He's the frontman of Sleeping With Sirens, and if you were a certain kind of teenager in the early 2010s, his voice was basically the soundtrack to your emotional life. If You Can't Hang. Let Love Bleed Red. If I'm James Dean, You're Audrey Hepburn. Songs people didn't just listen to. They grew up inside them. There was something about that era specifically, post-hardcore and emo bleeding into each other, Warped Tour lineups packed with bands that wore their feelings on the outside, that created a specific kind of loyalty. The kind built in parking lots and mosh pits and burned CDs passed between friends. The kind that doesn't really go away.

In his interview with Poison, she tells him about driving across the country with her mom, listening to his music the whole way. He lights up. "There's artists you reference for amazing times in your life, and artists you reference for getting through hard times," he says. "Music has the ability to put you right back in a moment."

The band is still here. He is still here. And somewhere along the way, that stopped being a given and started being something worth understanding.

Sleeping With Sirens came up inside a scene that almost doesn't make sense when you describe it out loud now. Myspace pages with autoplay songs. Burned CDs with hand-written Sharpie titles. Warped Tour, the travelling punk rock summer camp that launched Blink-182, Paramore, Fall Out Boy, and My Chemical Romance, and served as the primary axis around which an entire youth culture organized itself every summer. Kids sitting on top of 15-passenger vans in parking lots after shows, playing extra songs for whoever stayed. "We would sit on top of the van and there'd be like 150 kids outside and we'd play extra songs," Kellin says. "Whatever you got to do to stand out." It wasn't strategy. It was survival. And for a lot of bands from that era, it was also the peak.

Sleeping With Sirens is not that story.

What separated them, partly, was the emotional specificity of what they made. This wasn't background music. It was music for the exact feeling you didn't have words for yet. Kellin's voice, distinctly high and raw and unashamed, became a kind of permission slip for a generation that needed one. The band moved through sounds and eras without fully abandoning what made people find them in the first place. That's harder than it sounds. A lot of bands tried. Most of them disappeared.

"There was a period of our lives where we burned out, and it was awful," he says. "Just being conscious of, hey, I need to take a break, and actually taking those breaks. Because when you're away from something, you miss it and you want to go back. But if you're constantly doing it over and over again..." He doesn't finish it. He doesn't need to.

The surviving wasn't glamorous. It was learning to trust instincts he'd spent years overriding. "When you don't listen to your instincts and you force it, that's just something I don't do anymore," he says. "If it lights you up and makes you feel good, you're moving in the right direction. If it doesn't, then it's not."

Getting back wasn't one decision. It was incremental. Letting the work be fun again instead of letting it become a job. "If it's always fun, then you're killing it."

What shifted over the years is what success means to him. "Success to me is putting on a good show and walking away feeling like people had a really great night," he says. "When someone went to a festival and didn't know our band, and they watched us, and walked away going, well I'm a fan now. That's the most success I could ask for. It's not being on the cover of a magazine or making a certain amount of money. It's being an impact on someone's life."

He's been on the other side of that equation. Chasing metrics, chasing perception. He knows what it costs. "There's an authenticity to people and an inauthenticity to people. I've been on both sides. You're the most authentic when you're just doing something that lights you up."

Alongside Sleeping With Sirens, he launched Haunted Mouths, a side project built almost entirely on freedom. No expectations, no brand, just writing. "We wrote a whole record in a couple weeks. Every single day we'd go in and get a song." He'd been journaling heavily, carrying a full book of scattered lyrics he'd bring into sessions and find homes for. "You don't know what you're writing about until you get three or four songs. And then it starts to take shape." Having two outlets has made him better at both. The structure of one sharpens the freedom of the other.

The new Sleeping With Sirens album is coming, and he talks about it the way someone talks about something they genuinely can't stop listening to. "I'll go on a five or six mile run listening to other artists, and then I'll end up throwing our record on. Front to back. And still liking it." He laughs. "That doesn't always happen."

The timing feels significant. Because the world that made Sleeping With Sirens relevant is, quietly, coming back.

Warped Tour returned in 2025 for its 30th anniversary, three cities, sold out. The response was loud enough that 2026 brings five two-day festivals across Washington D.C., Long Beach, Orlando, and brand new international stops in Montreal and Mexico City, partnering with Insomniac for expanded production. The kids who grew up on this music are coming back. And they're bringing a younger generation with them who found the scene through TikTok and algorithmic rabbit holes and somehow feel just as strongly about it.

Kellin doesn't overcomplicate why. "Emo music is fun," he says. "Going to a local show is fun. Discovering a band in your hometown and meeting people that are like-minded. What the hell else do you do?" He sees it at his own shows now. Parents bringing their kids. Teenagers who weren't alive during the original Warped Tour run singing every word. The music found them anyway.

A generation raised on curated feeds and algorithmic playlists gravitating toward a scene that was always fundamentally about showing up in person. About community built in parking lots and hot amphitheaters and sweaty venues. Emo, at its core, was never really about aesthetics. It was about being in a room full of people who felt too much and finding out you weren't alone in it. That need didn't go anywhere. It was just waiting.

"Enjoy the moment," he says, when I ask what he'd tell younger artists finding their footing in the scene now. "It goes by really, really quick. The roughing it. The not knowing where you're gonna sleep that night. Those are some of the best moments."

He's seen both ends now. The climb and the staying. The burning out and the coming back. And somewhere across fifteen years, a van, a parking lot, and Madison Square Garden, he found something a lot of artists never do.

He still loves it. It never became a job.

That's the whole thing.