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The mid-aughts were a special time in music, defined by the angsty pop-punk movement popularized by bands like Green Day and blink-182. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can relive your emo teens at a festival in Las Vegas, but if When We Were Young tickets are sold out, how will you get to see all your old favorite bands? We got you.
The lineup for When We Were Young 2023 was announced in October of the previous year, with some of the biggest names in the genre, some who haven’t played together in years but make up an absolutely gargantuan lineup for October 21, 2023, at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.
After many, many rumors, the original members of blink-182 are back together and are one of the headliners. Longtime co-leader Tom DeLonge parted ways with blink in 2015 under contentious circumstances and the band—Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker—went on to record two more albums with Alkaline Trio leader Matt Skiba replacing DeLonge. But the classic trio is reuniting for a massive world tour that includes the When We Were Young festival and we the emo kid within could not be more excited. Here’s how to score We Were Young 2023 tickets to the sold-out event.
How to buy When We Were Young 2023 tickets
Where can fans buy When We Were Young 2023 tickets? When We Were Young tickets went on sale on October 14, 2022, on the festival’s official site and sold out quickly. Tickets are also available on trusted resale sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats, which offers a $20 discount for purchases over $200—a 10 percent savings—with the code SC2022. Read on ahead for how to buy When We Were Young 2023 tickets on StubHub and Vivid Seats for a discount this upcoming festival season.
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- Visit com and search for “When We Were Young“
- Select from the 4 tiers: General Admission, General Admission Plus, or VIP
- To sort by price, toggle the price scale on the sidebar to the range you want to buy from.
- Create or sign into your account, check out and enjoy When We Were Young 2023!
- Visit com and search for “When We Were Young.”
- Select from the 4 tiers: General Admission, General Admission Plus or VIP
- To sort by price, click either “Sort by Price” in the top bar or toggle the price scale to the range you want to buy from.
- For $20 off of $200 or more, use the code SC2022 at checkout
- Create or sign into your account, check out and enjoy When We Were Young 2023!
Image: Courtesy of We Were Young.
Who’s in the We Were Young 2023 lineup?
Like previous years, 2023’s When We Were Young festival lineup is a roll call of iconic pop-punk bands that dominated the genre. Here’s everyone that’s playing:
- Green Day
- blink-182
- 30 Seconds to Mars
- The Offspring
- Good Charlotte
- 5 Seconds of Summer
- All Time Low
- Pierce the Veil
- Thrice
- Rise Against
- Something Corporate
- Motion City Soundtrack
- Gym Class Heroes
- Yellowcard
- Saves the Day
- MxPx
- The Academy Is…
- Say Anything
- Michelle Branch
- Bowling for Soup
- Less Than Jake
- Finch
- Sum 41
- Movements
- Waterparks
- Relient K
- Turnover
- The Ataris
- Goldfinger
- Plain White T’s
- Simple Plan
- Beach Bunny
- Joyce Manner
- AJJ
- Citizen
- Tigers Jaw
- The Veronicas
- Lit
- New Found Glory
- The Front Bottoms
- Zebrahead
- The Wrecks
- Set It Off
- Fenix TX
- Hot Mulligan
- Lit
- EKKSTACY
- No Pressure
- The Movielife
- Games We Play
- Jean Dawson
- Knuckle Puck
- KennyHoopla
- Magnolia Park
It’s particularly exciting to see blink-182 back together because things have definitely changed since their Enema of the State (1999) era. Bassist and vocalist Mark Hoppus was diagnosed with Stage 4 lymphoma—a type of blood cancer—in April 2022 and underwent chemotherapy. But at the time, he was optimistic. “My mom has beaten cancer three times, twice for breast cancer and once for same cancer that I have,” he said during a live Twitch stream. “It sucks and I’m scared, and at the same time I’m blessed with incredible doctors and family and friends to get me through this,” he wrote in a social media message after announcing his diagnosis.
The good news is that he seems to have kicked cancer’s ass. “Very grateful today. My scan came back clean and I’m cancer-free,” Hoppus wrote in an Instagram post shared on September 2022, just five months after being diagnosed. “Thankful for every day I get to be here. Love you all.”
Image: Christopher Polk/PMC.
Meanwhile, guitarist and vocalist Tom DeLonge became one of the most famous voices in UFO research. “I saw some really anomalous stuff one night out in the desert, zipping across the stars, horizon to horizon, zig-zagging,” he told the New York Times in 2019. “That really blew my mind because no satellites move that way. But, I can’t tell you what it was. I think like most people, the stuff that I’ve seen is a lot of stuff on the internet where I bet some of it really is true, but you really don’t know which pieces.
He added that his reputation as an outlandish—sometimes naked—musician wasn’t a barrier to becoming an authority in the field. “Fortunately most of the people I was meeting with in the early days weren’t really aware of the crazy rock and roll behaviors and antics that I’ve had in my early, mid-20s. I always tell people being a celebrity got me in a few doors, but that’s all it did,” he said. “Being humble to the subject, because the subject is not a joke. I had to really be respectful about what I was saying, how I was saying it. I think because all those things, I earned trust and I earned more meetings.”
Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker has been forging his own path, so to speak, most notably by marrying Kourtney Kardashian in 2022. He’s had one hell of a glow-up, going from baggy cargo shorts and sideways caps to attending the 2022 Met Gala dressed in a Thom Browne black pleated skirt and tuxedo tails. “I like being places maybe I’m not supposed to be,” he told GQ. “That’s the best.”
What of the other headliner, Green Day? They’ve released 13 albums since their debut 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours in 1991. In an interview with Vulture in 2021, frontman Billy Joe Armstrong reflected on his career with drummer Tre Cool and Bassist Mike Dirnt but lamented the genre term “pop-punk”. “I never thought of myself as a pop artist. I’ve always been left of center. To say you’re a pop-punker … it never sat well with me. I’m very proud that we came from a diverse scene,” he said. Formed in California in 1987, the trio has toured pretty consistently since.
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“I think Green Day wanted to be independent from [everything],” Armstrong continued to Vulture. “We wanted to do our own thing, just be green… I never thought, ‘We’re going to push punk into a new, different level. We’re going to represent all of punk.’ That was never what our mission was. We wanted to play music for the rest of our lives. We wanted to be Green Day in the same way the Who was the Who.”
Fellow Californians The Offspring will be another fan-favorite at When We Were Young; with such hits as “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” and “The Kids Aren’t Alright” and their frontman Bryan “Dexter” Holland’s unmistakable voice. Formed in 1983, they’ve released 10 albums, the latest of which, Let the Bad Times Roll, was released in 2021. “The fact that we’ve been able to do this for so long, it’s something that I’m proud of because it means that it wasn’t just a one-time thing of a flash in the pan, like a one-hit-wonder, that kind of thing,” reflected Holland in an interview with The Shortlisted. “It feels like we really have a body of work. We have a career. It’s been something we’re very proud of.”
The band made headlines during the COVID pandemic because their drummer, Pete Parada, didn’t get vaccinated at a time when most countries listed it as a requirement for entry. Parada claimed he’d been axed, but Holland said that wasn’t exactly true. Lead guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman told The Shortlisted: “We looked into what it would take to travel around the world with an unvaccinated member of the band and crew and we just kept running into roadblocks. And it would put the whole crew at risk, it would put the whole tour at risk and it would put the unvaccinated person at risk, so we just couldn’t,” he explained. “There were ways we would get shut down, just travel restrictions with either unvaccinated people needing to be quarantined or just not being allowed to enter countries.” Josh Freese replaced Paranda in 2021.
When We Were Young is on Saturday, October 21, 2023, at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.
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