This Spring Music Trend Is Making Aging Millennials Oh-So-Very Happy

Retro band music and legacy acts are popping this season, and elder millennials are singing along with the nostalgia. Tours, reunions, new releases and even two classic rock legends’ return to Spotify are signaling that Spring 2024 will be a season of '80s and '90s-era easy listening for the millennials and Gen Xers who first embraced the sounds. Here’s what’s worth buying a ticket to, and giving a streaming listen, in the coming months.

Who doesn’t love a feel-good sing-along with your favorite songs from back in the day? These musical artists are giving their fans face time this spring—and while there will be new music, we are counting on the hits.

• No Doubt: The pop band’s breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom was released nearly 30 years ago, and Gwen Stefani and the guys haven’t performed together since 2015, but they’re bringing their bouncy Cali-pop stylings to the Coachella Music Festival, which begins on April 12.
• Alanis Morissette: Her megahit Jagged Little Pill came out in 1995 and sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S. alone; now she’s touring the nation beginning in Phoenix on June 9.
• Weezer: Starting in September, the alt-rock band will play its debut album in honor of the record’s 30^th anniversary with Weezer: Voyage to the Planet Blue tour 2024, spanning 22 dates across the U.S.
• Sum 41: The Canadian nu-metal band debuted in the early 2000s and garnered a lot of attention, for both its high-energy stage shows and frontman Deryck Whibley’s six-year marriage to Avril Lavigne. Now the band’s retiring with a bang—a well-reviewed new album and a world tour beginning April 19.

Legacy acts are releasing new albums, and they run all over the genre map, from grunge to soul to pure pop (and ahem, we’ll all be poised for your see-though tops, Lenny Kravitz). The pick of the litter for the once and potentially future chart-toppers are  Pearl Jam (April 16), Linkin Park (April 12), New Kids on the Block (May 17), Kravitz (May 24), Sheryl Crow (March 29) and Bon Jovi (June 7).

Music industry giants Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, both favorite additions to classic rock playlists, have returned to Spotify after pulling their catalogs off the platform in protest of Covid-19 skeptics. Meanwhile, Mitchell fans are pre-ordering Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by award-winning NPR music journalist Ann Powers.

Just don’t call what these musicians are doing “a comeback,” since these acts never really went away. And stay tuned—it’s too soon to predict if the music is going to hit big (like pop punk band Sum 41, who hit number one on the alternative charts for the first time since 2001) or get a critical dismissal (sorry, Justin Timberlake).