NEW YORK, NY.- “Turn This Off!” is a pummeling, 23-second novelty song on “One More Time,” the most recent album from pop-punk juggernaut Blink-182, and the first in 12 years to feature singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge. “If you’re too offended by these words,” DeLonge shouts in his vowely, oft-imitated Southern California drawl, “then please [expletive] off.” His rapid-fire verse concludes in a crude joke, perhaps the only word of which I can quote in this publication is “proctologists.”

When “One More Time” came out in October, listening to this song prompted me to feel a specific kind of discomfort as familiar as the wallpaper on my teenage bedroom: knowing you’re supposed to laugh at a joke you don’t find funny.

Blink-182 was my favorite band for a decent chunk of my adolescence, and I felt for them a fervent, unconditional kind of adoration that today gets called “stanning.” I loved the tuneful irreverence of their voices, their goofball defiance and the way their three simple instruments fused into a sound as huge as the sky on a cloudless California day.

And yet there were always lyrics, stage banter and sometimes entire songs that made that particular queasiness rise in my throat. The ones that went “Your mom’s a whore” or “The state looks down on sodomy.” They were the sort of jokes the boys at school made, too — homophobic, sexist, brutishly derogatory — that I knew I was supposed to laugh at if I wanted to fit in. On my headphones, an angrily heartbroken DeLonge sang “I need a girl that I can train” over and over again on the title track of an exhilaratingly catchy, romantically frustrated album I adored called (what else?) “Enema of the State.” The refrain played on a loop in my brain long before I realized what a nasty, limiting sentiment it was.

The female perspective — or sometimes even a perspective that didn’t actively denigrate women — was completely absent in the pop-punk I loved as a teenager.

Blessedly, in 2023, that is no longer the case, and there’s a bona fide superstar — 20-year-old Olivia Rodrigo — topping the charts with pop-punk-inspired music that talks back to the boys. “I’m all right with the movies that make jokes ’bout senseless cruelty, that’s for sure,” Rodrigo sings on “All-American Bitch,” the leadoff track from her guitar-driven, gimlet-eyed 2023 album, “Guts.” She delivers that part of the song in an exaggeratedly feminine lilt, embodying a familiar character: a girl that can be trained. Then the chorus hits and she obliterates that fiction with cranked distortion, gleefully unladylike expletives and — as the song builds to its cathartic conclusion — an unapologetically feminine scream.

As one of the breakout musical stars of this nascent decade, Rodrigo is riding a wave of rock music made by young women, a force that has been building in more underground spaces for quite some time. (Many of these artists cite as their chief inspiration Hayley Williams of Paramore, a pop-punk act that this year put out a comeback album more searching and mature than Blink-182’s.) Rodrigo’s perspective is critical. At last, there is a young pop star pointing out the ambient misogyny that pollutes American culture — and doing it over three chugging chords in a sneering pop-punk yowl.

But she knows how to make the medicine go down easy. What sets Rodrigo apart from her peers is the same quality that elevates “Guts” slightly above her multiplatinum 2021 debut, “Sour”: how funny she is. On songs such as the exhilaratingly catchy ode to romantic ambivalence “Get Him Back!” or the deliciously spiky “Bad Idea Right?,” Rodrigo’s comedic timing (“I know I should stop, ... but I can’t!”) is immaculate. Sometimes, Rodrigo deploys humor to puncture a guy’s inflated ego (“He said he’s 6-foot-2, and I’m like, ‘Dude, nice try’”), but more often, the punchline comes at her own expense. Consider the avalanche of cringe that tumbles out of her mouth at the end of the raucous rocker “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl”: “Thought your mom was your wife / Called you the wrong name twice / Can’t think of a third line ... .”

Those jokes are better written than the ones I heard men more than twice Rodrigo’s age making when I went to see my teenage heroes Blink-182 on their reunion tour in May. As ever, they sounded great; they filled the sold-out arena with such a colossal noise that it was hard to believe it was made by only three people. But there was something strange about how little the band’s — and, in particular, DeLonge’s — stage banter had changed with the times. He still made sexist jokes about “your mom” and spun gallingly homophobic fictions about nonconsensual sex with his bandmates. Someone threw a bra onstage, prompting a soliloquy on how much the 47-year-old DeLonge likes boobs.

Blink-182 has long been adult men doing teenage cosplay, and it would have been naive of me to expect growth from a group that made its name with a hit called “What’s My Age Again?” But at its concert this year, my queasiness was replaced by an odd relief that such so-called “jokes” didn’t feel so normal anymore. They felt, to borrow a word from Rodrigo, cringe. The band’s assumption that these are the sorts of things young people find funny in 2023 just made it sound behind the times, like it was speaking an old dialect that had fallen out of fashion.

The best new Blink-182 song I heard all year wasn’t a Blink-182 song at all. It was “Hollywood Baby,” by digitally savvy jesters 100 gecs, a hydraulic Monster Truck of a pop-punk song with a chorus featuring Dylan Brady’s best and most reverently nasal DeLonge impression: “I’m gowww-ing crayyy-zeee, little tiny Hollywood bay-beee.” It has that rib-shaking, volcanically blown-out sound that I still love about the best Blink-182 songs, but I can enjoy it mindlessly without having to stifle any kind of internal nausea to sing along to every word.

On their thrill-a-second, blissfully silly album “10,000 gecs,” Brady and Laura Les are equal-opportunity absurdists; they don’t need to punch down to get their jokes off. Like the most benevolent stoners, they know that there is an infinite quantity of things to laugh at in this world that do not come at the expense of other people. Such as: What if a little frog showed up at a kegger? Can you imagine eating a burrito with Danny DeVito? What would be the funniest emoji for someone to put on their tombstone?

“10,000 gecs” is ridiculous, unserious and also my favorite album of the year. When I try to articulate why, I keep coming back to something that critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote in her review of it: “It’s a reevaluation of the most declasse and dunderheaded rock genres that roiled the 2000s, positing that when it’s not delivered by misogynistic frat guys, it can be terrific music. 100 gecs are speaking to and for the regressive ids of us all; dumb [expletive] should be inclusive too.”

That was the energy I sensed in the room when 100 gecs played a sold-out show in New York City in April, easily the most jubilant concert I saw all year. Brady and Les thrashed in neon wizard robes; someone crowd-surfed an inflatable alligator. The audience was diverse, friendly and full of people of all genders having the time of their lives.

Everyone deserves an opportunity to turn their brains off now and then, 100 gecs seem to be saying, but it’s hard to enjoy something mindlessly when you have the creeping sense that you’re the butt of the joke. That’s not the case when I’m listening to “10,000 gecs,” though, and it certainly wasn’t that night at the show. We weren’t laughing at anyone in particular, but best believe, we were laughing.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.