In the mid-1990s, there were plenty of bands with jagged guitars and heart-on-sleeve lyrics. I was all in on bands like Sugar, Superchunk, Sebadoh, Seam, Archers of Loaf, and Built to Spill. It was easy for a listener like me, with one foot in punk and hardcore and the other in indie rock, to fall in love with second wave emo. When the bands I loved from that era broke up, mostly in the early 2000s, I checked out.
By the late 2000s, emo had developed a glammed-up, Hot Topic image that was so far removed from its origins, favoring image over substance and trafficking in misogyny at the same levels as 1980s hair metal. Gone was the influence of seminal bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace, as well as the late 1990s explosion led by bands like Braid, the Promise Ring, Texas Is the Reason, and Jawbreaker.
To my surprise, in the early 2010s, I began to discover bands like Touche Amore and the Hotelier. Emo was back. The mix of younger bands and the return of established acts writing about life as I was experiencing it made me realise this wasn’t a genre to outgrow, but one to grow with.
That’s precisely what Andrew Sacher’s Emo Revival is about. He begins in 2008, when the genre is widely considered to have been reborn through its fourth wave, including bands like the Wonder Years, Modern Baseball, Tigers Jaw, Into It, Over It, Snowing, and Algernon Cadwallader.
For fans of the genre, this is a must-read, chronicling basement shows across the country that formed scenes unconcerned with commercial breakthroughs and took cues from 1990s emo touchstones like Cap’N Jazz and American Football. If you checked out on emo during its lost decade and rediscovered the genre a little later, as I did, you will relish the stories and want to build your own playlist to get acquainted with the crucial bands you missed. If you are new to the genre, this will provide a thrilling introduction to one of the most vital collections of bands of the 2010s.
As with other genres, when the commercial prospects of third wave emo began to recede, a fresh crop of bands quietly, but persistently, swooped in to breathe new life.
“This scene really started to arise when all the major-label third-wave emo bands were getting dropped from major labels, breaking up, or going in different directions musically. At the same time, the Warped Tour pivoted towards either the super digital metalcore stuff or the really neon pop punk stuff, and publications like Alternative Press that had championed emo were also not looking for the newer bands in that scene,” Sacher says. “The industry was turning off the genre, and that left the newer bands to their own devices, and their only option was to create their own space.”
The genre had been taking hits from tastemakers like Pitchfork, who initially gave canonical emo releases terrible reviews while favoring the indie rock that would dominate the decade. Couple that with the rise of the more fashion-conscious pivot, and a return to the genre’s earnest roots now feels inevitable. Eventually, Pitchfork would course-correct on many key emo albums, making up for past mistakes through disappeared and rewritten reviews, or praising key releases upon rerelease. For a while, a fourth-wave emo band had nowhere to get the word out, and that became important to the networks of basements and scenes that developed.
“If you were a young band in the late 2000s that wanted to do emo that had more in common with bands like Braid and Promise Ring, where would you go?” Sacher says. “There were no festivals that wanted to book you. There were no magazines that wanted to write about you. There were no labels that wanted to sign you. No bigger bands that wanted to take you on tour. So what really happened was that these bands would find each other, and it became a strength in numbers. All these bands stuck together because there were so few of them, and it just sort of organically grew.”
Around 2013, the emo revival began to pick up some steam and the press began to pay attention. “I remember seeing many of these bands play shows back when there wasn’t attention on them. There would be a hundred people here, but everybody was just deeply in it. It felt like what I imagined it must have felt like to have seen a great hardcore show in 1981,” Sacher says. “Everyone there was so passionate, but it was still this tiny thing.”
Before the mainstream press found it, fans discovered bands through blogs written by people who love the music. By the time those outside the scene covered it, a massive ecosystem stretched across America and even to places like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan. The press learned there was an entire nationwide and international network of bands that was far too big to ignore.
“I don’t think I have seen anything else like this, where it was just such a massive network of multiple regions. It was just sort of happening hidden in plain view. It was right in front of you if you just looked. But so many people for so long weren’t looking, and then when they finally did look, it became massive,” Sacher says.
Like the discovery of those scenes, there was a major-label rush to sign the most popular bands, like Title Fight. Some have even played mainstream festivals like Coachella. Sunny Day Real Estate, Jimmy Eat World, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and At the Drive-In have all played the festival.
Another way fourth-wave bands course-corrected the genre was by breaking from the third wave’s misogyny and taking inspiration from second-wave bands. It’s easy to assume that fourth-wave emo is a reaction to the toxic characteristics of third wave, but Sacher doesn’t think it’s that simple.
“It’s interesting when you zoom out and look at music trends and eras; it could really look like a reaction to third-wave emo. But when I would dig in and talk to all the bands, many of them said it wasn’t an intentional choice,” he says. “One thing that is unique about this generation is that a lot of these bands’ members are millennials. A lot of them found punk or emo or hardcore through bands like Blink-182 or Taking Back Sunday, and those were some of the biggest bands in the world at that point. Punk is very accessible because it was literally all around them, and then from there it’s an easy path to Lifetime or Cap’n Jazz. I think what happened is these people found punk through the mainstream stuff, kind of quickly found the more underground stuff, and thought that held more appeal for them.”
So rather than emulating bands that had a path from VFW halls to MTV via major-label interest, fourth wave bands were more interested in reviving the ethos and sound of bands that broke up before they had any chance of mainstream success. They were also less interested in perpetuating the “bitter ex-boyfriend” songs that dominated the genre’s most commercially successful era. “Fourth wave bands were just collectively of the mindset that they didn’t want to perpetuate that,” Sacher says.
“One of the great things about punk and hardcore is it gives people a vessel to really open up about inner emotions. I think that in the third wave emo scene, a lot of bands ended up taking that to a really sort of toxic conclusion. But fourth wave bands were like, ‘Well, I want to be open and vulnerable and use that side of punk and hardcore, but I want to do it in a more responsible and respectful way.’ In addition to that, musically, I think a lot of it was just people being like, ‘I just want to operate my band the way my favorite bands do.’”
Groups like Title Fight, Algernon Cadwallader, Touche Amore, and Modern Baseball found that audiences were looking for that openness and honesty, too. Those bands sound nothing like each other, but they shared a common earnestness. “It was the opposite of what was being served at the Warped Tour at the time, a callback to this mass variety of punk, hardcore, emo, post-hardcore, melodic hardcore bands that live beneath the Blink-182 levels of stardom,” Sacher explains.
As a writer at Brooklyn Vegan, Sacher began covering these bands when publications like Pitchfork had an extreme bias against emo, panning now-canonical releases from bands like the Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World. “One of the reasons I started covering these bands in real time was that no one, not even Brooklyn Vegan, which was an indie rock-oriented publication. Pitchfork hated emo and everything to do with it for quite a while. Emo became a big theme for me, and the reason was that these bands felt so refreshing,” Sacher says.
One aspect of Emo Revival that sets it apart from other scene histories is that Sacher pulls in the stories of labels, promoters, and venue runners. I was delighted to find that the all-ages venue of my youth and my best friend’s emo band Kid Brother Collective made the cut. For Sacher, these players were as critical to the scene’s resurgence as the bands who spent hours in vans.
“The interesting thing about the venues is that so many of them were run by the bands. I did make a very intentional point to give space to those venues in the book. I wanted people to know the names of these little punk basements. That was important to me,” Sacher says. “To get those in there, it was so important to interview the founders of labels like Tiny Engines, Top Shelf, Run for Cover, and Count Your Lucky Stars. I wanted to connect with No Sleep, too, but the interview fell through. Those were just as much main characters in the book as the bands. Many of those important blogs were written by people who were connected to labels, too.”
Of course, it is important to acknowledge the patrons in these tiny basements. “I think a lot of credit must go to the people who wanted to see this music, the people who saw Algernon Cadwallader or Snowing in a basement in 2008. At first, the scene was so small. There was this total lack of barrier between artist and fan,” Sacher explains.
That relatability is what made emo so appealing when I was in my early 20s, seeing bands like Mineral, Texas is the Reason, the Get Up Kids, and the Promise Ring. But soon enough, emo became a label that made many of those bands bristle. People who cared more about hardcore dismissed it, and plenty of others used the blurred line between that era’s indie rock and emo to claim allegiance to the former instead. Sacher insisted on including perspectives from second-wave bands.
“It was important to me to get the perspectives of people from other waves, too, and I was aware that connecting those bands would give the book appeal for people who were around for other waves, too. There is a chapter where the talking heads are the two Steves [Holmes and Lamos] from American Football and Chris Simpson from Mineral. They talked about how ’emo’ was a derogatory term in the 1990s. Even in the press, if you saw the word ’emo’ in a record review, it was usually used as a diss,” Sacher explains.
“It goes back to Ian McKaye,” he continues. “There was the famous quote at the Embrace show where he says, ‘As if hardcore wasn’t emotional to begin with,’ which I quote in the intro of the book. So if you have Ian, whose opinion carries a lot of weight, saying the term emotional hardcore is stupid, right off the bat, some people will think it’s stupid. Then there is the second-wave emo scene, which is obviously way bigger than the first wave, and again it’s a derogatory term in the press. Fans are all distancing themselves from it. Nobody wants to be called emo. Then, in the 2000s, it’s the same thing with My Chemical Romance, but the fourth-wave bands embraced, pun intended, the label. And so far, the fifth wave bands are, too. It’s getting ridiculous. Maybe we should just stop counting the waves.”
The groups that started the fourth-wave often saw the second-wave bands as the “real” emo, not the fashion victims of the third wave. Drawing inspiration from that collection of bands was a way to connect to the subculture’s richness, from innovators like Rites of Spring and Embrace to their contemporaries. They saw the possibilities of being called “emo” as a positive thing.
While the book covers many groups that had breakthroughs of various magnitudes, others missed their first shot at a big moment, like Snowing, who graces the cover of Emo Revival. One of the heartrending sections of the book focuses on John Gomm from Snowing and Street Smart Cyclist. “I think theirs is one of the most impactful stories in the book, and that’s a big part of the reason that they’re on the cover. Hearing John get very vulnerable and introspective about what happened with his band. Snowing were kind of forced to break up right before all this stuff got big. Then John had to reckon with seeing a lot of his friends’ bands have these opportunities that he couldn’t have,” Sacher explains. “To hear him tell his story was very emotional for me.”
With books like Sacher’s driving credibility for the genre, can a contemporary emo band reach the arena-filling success of My Chemical Romance, one of the rare third wave bands that has managed to escape the negative baggage their peers carry? Sacher’s not expecting it, but he’s not ruling it out, either.
“I don’t think we’re gonna see another My Chemical Romance level fame for an emo band anytime soon. I just don’t think it’s what the major labels are after, and you do need that major label push to be that,” Sacher says. “The biggest punk band right now is probably Turnstile, and they’re still way less popular than Fall Out Boy ever was at their peak. The biggest straight-up emo band right now is probably Hot Mulligan, who are still on a small independent label, even though they were all over the festival circuit this past summer. If Interscope decides to sign Hot Mulligan and put them on tour with Olivia Rodrigo, it might happen. They are an amazing band that is even spawning their own scene of bands who are influenced by them, but I think emo is comfortably in this sort of middle ground right now. It’s a little bit bigger than straight-up underground, but it’s still mid-level music. I think it is pretty comfortable there.”
Still, even if there isn’t a full-blown explosion of emo in mainstream culture, there are definite signs of its influence and relevance. Phoebe Bridgers sang on Joyce Manor’s song “Do You Really Want to Not Get Better?” from 2016’s Cody. Julien Baker has roots in punk and sang on the screamo band the Saddest Landscape’s latest album, released this year. Alex G came from the Philadelphia indie scene. Now he’s opening for Phoebe Bridgers in arenas this fall, and he worked on Frank Ocean‘s blonde, too.
“It’s not even crazy to say that Taylor Swift is three or four degrees of separation from emo revival, and that’s kind of cool,” Sacher explains. “But then outside of just mainstream stuff, I think an even more important thing is that they had to build their own scene. The most important lasting impact of this movement is that they built this foundation, which is still here. This whole new generation of emo has this structure so they can jump in. There was no band as big as the Wonder Years for them to tour with early on, but now, every new emo band opens for the Wonder Years. It’s a rite of passage. Now they’re the elders, and they are committed to supporting the next generation.”