The story
When We Were Young in Las Vegas
When We Were Young is an annual emo, pop-punk, and alternative rock festival held at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds in Winchester, Nevada, just outside the Strip. Launched in 2022 and typically scheduled for the third weekend of October, it books a single lineup repeated across multiple identical days rather than varying the bill, drawing a large crowd nostalgic for 2000s-era emo and pop-punk acts.
Emo and pop-punk music, genres that dominated a significant corner of American youth culture in the 2000s before falling out of mainstream favor through the 2010s, experienced a notable resurgence in popularity in the years leading up to 2022, driven partly by streaming-era rediscovery among younger listeners and partly by nostalgia among the millennials who grew up with the original scene.