When We Were Young mines early 2000s nostalgia in Las Vegas debut

Nostalgia.

It’s a funny thing: Something that takes years and years to generate can feel like it was conjured in an instant when it hits you.

Where did the time go?

Well, check your Discman — Remember those? — your iPod, your Myspace page.

Nostalgia lives in many things, but music might be its most powerful source: Those yearbook pictures may spawn memories of high school, but the songs you listened to back then take you there. It’s less a memory than a feeling, an emotional union of the past and present.

Every generation experiences as much.

And for those who came of age in the early to mid-aughts, now it’s your turn.

Hence, the debut of When We Were Young on Saturday at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.

As its title suggests, the music festival that smells like the teen spirit of yesteryear is posited on nostalgia, largely featuring punk, emo, pop rock and indie bands that initially came to prominence roughly 15 to 20 years ago.

For millions, these were the bands that soundtracked their teendom, the groups that served as the emotional pressure valves to release so much coming-of-age angst, sanding down the rough edges of adolescence in song.

The lineup is massive with over 65 acts, spanning reunited prog-emo favorites My Chemical Romance, pop rockers Paramore, more metallic acts like Bring Me the Horizon and A Day to Remember, the indie-oriented Bright Eyes and Car Seat Headrest, attitudinal popster Avril Lavigne, punk vets AFI and Alkaline Trio and dozens more.

How much demand was there for this sonic wormhole to the AOL era?

When tickets went on sale in January, they were snapped up instantly.

And so a second show was added for Sunday — then a third on Oct. 29.

Every date sold out.

Kittie claws back to the stage

She was a teenager when she first started touring the world.

A little over two decades later, Morgan Lander is at it again, thanks in large part to When We Were Young.

The frontwoman for Canadian metallers Kittie, Lander and her drummer sister, Mercedes Lander, have come out of semiretirement from the stage to play their first shows in five years with the band they founded in high school.

Having gone gold with their 2000 debut, “Spit,” Kittie quickly established themselves as femme metal ingenues, touring with heavy hitters like Slipknot and Pantera and appearing on Ozzfest.

But, after last performing in October 2017, the band was uncertain it would ever play live again.

“At the time, when we sort of decided to just take a break, the band wasn’t paying the bills anymore. It was a really tough time for us,” Lander acknowledges. “So, we were like, well, maybe, we can just sort of go on a hiatus.”

And then When We Were Young came calling.

“They made a really great offer. They were very persistent. I was sort of like, ‘I’m not really sure,’” Lander says. “And there was a lot of discussion. I think that, because the offer that was given was really great, then it was like, ‘Wow, I really think that we will be able to make this work.’”

While the fest lineup is diverse, there is cohesion in terms of era: The majority of the performers established themselves in the early 2000s, when the path to gaining a following was decidedly different than it is now, with music videos and radio play still often a driving force in a band’s success.

“The late ’90s, early 2000s, I see it sort of as the last of the good old days,” Lander says. “Back then, with record labels, everybody seemed really big. It seemed like the industry had a lot of money.

“After that, the climate has changed,” she continues. “Social media and things like TikTok, all those things nowadays are what sort of influences things. But back when we first started, it still felt like radio was king. It was definitely a magical time for us.”

Now, the idea is to re-create that magic on stage, bringing their nü metal to new faces.

“It’s a very interesting thing to have been around long enough to see a trend come back and sort of really resonate with young people again,” Lander says. “I’m seeing that now people that weren’t even born when our first album came out, loving the band, discovering the band. It’s just a really amazing, amazing feeling.”

Young indeed

They’re playing When We Were Young, and the Linda Lindas still fit that description, the three teens and one tween currently pressed into a leather couch in their native Los Angeles, gazing into a video camera that keeps toppling over.

It’s 5 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, and the punk quartet is done with school for the day, and free for a Google Meet session.

It was PSAT day for two of them.

“How was the math section for you?” Lucia de la Garza asks bandmate Eloise Wong.

“It was pretty easy,” the latter responds.

Now, this is not the average, get-to-know-you small talk that typically prefaces a chat between journalist and band.

But “typical” is an adjective seldom attached to the Linda Lindas: ranging in ages from 11 (drummer Mila de la Garza, Lucia’s younger sister) to 17 (guitarist Bela Salazar), the band has spent the past year playing music festivals around the world, from Japan to Germany, dropping a debut album, “Growing Up,” on seminal punk label Epitaph and making its late-night TV debut on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Things took off last May when a clip of the Linda Lindas performing their song “Racist, Sexist Boy” at a Los Angeles public library went viral, earning accolades from members of bands like Rage Against the Machine, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sonic Youth.

“It was really weird,” Wong recollects, “because we’re just used to, like, fooling around and doing whatever with our music, but suddenly we had such a larger audience. It was like, ‘Whoa, people want to hear what we’re doing.’”

The band’s sound is buoyant and brash, hook-heavy and egalitarian, with all four members taking turns singing and everyone writing songs as well.

At When We Were Young, they’ll be making their Las Vegas debut.

While the fest is a nod to the past, there’s also a focus on the present with a band like the Linda Lindas.

They’re young — and they want you to feel the same this weekend.

“What it’s about is that energy of what it’s like to be young, like some of the older generations that have really, really looked back on this music and this as their childhood,” Lucia de la Garza says. “I feel like that’s so cool, that there’s a festival that is about remembering that, celebrating youthful energy. I think that is what a lot of the When We Were Young bands encapsulate.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram