Emo

By 1984, Washington’s hardcore scene had its own label, Dischord Records, and a reputation for fast, disciplined songs. It also had slam-dancing violence and a nihilism that discouraged many of the people who had built it. In the summer of 1985, Amy Pickering, who worked at Dischord, mailed fliers announcing a “Revolution Summer.” The bands that answered, among them Rites of Spring, Embrace, Gray Matter and Beefeater, played benefits and protests, turned against the macho pit and let their songs move in new directions.^[1][2]

Rites of Spring were the clearest example. Guy Picciotto sang poetic, personal lyrics with a delivery that always seemed close to breaking, and the band played only about fifteen shows, some intense enough to wreck their equipment. Ian MacKaye, formerly of Minor Threat, produced their only album at Inner Ear Studios in February 1985, and Dischord released it that June. MacKaye’s own new band, Embrace, formed the same summer with three former members of Faith.^[1][2][3]

Listeners and critics started calling the sound “emotional hardcore,” then “emocore,” then simply “emo.” Accounts differ on who said it first, and the musicians mostly hated it: MacKaye called it a stupid term, and Picciotto insisted Rites of Spring were a punk band. By 1986 most of these groups had split. Picciotto and drummer Brendan Canty later joined MacKaye in Fugazi, but the word they rejected had already left town on records, in zines and by word of mouth.^[1][2][3]

Through the late 1980s and early 1990s the idea traveled through small labels and touring vans rather than radio. In San Diego, Heroin and the bands around Gravity Records, founded in 1991, pushed it toward the shrieking, chaotic sound later called screamo. Elsewhere it grew slower and more melodic.^[1]

Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate gave the melodic version its defining record. Diary, recorded in Chicago with producer Brad Wood and released by Sub Pop on May 10, 1994, sat somewhere between post-hardcore and grunge, with Jeremy Enigk’s high, strained voice riding guitars that swelled and fell away. It never charted, yet it sold more than 231,000 copies and became one of Sub Pop’s best-selling releases. The same year, Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy gave Bay Area punk a confessional songbook that later emo bands returned to again and again.^[1][2]

Even a major-label band found the same vein. Weezer followed their hit debut with Pinkerton in 1996, a rawer and more uncomfortable record that was panned on release. It went gold in 2001 and platinum in 2016, and writer Andy Greenwald later called it the most important emo album of the decade.^[1]

In the Chicago suburbs and the college towns around them, another branch grew from the same post-hardcore roots. Cap’n Jazz, started by teenage brothers Tim and Mike Kinsella, played frantic songs that kept changing shape. Braid, from Champaign, Illinois, and the Promise Ring, from Milwaukee, tightened that energy into hooks, while Mineral, from Texas, and the Get Up Kids, from Kansas City, stretched it toward slow builds and big choruses. Their records came out on independent labels such as Jade Tree, Polyvinyl and Deep Elm, whose Emo Diaries compilations ran to eleven volumes between 1997 and 2007.^[1][2]

American Football distilled the sound into a single album. Mike Kinsella formed the trio in Urbana, Illinois, in 1997 with Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos; their self-titled LP came out on Polyvinyl in 1999, a year before they stopped playing together. Its interlocking, chiming guitars gave the style a nickname, twinkle emo, and in 2023 the band bought the Urbana house on the album cover to keep it from being demolished.^[1][2]

By the end of the decade, the same circuit was producing records built for bigger rooms. Arizona’s Jimmy Eat World released Clarity in 1999 to modest sales, and the Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About found a wider audience through Vagrant Records the same year. Vagrant was about to take that audience on the road.^[1]

In the summer of 2001, Vagrant sent its bands across the United States on a tour sponsored by Microsoft and Coca-Cola, and the word “emo” went with them into the mainstream press. That year Jimmy Eat World released Bleed American on DreamWorks; “The Middle” topped Billboard’s alternative chart and the album went platinum in 2002. In 2002, Dashboard Confessional became the first act to record MTV Unplugged without a platinum album, and critic Jim DeRogatis called singer Chris Carrabba the “face of emo.”^[1]

New Jersey and Long Island supplied a heavier strain. Thursday’s War All the Time reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 in 2003, Taking Back Sunday’s Where You Want to Be reached No. 3 in 2004, and Brand New’s Deja Entendu (2003) and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006) became two of the period’s most cited albums. My Chemical Romance, from New Jersey, broke through with Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in 2004 and followed it in 2006 with The Black Parade, a theatrical concept album that went platinum in under a year.^[1]

Fueled by Ramen built a second center around pop hooks. Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree (2005), Panic! at the Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (2005) and Paramore’s Riot! (2007) all went multi-platinum. MySpace pages, Warped Tour stages and mall stores turned emo into a look as much as a sound, with dyed black fringes, eyeliner and skinny jeans, and many of the bands, My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco among them, rejected the label.^[1]

Success brought a backlash. In 2008, after a British teenager’s death, the Daily Mail ran a series of articles presenting emo as a dangerous cult, and fans protested outside the paper’s offices; the same year, anti-emo groups attacked teenagers in several Mexican cities. By 2013, Paramore and Fall Out Boy had released records that left the sound behind.^[1][2]

While the charts moved on, younger bands went looking for the 1990s records. Philadelphia’s Algernon Cadwallader, whose 2008 album Some Kind of Cadwallader is often cited as the start of the so-called fourth wave, revived the twinkling guitars and shouted vocals of the Midwest bands. Title Fight’s Floral Green (2012) and the groups around labels such as Run for Cover gave the revival its shape, and in 2014 American Football reunited as Polyvinyl reissued their only album.^[1][2][3]

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die stretched the style into crowded, orchestral arrangements on Harmlessness (2015), which critics later treated as the close of the revival, and Modern Baseball split in 2017. By then emo’s vocabulary had crossed into hip-hop: Lil Peep sang about depression over guitar samples, and emo rap became a commercial force of the late 2010s. Guitar bands kept going too. Home Is Where’s 2021 EP I Became Birds spread during the pandemic lockdowns and carried the line into the 2020s.^[1][2]

The 2000s wave also took root far from the United States. In Brazil, São Paulo bands from the melodic hardcore scene, CPM 22 and Hateen among them, were labeled emo for their personal lyrics, while Fresno, from Porto Alegre, and NX Zero, from São Paulo, became two of the country’s biggest rock acts; each was named artist of the year at MTV Brasil’s Video Music Brasil awards, NX Zero in 2007 and Fresno in 2009. In Mexico, Monterrey’s Panda, later styled PXNDX, sold more than 250,000 copies of Amantes sunt amentes (2006).^[1][2][3][4]