Thin Lizzy album cover for 'The Boys Are Back in Town' showing three band members playing guitars

The Boys Are Back In Town

2009catchphraseclassic

Published October 1, 2026

"The Boys Are Back In Town" is Thin Lizzy's 1976 arena rock anthem that got a second life online, first stapled onto Advice Animals in the early 2010s and then flipped into a Weird Twitter in-joke after a 2015 Vice stunt and a Dril tweet made the title phrase funny on its own.

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Overview

The meme has two distinct lives. In its first, the title phrase was slapped onto classic Advice Animals like Brace Yourself, Matrix Morpheus and Success Kid, played straight as a declaration that some group was, in fact, back4. The gag only required one line, which is why it worked across so many templates with no setup.

Its second life is weirder. On Weird Twitter the lyric got drained of sincerity and used as absurdist filler, often triggered by nothing in particular2. The joke rides on how overexposed the song is at bars, sports events and political rallies, so repeating the line reads as a parody of hype itself. By late 2015 and 2016, Dril-adjacent accounts were treating "the boys are back in town" as a self-contained punchline that didn't need an image, a video or a context35.

Origin & Background

Platform
Image macros (early use) / Twitter and Tumblr (Weird Twitter revival)
Date
2009

Thin Lizzy released "The Boys Are Back In Town" as a single on April 17, 1976 from the album Jailbreak, where it hit number one in Ireland, number eight in the UK and number 12 on the US Billboard Hot 1001. Management reportedly pushed the band to include it on the album after initially leaving it off8.

The earliest sustained online fixation is the single-serving Twitter account @intownagain, which started posting lyrics from the song in September 20094. The caption usage on Advice Animals built up over the next few years before the Weird Twitter wave took over.

How It Spread

The pivot from sincere Advice Animal caption to ironic Weird Twitter catchphrase happened in 2015. On March 23, Vice ran a first-person piece titled "I Played 'The Boys Are Back in Town' on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out," a stunt that treated the song as an endurance test for other patrons2. KYM credits the article with setting the tone for the ironic revival that followed4.

On November 29, 2015, Dril posted a tweet riffing on the title, which pushed the phrase into his orbit of followers3. About a week later, Tumblr user Bromurra published a "good end / bad end" text post built around the song, which Meme Archives reblogged on February 9, 2016 and which pulled in over 5,900 notes by that October5. By late September 2016, @SocMalpractice summed up the whole bit by tweeting a scenario where he described Twitter to his mother as a website where everyone disagrees about everything "except that referencing 'the boys are back in town' is funny"6.

Away from the meme circuit, the song kept recycling through film, TV and politics. Everclear covered it for the 2001 film A Knight's Tale, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia used it in the 2010 episode "Dennis Gets Divorced," and Paul Ryan walked out to it at the 2012 Republican National Convention, which the family of late Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott publicly objected to1.

Timeline

1976-04-17

Thin Lizzy releases "The Boys Are Back In Town" as a single off the album Jailbreak.

2009-09

Single-serving Twitter account @intownagain joins Twitter and starts posting lyrics from the song.

2012-08

Paul Ryan is introduced at the Republican National Convention to the song, drawing public objection from Phil Lynott's family.

2015-03-23

Vice publishes "I Played 'The Boys Are Back in Town' on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out," cited as the catalyst for the ironic Weird Twitter revival.

2015-11-29

Dril posts a tweet referencing "The Boys Are Back In Town."

2016-02-09

Meme Archives reblogs Tumblr user Bromurra's "good end / bad end" post, which eventually clears 5,900 notes.

2016-09-29

@SocMalpractice tweets that referencing the song is one of the only things Twitter agrees is funny.

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How to Use This Meme

Typical use is to drop the exact phrase "the boys are back in town" into a post with no setup, often in reply to a photo of friends, a sports moment, or absolutely nothing. The common convention is to let the line stand on its own, since the song is familiar enough that no quotation marks or context are needed.

Frequently Asked Questions