Halsey’s latest hit single, “Without Me,” is in many ways entirely of the moment: a mid-tempo track with intense confessional lyrics—seemingly about a recent breakup—and a buzzy video that features a look-alike for her real-life ex, G-Eazy. But it also has a decidedly old-school secret weapon: Justin Timberlake’s 2002 hit “Cry Me a River,” which famously was written about his real-life ex, Britney Spears, and had a video featuring her look-alike. In the bridge of the song, Halsey slightly alters the lyrics to the Timberlake classic, serving to both evoke memories of the pervasive pop classic (as well as the video and the corresponding narrative around the song), while also, as they say, making it her own.

Evoking a song from the past—whether via similar lyrics or an actual sample—is of course nothing new. In all arenas of pop culture, nostalgia is a juggernaut force, whether it be the continuing churn of TV remakes or as evidenced in, say, Kim Kardashian dressing as Pamela Anderson for Halloween. And samples from previous decades have been a hallmark of pop for ages; sometimes an entire song is constructed around an iconic sample, like the 2009 Kesha-Flo Rida smash “Right Round,” which was built around the 1985 Dead or Alive hit. Other times it is a bit more subtle, in the way M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” borrowed a riff from The Clash. (Oftentimes, this sort of “homage” can hew so closely so as to result in a lawsuit, as Bruno Mars can tell you.)

But the current nostalgia wave in pop marks a transition point: not only are we getting the earliest rounds of late 90s and even early-00s nostalgia, but it’s coming from singers who were children, or barely even born, when all this culture came around the first time. In addition to Halsey’s J.T.-spiration, Troye Sivan and Charli XCX recently released a song titled “1999,” which features references to Eminem, Spears, and Jonathan Taylor-Thomas (!) among many others. The video, which has been viewed more than 12 million times, features an assortment of visual references, as well, including The Matrix and TLC’s “Waterfalls” video. (That many of these references did not actually occur in the year 1999 was not an apparent concern of theirs.)

Up-and-coming British pop singer Anne-Marie released a successful single this summer called “2002,” which, like “1999,” also references Spears’s “. . . Baby One More Time” in its chorus; her video, which pays visual tribute to the Spears hit, has racked up more than 204 million views. (Perhaps one of the takeaways here is that Spears—singular among her peers—is, as we move farther from the decade, becoming more clearly defined as the patron saint of that era, with the most lasting impact on the generations who came after.)

Sivan was four years old and Charli XCX was seven in 1999; Anne-Marie was 11 in 2002. So, given that timing, this current output of nostalgia-infused pop is nostalgic for an era these younger artists probably remember mostly through a lens of other people's memories, the way someone born in the 80s might have developed a sense of what “the 80s” represented through the movies and television shows he or she watched later in life.