Watching the 38-second viral video linked in the tweet below—a clip of the millennial folk band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros performing their song “Home” in 2009—will probably provoke a strong reaction in you. It might remind you of being a teenager or a 20-something enjoying the 2000s, when the jeans were skinny and the beers were hoppy. Or you could also agree with the video’s poster, who captioned it the “worst song ever made”.
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The “stomp clap hey” indie-folk of bands like the Magnetic Zeros, The Lumineers, and Mumford & Sons, which dominated the charts in the late 2000s and early 2010s, can be radioactively twee—the essence of “millennial cringe,” as Gen Z has contemptuously named the previous generation’s tendency towards sincerity.
This year, though, zoomers (and everyone else) have been getting into a lot of millennial culture, and a generation that seemed to have aged out of youthful cool is enjoying somewhat of a second wind. “Stomp clap hey” is back—and ferociously so. Spotify’s 4th-most-streamed song globally in 2025 was Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” built on an acoustic arpeggio and an “Oh, my, my” pre-chorus. Benson Boone’s whoa-whoa-whoa-ified 2024 hit “Beautiful Things” is still lingering near the top of the charts. And Superman uses Noah and the Whale’s chirpy 2007 single “5 Years Time” as a climactic needle drop.
Millennial indie rock is back too, via both its originators and newer artists. Bloc Party played their 2005 album Silent Alarm in full on tour this year; next year, they’re touring with Interpol. The Dare, a prince of New York’s clubs, plays dance-y, shouty songs that recall LCD Soundsystem while dressed in suits and skinny ties that recall The Strokes. Geese, Wet Leg and Dijon are bringing a guitar-driven, squally and scuzzy sound back into fashion. We’ve even had discourse around a new Lily Allen album. Are we in 2025 or 2005?
This is more than a musical phenomenon. Girls, the defining 2010s show about millennial womanhood, became a trendy rewatch in 2025, while its creator Lena Dunham returned with a new show, Too Much, about a 30-something protagonist going through very millennial growing pains. Baggy trousers, the defining fashion choice of Gen Z, may have passed the peak of their powers: recent runway shows by Burberry and Gucci showed a swing back towards narrower silhouettes. One zoomer fashion tribe, the Hedi Slimane-worshipping Hedi boys, have leaned fully into the 2000s skinny-jeans-and-pointy-boots look; they’re the shock troops of a more widespread fascination with the carefree, offline “indie sleaze” of that era. (Those whose tastes run more towards nu-metal will be heartened to know that belt chains are back too.) And one of the year’s most zeitgeisty novels, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, is a dry dismantling of millennial hipsters in Berlin, with period-specific details right down to a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster.
Part of this is simple math. Every decade or two, trends come around again. Recent years have been big on 1990s and early 2000s Y2K aesthetics; it’s natural that late-2000s and 2010s millennial-core would come next. But millennial cringe itself is also being reevaluated. Zoomers, raised on hyper-ironic meme culture, are beginning to discover that cynicism makes for a thin diet; past a certain point, sincerity is the only thing that can get you through the day.
It’s also the way to great art. This year’s landmark pop album, Rosalía’s Lux, doesn’t sound particularly millennial, but the glorious ambition of it—the orchestra, the opera, the singing in multiple languages—wouldn't work without complete seriousness of purpose; even a drop of irony would’ve deflated the whole thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the latest playful epic from an iconic Gen-X director—but the concluding scene, in which Tom Petty's “American Girl” builds on the soundtrack as Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson takes up her parents’ political mission, is strikingly sincere.
The other simple math powering this strange rehabilitation is the ages of everyone involved. In 2025, the median millennial turned 36 or 37, the point by which someone has, or should have, renounced all pretense of being a young person, especially if they’ve become a parent. You can still be stylish, hot and well-informed, but you can’t pretend you’re on the bleeding edge. Millennials who spent their late 20s and early 30s clinging to their youth had to disavow the culture of their teens and sign up to what the zoomers were into; now, at last, they can admit they did like trilbies and indie-folk all along. Paradoxically, this makes them less cringe, not more. Now millennials are too old to care about being cool, they’re cool again.
It appears something of a generational ceasefire has broken out. Consider this tweet, which circulated last December like an omen for the coming year. “I would have been a great millennial,” wrote the early-20s journalist Cami Fateh. “I would work at i-D and my friends would work at Vice and Buzzfeed News and we’d write listicles and Twitter was at its prime. Unfortunately, I was too busy being in the sixth grade to participate.” It's a dig at millennials for being old—but a gentle, almost affectionate one. The world in which they were on top is viewed nostalgically, and as something completely historical. Some zoomers are even making TikTok odes to 2010s “millennial optimism”, with pictures drenched in the sepia tint of early Instagram filters.
Millennials, in other words, are no longer a threat. And that means Gen Z can admit that, yes, some millennial culture is cool. Bands with noisy guitars can be cool. Jeans that cut off blood circulation to your calves can be cool. This acknowledgement is validating for millennials themselves, but it’s also good for Zoomers. The oldest of them are now in their late 20s; in a few years, they’ll be heading for 35. Soon, to paraphrase LCD Soundsystem, they’ll be losing their edge to the Gen Alpha kids coming up from behind. But they’ll know that, sometime around 2040, their baggy trousers and hyperpop and Labubus will creep back into fashion. It’s not the getting old that’s hard—it’s the period before you admit it.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.