two California bands, Berkeley's Operation Ivy and Long Beach's Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the mid-1990s. The original 2 Tone bands had emerged amid punk rock's second wave, but their music was much closer to its Jamaican roots—"ska at 78 rpm". Ska punk bands in the third wave of ska created a true musical fusion with punk and hardcore. ...And Out Come the Wolves, the 1995 album by Rancid—which had evolved out of Operation Ivy—became the first record in this ska revival to be certified gold; Sublime's self-titled 1996 album was certified platinum early in 1997.

By 1998, the punk revival had commercially stalled, but not for long. Pop punk band Blink-182's 1999 release, Enema of the State, reached the Billboard top ten and sold four million copies in less than a year. New pop punk bands such as Sum 41, Simple Plan, Yellowcard, and Good Charlotte achieved major sales in the first decade of the 2000s. In 2004, Green Day's American Idiot went to number one on both the U.S. and UK charts. Jimmy Eat World, which had taken emo in a radio-ready pop punk direction,^[253] had top-ten albums in 2004 and 2007; in a similar style, Fall Out Boy hit number one with 2007's Infinity on High. The revival was broad-based: AFI, with roots in hardcore, had great success with 2003's Sing the Sorrow and topped the U.S. chart with Decemberunderground in 2006. Ska punk groups such as Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake continued to attract new fans. Celtic punk, with U.S. bands such as Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys merging the sound of Oi! and The Pogues, reached wide audiences. The Australian punk rock tradition was carried on by groups such as Frenzal Rhomb, The Living End, and Bodyjar.

NOFX in concert in 2007

With punk rock's renewed visibility came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream. They argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV, punk bands like Green Day were buying into a system that punk was created to challenge. Such controversies have been part of the punk culture since 1977, when The Clash was widely accused of "selling out" for signing with CBS Records. The effect of commercialization on the music itself was an even more contentious issue. As observed by scholar Ross Haenfler, many punk fans "'despise corporate punk rock', typified by bands such as Sum 41 and Blink 182". By the 1990s, punk rock was so sufficiently ingrained in Western culture that punk trappings were often used to market highly commercial bands as "rebels". Marketers capitalized on the style and hipness of punk rock to such an extent that a 1993 ad campaign for an automobile, the Subaru Impreza, claimed that the car was "like punk rock". Although the commercial mainstream has utilized many elements of punk, numerous underground punk scenes still exist around the world.