In its fourth wave, emo is revived and thriving

This isn’t the emo you listened to in high school. Or maybe it is. Emo is now in its fourth wave, and it’s thriving. These bands are leading the way.

When did emo become a dirty word?

Today, most contemporary emo bands wear the badge proudly. Stretching over four decades, the breadth of emo’s catalogue has allowed bands to celebrate the rich history of the term — from the 1980s post-hardcore origins to the DIY sound of today.

The problem with emo is that, somewhere along the way, it got away from its post-hardcore roots and became an establishment — one people have loved to mock. The associated lifestyle, which exploded in the early 2000s, was a cash cow for record labels, clothing companies and, only sometimes, the bands that were the lifeblood of it all.

But the truth is that emo is its own musically distinct genre just like punk, alternative or metal — and when you know what to listen for, you can recognize it from a mile away. You can also tell when it’s being imitated — or exploited.

There is no one dictionary-approved definition of emo — though, hilariously, Merriam-Webster tries: “A style of rock music influenced by punk rock and featuring introspective and emotionally fraught lyrics.”

That’s pretty much it, distilled down, but everyone still clings to their own individual understanding of the genre.

For instance, when I spoke to Tom Mullen, frontman of the popular Washed Up Emo podcast, I mentioned Jawbreaker. He revealed that he has never considered Jawbreaker an emo band, but has given up the fight after encountering much protest. Meanwhile, I would be lost if I had to redefine my understanding of the progression of the genre not to include them.

Generally, however, emo is understood to be an offshoot of hardcore punk, similar to punk but with more complex musical arrangements, often including keyboards, synthesizers and strings, and more emotional — hey — lyrics. The term is a truncation of the word emocore, which is itself a shortened version of emotional hardcore.

There’s a common misconception that emo is short for something along the lines of “emotional music,” which of course isn’t the case. All music is emotional! Emo, by definition, must always spring from those post-hardcore roots.

It also doesn’t all sound the same. Picture a flowchart with post-hardcore at the very top — the root of all emo. From it branches off emocore, emo, Midwest emo, screamo, emo pop — and each of those sub-genres intersects with other genres, from punk to pop-punk to metalcore to pop to math rock to indie rock.

Is tracing the development of emo in “waves,” as I have done here, the end-all, be-all way for music journalism to trace, categorize and analyze this genre? Of course not. The waves get messy, because they aren’t self-contained — they ebb and flow into one another.

At the same time, the waves are chronological, which is an easy way to trace the progression of the sound. The dates aren’t exact, and the lists of bands aren’t exhaustive. But if you want a more-than-entry-level understanding of this genre — complete with embedded playlists — this article is for you.

Many bands and figures in this world lent their time and their words to the completion of this story, and to them I am indebted: Anthony Raneri of Bayside; Buddy Nielsen of Senses Fail; Zoe Reynolds of Kississippi; Declan Moloney and Noah Aguiar of Bicycle Inn; Tom Mullen of Washed Up Emo; Keith Galvin, Chet Morrison, Dusty Sciacca, and Matt Hunter of Deer Leap; and Eric Butler of Mom Jeans.

What follows is, obviously, my own understanding of the history and progression of emo. But I wanted the artists, themselves, to tell the story wherever possible, and their perspectives have helped solidify my own interpretation.

Emo can be poppy, but it’s not created for mass consumption. It can be punky, but it’s not always political.

And in 2018, as it’s gone back underground, emo is perhaps more itself than it has ever been. Let’s take a look at how we got here.

Note: Not everyone will agree with the lists of representative bands below. Not everyone will agree with the dates of each wave — which do not necessarily indicate when the bands were founded or when they released their first record so much as when the majority of bands in that wave were active. If you have counterpoints, that’s okay. Tell me and each other why you feel differently. We are the reason these bands continue to make music. But it’s pit rules here: Take care of each other.

The First Wave: 1984-1994

Representative bands: The Faith, Dag Nasty, Drive Like Jehu, Rites of Spring, Embrace, Moss Icon, Jawbreaker, Indian Summer

Key subgenres: Punk, hardcore, post-hardcore, emocore

In the mid-1980s, a new sound emerged in Washington, D.C. The area had been home since the late 1970s to something of a hardcore punk renaissance thanks to bands like the Faith and Minor Threat. (There’s a reason you’ll sometimes see these bands referred to as harDCore.)

Hardcore punk scenes existed in pockets across the United States — not to mention the United Kingdom — but the one based in D.C. embodied so much of what punk came to stand for during this time: the counter-culture, anger, aggression.

Here’s the thing about punk — it’s always political. Its lyrics are often about society, rather than the individual, and they criticize conformity and war and the establishment and materialism, among other perceived societal ills.

Stylistically, hardcore punk took the genre even farther than its punk forebears like The Velvet Underground or the Ramones.

Though hardcore, for the most part, still used relatively simple rhythms and chord progressions and employed a singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer set-up, everything was louder, faster and more aggressive. The songwriting was direct and to the point.

Any history of emo is indebted to Ian MacKaye, the frontman of hardcore punk band Minor Threat, post-hardcore band Fugazi and early emo band Embrace, among others.

One way in which MacKaye bridged the gap between the hardcore punk scene and what would follow on its heels was returning the music to a focus on the self and feelings, rather than on society. He did this both through his music and through the independent record label he co-founded, Dischord Records.

As Andy Greenwald writes in his 2003 seminal emo text, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, “What had started as a community was slowly being brought back to the individual, to, in a very real sense, the only thing that each of us is truly able to change.”*

It was in 1985 when the seeds that had sown emo finally started to sprout. “Revolution Summer” in D.C. spawned bands such as Rites of Spring and MacKaye’s own Embrace, whose status as the patriarchs of emo is cemented forever even as they have never really embraced the connection.

In fact, MacKaye, who says the term emo originated in a 1985 Thrasher Magazine article referring to the new sound as “emo-core,” called it “the stupidest f*****g thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”

And while those who associate MacKaye with Minor Threat might agree, anyone who has listened to Embrace might be shocked to find out both bands are fronted by the same person. With Embrace, here is a MacKaye who is singing a complex melody rather than simple punk progressions. Here, too, is a MacKaye who is penning confessional, emotion-driven lines.

In the mid-80s, D.C.-based Rites of Spring continued the trend of focusing lyrics inward. Frontman Guy Picciotto was a fan of Minor Threat, and the power of MacKaye’s music was no doubt a catalyst for the music he would go on to make — encapsulated forever in 1985 on Rites of Spring’s only record, a self-titled studio album produced by MacKaye and released by Dischord Records.

But while Minor Threat was still widely dedicated to the community, to enacting public change, Rites of Spring championed the individual. Greenwald again: “Whereas Minor Threat’s fury transformed disparate outcasts into a unified, extroverted force, Rites of Spring brought together an inspired hodgepodge of individuals eager to convert private pain into public purging.”**

The band gave us such emotionally-driven lines as:

"I bledTried to hide the heart from the headAnd I said I bledIn the arms of a girl I’d barely met (“For Want Of”)"

and

"And from insideOutside can just fall apartAnd you wonderJust how lost inside can be? (“Deeper Than Inside”)"

This is emo, folks. The very, very beginnings of it, anyway.

As the inimitable music critic Jim DeRogatis once put it, “I prefer to think of [emo] as punk rock that’s more melodic and introspective/depressing than hardcore, but still tapping into that primal energy and anger.”

If Rites of Spring toed the line between hardcore and emo, Jawbreaker, which formed in New York City, took the first bold step over it.

Frontman Blake Schwarzenbach, bassist Chris Bauermeister and drummer Adam Pfahler released their debut album, Unfun, in 1990 through independent record label Shredder Records.

Unfun, even in the moment, was highly aware of the unique moment in time in which it existed. It’s not quite punk, not quite emo — it’s instead one of the few true products of emocore.

And while the punk influence can be seen in tracks such as “Softcore” (anti-porn industry) and “Seethruskin” (anti-racism), Unfun is highly personal, as well. As one of the earliest emo songs, “Want,” an anthem of longing, earns its place in the genre’s history with Schwarzenbach’s heartsick lyrics:

"So now you know where I come fromMy secret’s come undoneMy heart revealed my causeI’m lying naked at your feet"

Emo took the independent, or DIY, ethos of hardcore punk and expanded upon it — bands signed with independent labels, grew through word of mouth and advertised shows on flyers and through zines.

In this early stage, emo was very much underground.

***

The Second Wave: 1994-2000

Representative bands: Texas is the Reason, Sunny Day Real Estate, Cap’n Jazz, Jimmy Eat World, Braid, The Promise Ring, At the Drive-In, The Get Up Kids, American Football, Mineral, Cursive, The Appleseed Cast, Rainer Maria, Quicksand, Glassjaw, Orchid, Jets to Brazil, Piebald, Christie Front Drive, Elliott

Key subgenres: Post-hardcore, Midwest emo, emo pop, indie rock, math rock

When you think of emo, which bands come to mind immediately? American Football? The Promise Ring? Mineral? Whatever your answer, you’ll likely find it in the list above.

By 1994, emo’s growth had plateaued; instead of reaching the mainstream, it retreated into the basement as it watched alternative rock and grunge bands like Nirvana, Collective Soul and Soundgarden rise up the charts.

It’s also around this time that we travel out of Washington, D.C., about 1,000 miles west to see the Midwest become the new capital of the burgeoning emo sound.

It was anchored by bands such as Braid and American Football (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois); The Get Up Kids (Kansas City, Missouri); Mineral (Austin, Texas); Cursive (Omaha, Nebraska) and The Promise Ring (Milwaukee, Wisconsin).

A few years earlier, the bands in this region had been captivated by the “twinkly” guitars of Cap’n Jazz, who may low-key be the most influential band in this whole scene once you’ve listened to enough fourth-wave acts. If you were to look up the term “math rock” in the dictionary, you’d likely find a picture of Mike Kinsella.

Who’s that, you ask? And what, exactly, is math rock? Well, if Ian MacKaye ran the first leg of the relay for emo, he handed the baton off to Kinsella for the second.

Though he is mostly lauded for his involvement in American Football, one of the cornerstone bands of emo’s second wave, Kinsella had gotten started a few years before that with Cap’n Jazz. Other members included Mike’s brother, Tim, and guitarist Davey Von Bohlen, who would rise to emo prominence a few years later with his own band, The Promise Ring.

All the Kinsella bands pioneered the “mathy” sound in emo, which, put simply, means they played with odd time signatures and complex rhythmic structures.

Closely related to progressive rock and pioneered by bands like King Crimson, math rock will also commonly feature long stretches of instrumental interludes — in emo specifically, they tend to take the form of high-note arpeggios. This is also the period in which we see the rise of one of emo’s hallmarks — interplay between loud and soft dynamics.

Go ahead and fire up “Never Meant” off American Football’s 1999 self-titled album, and you’ll see exactly what that all means. And keep that song handy for when we get to emo’s fourth wave, because — spoiler alert — that’s where it all really comes full-circle.

American Football’s 1999 record was released by Polyvinyl Record Co., an independent record label now based in Champaign, Illinois. It didn’t make a huge splash at the time of its release save for the college radio circuit, and the band broke up not long after. But since, it’s become a seminal emo album, with Rolling Stone ranking it No. 6 on its list of the 40 Greatest Emo Albums of All Time.

Then you have bands like Texas is the Reason, who are actually from New York, and Mineral, who are, ironically, from Texas.

Mineral especially pushed the Midwest sound in a darker, messier direction, featuring heavy bass riffs and an overall lo-fi quality. Over it all, Chris Simpson wails his confessional lyrics, describing everything important to a 22-year-old — friends, family, unrequited love, euphoria and broken hearts.

Madison, Wisconsin’s Rainer Maria, like Mineral, also combined twinkly guitars with mournful bass notes and wailing vocals. Speaking of their vocals, the band began its career with a male/female vocal dynamic between Caithlin De Marrais, who also played bass, and Kaia Fischer, who also played guitar and synths.

Despite the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement and the notable, if not ideal, representation of women in punk, emo — early on and even, to a degree, today — didn’t make much room for women early on. Rainer Maria, in this respect, is a crucial forebear.

Of course, there had to be a poppier sound germinating at this time, as well, or the leap from emo’s second wave to its commercially explosive third would feel impossible.

Look no further than Jimmy Eat World, whose 1999 sophomore album, Clarity, may just be emo’s scripture. Tom Mullen considers it his favorite emo record, and I tend to agree.

Despite being released by Capitol Records, Clarity didn’t enjoy much commercial success, outside, bizarrely, the song “Lucky Denver Mint” — one of the album’s poppiest — which earned frequent radio play and then was featured in the film Never Been Kissed.

Capitol clearly felt it was on to something with Jimmy Eat World’s sound, but ultimately, the album failed to catch on in a time where Britney Spears and Sixpence None the Richer topped the charts. Capitol dropped the band.

Two years later, Jimmy Eat World would release Bleed American — whose single “The Middle” would rise to No. 5 on the Billboard Top 100 and play constantly on MTV. Emo had reached the mainstream.

But we’re not there yet.

For those in the know, can you imagine Jimmy Eat World without the vocal stylings of lead singer Jim Adkins? Well, Clarity actually marks his first full album providing those services, after Tom Linton did so for their debut, Static Prevails, in 1996.

And while Clarity is an impressive feat of instrumentation — mixing in no less than two drum sets, acoustic and electric lead and rhythm guitars, bass, keyboards, bells and strings — it’s Adkins’ voice that sticks with you long after any given listen.

But maybe the most important reason Clarity is so crucial to the genre? Lyrics. The record gifted us some of emo’s best love songs, with lines such as

"Turn and smile niceSmile, say goodnightSay goodnight in a breathSimple discourse breaks you clean in half (“Crush”)"

and

"Can you still feel the butterflies?Can you still hear the last goodnight? (“For Me This Is Heaven”)"

Emo is sad? Says who? Much of the time, emo is downright euphoric.

Take, for instance, The Promise Ring’s masterpiece, Nothing Feels Good — the record that lent its title to the one Andy Greenwald chose for his emo bible, Nothing Feels Good: Teenagers, Punk Rock and Emo. It’s a record that might challenge Clarity for the status of emo’s heaviest hitter — and much of it is so upbeat it’s downright poppy.

“Red & Blue Jeans,” the album’s standout track, flips the title of the record on its head. In it, Davey Von Bohlen repeats only one line, over and over: “Nothing feels good like you in red and blue jeans / And your white and night things.” All this set to one of the happiest little upbeats you’ll ever hear.

Of course, in the title track, “Nothing Feels Good,” Von Bohlen isn’t feeling quite so elated, singing, “And I don’t know if anything at all / will be all right.”

But therein lies emo’s central, essential tension. It’s not sad, all the time. It’s not happy, all the time. It’s a confused jumble of emotions — inexplicable, unacceptable, undeniable feelings. It’s catharsis and it’s celebration.

And, increasingly, it was becoming angrier.

Around the turn of the millennium, Midwest emo would give way to a new hub: New York and New Jersey. During the second wave, this would be where Texas Is the Reason, Glassjaw and Quicksand all got their start. It was also around this time that the emo pendulum swung back toward its hardcore roots.

The most important point to take away from the second wave of emo is that there is no one “sound,” which is what makes it almost impossible to definitively claim some bands do or do not belong to the genre.

While the Midwest was giving us mathy, twinkly rock, the Northeast was specializing in dissonant melodies and heavy distortion, with a healthy dose of screaming built in.

Both those overarching styles were about to become the most extreme versions of themselves in the third wave.

***

The Third Wave: 2000-2008

Representative bands: Saves the Day, Further Seems Forever, Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, Thursday, Bayside, Brand New, Silverstein, The Juliana Theory, The Anniversary, Straylight Run, Something Corporate, The Early November, The Spill Canvas, Armor for Sleep, The Starting Line, The Movielife, Northstar, Acceptance, Touché Amoré, Lemuria

Key subgenres: Post-hardcore, emo pop, screamo, pop-punk, metalcore

If you thought Ian MacKaye hated the term emo, welcome to the third wave — by and far emo’s most maligned.

Is that the fault of the artists? No — in 99 percent of cases, anyway. The early aughts marked the beginning of record labels starting to figure out that there was a ~new sound~ emerging — and that a lot of money could be made off it. Like Amy Poehler’s classic Mean Girls line — “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom!” — the music establishment wanted to be part of the conversation, without necessarily understanding how it had started.

There are those real genre purists who consider hardly any of these bands emo. They would argue these bands fall into other, related genres — pop-punk, metalcore, emo pop. We’ll get to that.

Then there are those who came of age at a certain time — and came into the genre at a certain time — who, at the mention of the word emo, would think of these bands first — bands such as Taking Back Sunday and Saves the Day and The Starting Line.

The truth is that the third wave of emo is the most disparate, a collection of Venn diagrams of musical genres.

Do Thursday and Bayside perhaps more appropriately belong in a box labeled “post-hardcore?” Sure.

Did New Found Glory, after their first record Nothing Gold Can Stay (1999), take a hard left turn into pop-punk? Yes.

And what about the heavier post-hardcore, almost metalcore, style and its associated acts during this time — The Used, Silverstein, Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Senses Fail, Chiodos, Finch, Underoath? Where do they fit in?

Well, a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. To truly trace the history of emo from its roots until today, one would be remiss not to mention the bands that also cross over into other musical genres.

It would be insane to insist that all hip hop has to sound the same in order qualify as hip hop, right? The same is true for emo. The first and third waves feel like siblings, with their post-hardcore roots — as do the second and fourth waves, which are overwhelmingly softer in their sound. But as with all musical genres, there are outliers.

The main theme of emo’s third wave was commercial success. Warped Tour got its start in the late ’90s and skyrocketed into the mainstream in the early 2000s. Huge record labels like Capitol, Island and Interscope began snapping up bands left and right, which had something of a sanitizing, homogenizing effect on the sound.

And that meant a lot of bands that toured together, appeared on record label samplers together and even got mislabeled on Napster and Limewire together were, for better or worse, bound together forever in a moment in time.

***

If, generally speaking, we can pinpoint Washington, D.C., as the epicenter of emo’s first wave and the Midwest as its second, in the third wave we move to the Tri-state area.

The kids listening to bands in basements in the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey at the turn of the millennium had the world at their fingertips. Within two or three years, the area saw Brand New, Bayside, Saves the Day, Glassjaw, Taking Back Sunday, Senses Fail, Thursday and The Movielife release their first full-length albums.

“A lot of stuff coming out was directly affected by the local scene in New Jersey, the local screamo basement bands,” says Senses Fail’s Buddy Nielsen. “And also by bands like Orchid, I Have Dreams, Page 99. I thought screaming erratically and in songs that don’t necessarily have heaviness was really cool.”

Nielsen lists his band’s influences as the punk ethos of Bad Religion; the more poppy, driving sound of Saves the Day; the emotional weight of Thursday, and a touch of Midwest emo, as well, in the Get Up Kids — then, “throw it all in the blender.” The same can be said for many of the bands that rose to popularity during this era.

With so much money being thrown around, the genre’s popularity began to reach a steady boil. But did the lure of fat record deals, a sea of merchandise being sold in Hot Topic and the promise of music videos being played on repeat on MTV cause these bands on the cusp to alter their sound?

“We were always very adamant about not chasing that sound, not chasing a certain level of success.”—Anthony Raneri, Bayside

“We were always very adamant about not chasing that sound, not chasing a certain level of success,” Bayside frontman Anthony Raneri told me.

“All we were ever chasing was longevity, really. That was the only thing we were trying to accomplish.”

Bayside has certainly done that. After a string of EPs, the band’s debut full-length record was released on Victory Records in 2004. They just released their seventh studio album in 2016, through Hopeless Records, and are currently working on new music.

While Bayside’s sound has evolved over that stretch of time, it’s clear that Raneri — who draws his inspiration not only from early post-hardcore bands like Saves the Day and The Get Up Kids but also pop and showtunes — has always known what Bayside sounds like, and what it doesn’t.

Unlike a lot of the bands from this era, Bayside isn’t reluctant to play their old songs at shows.

“We certainly benefited from it,” Raneri says about the commercial emo explosion, which saw bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance resonate with a large mainstream audience. Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar We’re Goin’ Down” would land at No. 4 on the 2004 Billboard Top 100.

“I can’t imagine that Saves the Day, when they were making Through Being Cool, had the budgets for records that we were getting” laughs Raneri, highlighting the massive shift that had occurred in just five years.

Nielsen was influenced by many of the same bands as Raneri. “So many bands formed in the Tri-state area that created this music scene that we were all sort of reacting to,” Nielsen told me.

And though there’s a perception, now, that many of the bands who were popular during emo’s heyday strongly disliked the term, that’s not the case for Raneri or Nielsen.

“It never too much bothered me,” says Nielsen. “I liked the bands that came before me that were called emo. I thought it was cool to be associated with it.”

“It’s changed over the years, really,” says Raneri. “For me, words mean very little and names mean even less. It’s just easier to call the genre something so you can quickly refer to it. But the definition of that genre has changed drastically. It’s almost come full-circle, to when [fourth-wave bands] are closer now to what we called emo in the ’90s.”

While the first and second waves of emo were far more homogenous in their sound, the third wave encompassed bands that sounded, in some cases, almost nothing alike. For every Bayside, there was a Dashboard Confessional. For every Senses Fail, a Straylight Run.

Emo’s third wave is also challenging to evaluate from a lyrical standpoint.

On one hand, the bands who were active at this time certainly took the nod from Picciotto in penning diary-like lyrics that resonated with their listeners.

Sometimes those lyrics were about fraught friendships, such as in Taking Back Sunday’s “There’s No ‘I’ In Team” from their debut 2002 album Tell All Your Friends:

"And I’ve got a twenty-dollar billThat says you’re up late night startingFist fights vs. fences in your backyardWearing your black eye like a badge of honorSoakin’ in sympathyFrom friends who never loved youNearly half as much as me"

Sometimes — frequently — they’re about breakups, seen here in Bayside’s “Just Enough to Love You” off their first album, Sirens and Condolences:

"Nothing is realAnd I want you to knowThat I’m not alrightWhen you tear open my chestI’ll try not to flinchWon’t make promisesYou taught me that"

On the other hand, a lot of the songs that emerged during this time felt performative — lyrics were written not from personal experience but instead as an imitation of other peoples’ experiences. The genre was growing, and it was imitating itself. As labels threw money at bands — ones not included in this piece — and told them to emulate this sound, what came out the other end was, ultimately, not emo.

A development of emo’s third wave, and one that caught on like wildfire, was the growing violence of the lyrics — much of it aimed towards women.

Suddenly, it wasn’t enough for lyricists — most of whom were male teenagers or twentysomethings — to pine for the women who broke their hearts. Bands began producing graphic lyrics often fantasizing about those girls getting just what they deserved. And though many of the lyrics during this time reflected a more general sense of violent imagery, including mention of self-harm, there was no shortage of songs about harming women.

Bayside and Senses Fail were two such bands that, early on, waded into this pool.

On Bayside’s 2005 self-titled album, Raneri sings on the track “Dear Tragedy,” “I’m begging you to leave here now / I’m begging you to die painfully.”

In one of Senses Fail’s most popular songs to this day, 2003’s “One Eight Seven,” Nielsen screams, “You ripped my heart out, you tore my eyes out / Now you’re gonna pay / I’ll stab you one time / I’ll eat your heart out, so you feel my pain.”

With the gift of nearly 20 years of hindsight, both singers recognize that period in time for its darkness. And while Raneri and Nielsen maintain that 18-year-olds with broken hearts don’t really have the emotional maturity to process the damage their lyrics were doing on a greater scale, to their credit, neither made excuses for those lyrics.

Instead, they each tried to help me suss out exactly what caused such a massive wave of misogyny in the music.

“One of the main tenets of emo is that we write about our feelings; that’s what separates us from other genres.”—Anthony Raneri

“We were young and feeding off each other,” says Nielsen. “And there was no pushback to it. I think what happened it is reached such a large audience that it became mainstream. If things had stayed underground, it would have went away.”

Raneri offered a similar view. “I do think it was, in a way, egging itself on, for sure,” he says. “I think we, as members of this community, look inward at the community and say, ‘Why do people in these bands write these lyrics?’ One of the main tenets of emo is that we write about our feelings; that’s what separates us from other genres. And so I think the question is, why are those our feelings? Why is that our inspiration? And that’s a much larger question than ‘Why do kids in emo bands write lyrics about girls that broke their hearts?'”

“It’s not an emo band thing,” adds Raneri. “It’s a man thing. It’s a toxic masculinity thing.”

Nielsen knows all about toxic masculinity. In 2014, he came out, revealing that he doesn’t identify as straight or gay or bi but rather somewhere “closer to the middle” of the spectrum. He’s also become more and more open about his views on Twitter, where he discusses everything from LGBTQ rights to feminism to progressive politics — sometimes drawing the ire of Senses Fail’s “fans.”

“There’s a real problem with white male fragility,” Nielsen says about the scene. “It’s obvious in the violence towards women, which has always been there. This is not exclusively a white male problem; it’s a larger male problem.”

Nielsen adds that many of the people in the scene who have taken issue with his views are men who suffer from anxiety and depression, who “don’t feel supported in their view of the world” and who “have a lot of privilege, but feel like they don’t.”

These are the same fans who first encountered Senses Fail in the early 2000s, maybe at Warped Tour, and found something of a mirror in Nielsen, who admits that he was troubled, self-destructive and lost in his younger days.

These fans, often white men from the suburbs, found an outlet for their anger — at women, at their parents, at the world — in these shows, in these lyrics. It led them to develop a sense of ownership over the music. And when Nielsen’s lyrics became more weighty (Senses Fail’s 2018 record, If There Is Light, It Will Find You, is the first for which he penned the entire book) or he started speaking his mind, the fans felt abandoned. And angry.

“They think that I’ve purposefully attacked them, and that I’m not respecting who they are by having a political opinion because I’m supposed to somehow exist solely for their emotional support and well-being,” says Nielsen. “Some people have this ownership of me, and if I don’t fit into their political sphere, I better watch out, because I’m going to lose fans.”

That’s another crucial tenet of emo music. As powerful and soul-baring as it is for the musicians to create, so too is it for the fans who turn out to scream along to the lyrics at shows. Just as the bands of the mid-2000s were influencing one another in their song content, so too were their fans picking up on and internalizing these messages.

That becomes complicated for women who grew up loving this music. Sometimes, that relationship took an extremely dark turn, as we saw when Brand New frontman Jesse Lacey released a statement concerning allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct with minors during Brand New’s biggest years — thanks to the platform and the power that his position afforded him.

But even when the interplay between male-fronted emo bands and female fans wasn’t that grotesque, it did lasting damage.

“Some of the musicians I listened to when I was younger weren’t afraid to victim blame women, tear them down, even talk about taking advantage of them.”—Zoe Reynolds, Kississippi

“I wanted to be the fun, gentle, lightly-treading woman that men sing sweetly about,” says Zoe Reynolds, who fronts the contemporary band Kississippi and grew up during the height of the third wave.

“Some of the musicians I listened to when I was younger weren’t afraid to victim blame women, tear them down, even talk about taking advantage of them. It definitely created a lot of internalized misogyny. I don’t think I even understood a lot of what was being said, but took those words as truth and felt sorry for these men who turned themselves into the protagonists.

“Every woman deals with internalized misogyny,” she adds. “Girl-hate developed into competition when I was a teenager; then I realized I was being an asshole. And so were bands like Brand New.”

To add insult to injury, there were so few women fronting or even playing in emo bands in the third wave, that it was truly hard, as a woman, to feel like this was a genre of music that was for you. One huge woman of influence to note is Michelle DaRosa (neé Nolan), who fronted Straylight Run along with her brother, John Nolan, and provided backup lyrics on early Taking Back Sunday songs.

Early on, DaRosa appeared on MTV’s TRL to provide backup vocals for Coheed and Cambria’s performance of “The Suffering.” After she left Straylight Run (and her brother went on to reunite with Taking Back Sunday), she formed the band Destry, along with Straylight Run bassist Shaun Cooper and The Format guitarist Sam Means.

For women listening to emo in the early- and mid-2000s, DaRosa’s voice was an important one. By the fourth wave, thankfully, more and more women would go on to play in or front commercially successful emo bands — and, surprise, the lyrics became much less problematic.

So emo, which began as a turn away from politics, away from the community, and toward the self, is finding that in 2018 it must reconcile all those themes. They inform one another. And while the third-wave bands still active today, now deep into their catalogues, are picking up that thread, the fourth-wave bands started off entirely within that landscape. We’ll get to them soon.

“Bands that are gonna be afraid to speak out are going to be remembered as bands that really weren’t there in a time of need for their fans,” Nielsen says. “Everything’s political. You don’t really get to not be political. If you are, you’re actively trying to not be political. I don’t know if when the smoke clears those bands will be held accountable for not saying anything. I guess it depends on the band.”

***

Emo reached critical mass in the mid-2000s. Dashboard Confessional, whose mainstream crossover is rivaled by perhaps no other band in this genre, saw three records go gold between 2001 and 2006: The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most; A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar; and Dusk and Summer. The latter peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 U.S. chart.

But one year later in 2007, Dashboard’s fifth studio album, The Shade of Poison Trees, peaked at No. 18, failing to reach gold. In fact, Dashboard would never see an album go gold again, despite a move to major label Interscope in 2009. The bubble was bursting.

Of course, that’s not to say Dashboard Confessional is “bad” because they were popular– their three gold-certified studio albums and platinum live album suggest they can’t be.

But the problem lies in trying to press notions of quality onto the music in the first place. Pop music isn’t categorically “good” so much as it’s categorically, well, “popular.”

Emo’s popularity surged in the mid-2000s before cresting and retreating back to the underground. Record labels’ and fans’ interest waned. For years, there were very few active bands in the scene — certainly not enough to necessitate pinpointing a whole new wave of emo.

But around 2010, that began to change.

***

The Fourth Wave: 2008-present

Representative bands: Modern Baseball, Basement, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, A Great Big Pile of Leaves, Pianos Become the Teeth, empire! empire! (i was a lonely estate), Touché Amoré, Into It. Over It., Oso Oso, The Hotelier, Marietta, Tigers Jaw, Bicycle Inn, Foxing, Sorority Noise, Have Mercy, Balance And Composure, Joyce Manor, Tiny Moving Parts, Kississippi, Gleemer, Basement, Marietta, Turnover, Mom Jeans., Origami Angel, Just Friends, Pool Kids, Petal, You Blew It!, Deer Leap

Key subgenres: Midwest emo, emo pop, pop, shoegaze/dream pop, indie rock, math rock

You know the swell of joy you feel in your chest when you discover two of your friends are also friends with each other? That was something like the feeling I had when I saw that Anthony Raneri’s Spotify playlist included tracks from Tigers Jaw and The Front Bottoms — two of fourth-wave emo’s most successful acts.

It’s easy when you’re writing of the moment, in the moment, to fall into the temptation of closing the loop.

And that’s so easy to do with emo, as the fourth wave connects back so perfectly to the first, forming a perfect life cycle — a genre of music that formed underground, rose to mainstream prominence, flew too close to the sun and went back underground.

The truth is, however, that emo’s fourth wave is simply its most recent, not its final. This genre still has a lot to offer.

The fourth wave of emo is commonly referred to in music journalism as the “emo revival.” But is something really being actively revived here? Or did people just stop paying attention to emo?

“People definitely stopped paying attention to it,” says Mullen. When he started Washed Up Emo in 2007, there wasn’t much mention online of a lot of those bands from the ’90s or ’80s — the first and early second-wave bands who started it all.

Aside from a smattering of sites and message boards, “in the grand scheme of mass media, no one was remembering it,” Mullen says. “There was always a kid in the basement playing a record, there was always a kid talking about these bands.” But we weren’t seeing it reflected in the music — until the fourth wave kicked off in earnest.

Like Raneri said, the genre has come full-circle. Bands started to look back at other bands — perhaps not intentionally — and started getting back to the roots of what independent punk is.

“The pop era was an anomaly,” says Mullen, who, during it, worked in marketing at labels Equal Vision Records and Vagrant Records. In emo’s most popular years, says Mullen, “The president of the label was asking me to come into his office to tell me what bands I was going to see. It was a feeding frenzy of that sound.”

But slowly, in the last decade, music — much of it released on independent record labels or played in small clubs — that sounded a lot like emo’s second wave began to emerge. Mathy, complex rock a la American Football, The Promise Ring and Cap’n Jazz found its contemporaries in bands such as The Hotelier and Modern Baseball, which released their debut studio albums in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

“The thing about the early part of that fourth wave is that there were a bunch of friends, all in the same scene, and they all sounded different but it all worked,” says Mullen.

“You want to see a noodly band like Tiny Moving Parts. You want to see an introspective band like Foxing. And then empire! empire!, who worship at the altar of Mineral and those kind of bands. It all kind of works. When it got homogenized and mass marketed all the tours and bands started sounding the same.”

Though the sound of emo’s fourth wave is very much tied to the Midwest stylings of the second, currently there are pockets of emo all around the country. And, like every other wave that came before, they all boast a slightly different sound.

New England can claim The Hotelier (Worcester, Massachusetts), The World Is a Beautiful Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Die (Willimantic, Connecticut), Bicycle Inn (Attleboro, Massachusetts), Deer Leep (New Hampshire) and Sorority Noise (Hartford, Connecticut), among others.

The Mid-Atlantic region has become an important hub of the emo revival. Pennsylvania can lay claim to Modern Baseball, Kississippi, Petal, Marietta and Tigers Jaw — many of whom, incidentally, prominently feature female or non-binary vocalists. Pianos Become the Teeth and Have Mercy both call nearby Baltimore, Maryland, home.

And, of course, the Midwest is still a prominent producer of fourth-wave emo bands. You’ve got empire! empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) (Michigan), Into It. Over It. (Chicago, Illinois), Tiny Moving Parts (Benson, Minnesota). Even Mike Kinsella, he of Illinois’ Cap’n Jazz and American Football, is fronting a solo project out of Chicago, called Owen.

These bands have, for the most part, gone back underground — you won’t find many are signed to major record labels. Sometimes they produce and distribute their own music; sometimes they belong to an ethical, indie label.

Sometimes, they’re making a flyer and playing for a handful of people in a basement.

“When I first heard a band in ’09 sound like something that wasn’t a pop-punk sound, I thought, how did this survive?” says Mullen. “I attribute it to the Internet and the honest sound of what it actually was back in the day.”

In Mullen’s view, the bands of today are referencing those genre forbears — though not always intentionally. “Some of the bands I interview have never heard of the stuff I tell them they sound like,” he says — such as Modern Baseball guitarist/vocalist Jake Ewald, who appeared on the Washed Up Emo podcast in September 2016. “I don’t think he was into those old-school bands, but it was inside of him,” Mullen explains.

Modern Baseball is a fascinating study in the progression of emo for two reasons. The first is Ewald’s self-admitted unawareness of the ’90s emo bands to which Modern Baseball’s sound is so similar.

Emo is a genre that loves to categorize itself — which is why it’s ironic some of the bands have resisted being categorized. Its lyrics are full of nods and references. There’s Something Corporate’s “Konstantine”:

"It’s to Jimmy Eat World and those nights in my carWhen the first star you see many not be a star"

Or the king of insider emo references, Jimmy Eat World’s “A Praise Chorus,” which includes guest vocals by The Promise Ring’s Davey van Bohlen referencing two of his own band’s songs:

"Our house in the middle of the street(Crimson and clover, over and over)Why did we ever meetStart in my rock and roll fantasy(Crimson and clover, over and over)Don’t don’t don’t let’s start(Crimson and clover, over and over)Why did we ever partKick start my rock and roll heart"

But the members of Modern Baseball aren’t referencing genre forebears in their music. They’re coming at it from an entirely different direction — and, in so doing, still ending up in a similar place.

Modern Baseball got their start the same way a lot of emo bands did — playing house parties and basements (the same ones, incidentally, as The Menzingers, in and around Philadelphia). After a series of EPs in the early 2010s, their second and third full-length albums were released in 2014 and 2016 by Run For Cover Records, a Boston-based independent label.

The second reason it’s ironic that Modern Baseball doesn’t necessarily pinpoint ’90s emo as an inspiration for their own sound is they, themselves, are in many ways the architects of fourth-wave emo. Nearly every current emo band I spoke to for this project counts Modern Baseball as a chief inspiration, even though they only got their start in 2011.

The members of Bicycle Inn, who are working on releasing a new EP, hold their influence dear.

“The bands we hold in the highest regard as inspiration are Modern Baseball — that’s our favorite band — [The] Hotelier is up there, The Front Bottoms, Have Mercy,” says Declan Moloney, Bicycle Inn bassist.

“We’re currently putting out a new EP and it generally reflects more personally what we want to sound like: [The] Hotelier and Have Mercy, in my case I love Touché Amoré, Fugazi, that harder rock sound balanced with American Football and Modern Baseball,” says Noah Aguiar, guitarist/vocalist.

But some of emo’s fourth-wave acts are yearning for that ’90s sound, trying, in some way, if not to recreate it then to reinvent it. If the members are of a certain age, it’s the music they grew up with — the music that set the standard for everything else.

“I find it harder to get attached to new music as I get older because I’m not in those formative years anymore,” says Keith Galvin, guitarist and vocalist for Deer Leap.

Galvin shared that he recently read an article in The New York Times titled “The Songs That Bind,” which explains why we tend to gravitate to the music we loved growing up and can’t quite connect to “new” music.

“But the emo revival stuff has that same quality of the music I loved when I was younger, and that might be the appeal for people who might were too young and missed the last wave or who are older now and connect with bands from this new wave.”

Galvin is certainly onto something here. Much of the reason emo’s heartbeat slowed to the point that it needed to be revived at all is that the main fanbase, as it grew up out of those crucial formative years, stopped consuming new music.

The fans played their Tell All Your Friends vinyl or CD into the ground, and maybe they showed up at the 10-year anniversary tour in 2012. But many might be surprised to find that Taking Back Sunday — the band that provided the soundtrack to their most formative years — is still putting out new music today.

This is something Senses Fail’s Nielsen contemplates often. In fact, it’s a running theme on the band’s 2018 album If There Is Light, It Will Find You. In the song “Is It Gonna Be the Year?” Nielsen sings, “I never thought that it would last this long / And neither did the others, that’s why they’re all gone.”

But, to Galvin’s point, a lot of the music coming out in emo’s fourth wave is appealing to those fans, many of whom are now in their thirties and early forties. If it’s the Midwest stylings of American Football and The Appleseed Cast, look no further than Deer Leap.

“Sometimes we joke about people discovering that we are just these impostors trying to be Appleseed and American Football and that we will be called out for it,” Galvin says.

As for the bands that belong to the fourth wave, it’s an obviously complicated relationship between embracing the return to that DIY ethos and wanting to, you know, make enough money to survive.

“It’s absolutely been a challenge for us with support,” says Moloney.

“If we can live off it, that’s awesome; if we can have fun with it, that’s even better.”—Declan Moloney, Bicycle Inn

“We have had our fair share of shows where we show up and the booking agent takes off with all the money, and we kind of thought that’s what happened,” Moloney continues.

“Getting paid wasn’t even on the radar for us until very recently when we started selling our own merchandise. We were playing our music for the love of our music. We got a check from Spotify the other day for like, $40, for the past two years. It’s not even possible nowadays without being huge.”

Moloney and Aguiar told me they don’t think they’ve ever been picturing themselves looking for a label.

“We make the music that we want to make,” Moloney says. “If we can live off it, that’s awesome; if we can have fun with it, that’s even better. As of right now, we’re making music, we’re having a good time. If somebody wants to sign us, that’s a bonus. Our goals are small, for the sense of connecting with people and that people are impacted by our music.”

The members of Deer Leap share that same ethos. “None of us have expectations that we’re going to ‘make money’ on the band, but if we’re able to fund recordings and small tours with the money we do make, that’s enough for us,” they said.

The money they earn from venues while touring or from merch sales and donations is immediately exhausted when they record an album — and then the cycle resets. The guys hold down “real” jobs — Galvin and guitarist/vocalist Matt Hunter, for instance, are both teachers.

More than anything, the bands I spoke to who are active now stressed that the most important thing about their music is authenticity.

Says Moloney, “Relatability is the most appealing thing in the emo genre. Modern Baseball can write a song using ‘I,’ and I can listen to it and realize I am the ‘I’ in that song.”

“We don’t want to produce fake feeling,” adds Aguiar.

It sounds like an oxymoron. But while emo is rooted in authentic emotion above all else, and has found its way back there in the fourth wave, there have been stretches that have seen the money and exposure taint the whole thing. That’s what, for better or worse, the third wave has come to symbolize for many.

It’s no surprise, then, that the fourth wave has been a course correction in many ways. The scene is DIY once again — it’s what Raneri calls “ethical.”

“For our version of a local scene, it’s mostly DIY shows,” explains Aguiar. “We had a show with another band in their basement and 75, 80 kids showed up through word of mouth and social media posting from the bands alone.

“Our main understanding of the emo revival scene has been this DIY family aspect, and people tell friends about bands that they just happened to stumble upon. We went to Pennsylvania and there were 40 kids in a basement because they had heard us on Spotify.”

“We don’t want to produce fake feeling.”—Noah Aguiar, Bicycle Inn

There are active bands in the emo revival who sound nothing alike, as they stretch and challenge the meaning of the term some three decades after it was created.

That’s due, in part, to the fact that unlike at emo’s peak, there are no longer a handful of enormous record labels snapping up artists and filtering their sound through a particular channel.

Though much fourth-wave emo sounds like second-wave emo, there are elements of all the predecessors here — hardcore, Midwest emo, screamo, and emo pop.

There are even further divisions present now, some of which have names sure to bring about a chuckle: “twinkledaddy” bands (see: The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die) and “sparklepunk.” The twinkledaddy sound is heavily influenced by math rock a la Cap’n Jazz, while sparklepunk (closely related to “party emo”) draws on indie rock, pop punk, even dream pop.

For his part, however, Mom Jeans.’ Eric Butler can do without the “sparklepunk” label. “Sparklepunk is a word that I dislike for a lot of reasons, because it’s not a real word,” says Butler.

How about party emo?

Well, now we’re on to something.

“Part of the reason we wanted to do the band and what our local scene kind of felt like there were all these people who didn’t feel like their lives were at their best but they could all come together and enjoy each other,” says Butler. “I guess party emo encapsulates that? Music that at its core is probably a little troubling and a little dark, but you still have to get through your day and have a little fun, you know?”

Butler acknowledges that some may use the term in a derogatory way — to suggest that bands that sound like Mom Jeans. aren’t “real” emo — but that doesn’t really bother him much.

I comment that, to me, party emo signifies emo that you can put on in the background at a house party that people, regardless of their tastes and preferences, will generally enjoy.

In many ways, that touches the heart of the scene’s origins — which was always kids coming together in a basement, enjoying the music and one another in a cathartic way.

When he would hang out with friends, Butler wanted to listen to Foxing, Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, Marietta, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. “And none of my friends wanted to listen to those bands…except the other guys in Mom Jeans.,” he says.

It’s the same “how they got started” story for so, so many bands in this scene — making music as a tribute to the music they love.

As they always have been, however, these terms, while distinct, are still Russian nesting dolls inside the word “emo.” And in 2018, some 40 years after is emergence, bands are overwhelmingly cool with the term.

“It’s funny, because when I think back to my first interactions with that word and that word being used to describe music, it was very much a derogatory term,” says Butler.

“But to me, bands like Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor, Marietta, they didn’t seem like ‘rock’ bands…that didn’t seem to do it justice. To me personally, I just connected lyrically and musically with those bands on a whole ‘nother level. It just seemed so real and vulnerable…so that’s what emo started to mean to me.”

“I’m coming to terms with being labeled as an emo artist, recognizing that it’s not about a sound or an image,” says Kississippi’s Zoe Reynolds. “It revolves around shared experience, identity, and vulnerability. It’s a really powerful community that’s constantly growing and changing for the better.”

Says Galvin of Deer Leap, “To someone outside of the know, emo is something completely different than what we know it as. I think we all embrace it openly and wear it proudly.”

Some people’s definition of emo, however, is whatever they heard on the radio or on MTV in the early 2000s — and that is harming the artists active in the genre today. There are Emo Nights (and the official Emo Nite) held monthly in cities all around the United States — nay, the world — that are, in many ways, 2000s party nights.

Often, people post on social media about “living their high school self’s best life” at Emo Night, where they sing and scream and dance to bands that they don’t often think about anymore, even though many of those artists are still putting out new records.

Not to mention, of course, the scores of emo revival bands currently playing at small venues in the very same cities as Emo Nights, where the support of even a $10 cover can make a difference in their career.

“Emo is not about one night or you reliving your high school years,” says Mullen — who himself DJs events like this, where he insists on playing the entire catalogue. “Emo Night is one night. How about you support the scene? These Emo Nights can thank MTV and Top 40 radio for their lines. Emo Nights should be a community thing. I couldn’t bring myself onto a stage and not play the whole history.”

***

Though the genre is nowhere near as mainstream as it was 15 years ago, it’s extremely robust, thanks to platforms such as Spotify and Audiotree live that allow access and exposure, not to mention touring and getting the chance to open for the right band. (When they were starting out, The Front Bottoms opened for Raneri’s solo act.)

While that’s helping the genre thrive, however, it’s not always conducive to the musicians earning a living.

“Nowadays, with everything being on the Internet and being so accessible, any Joe Schmoe with $20 can get his music on the Internet, which is incredible for the genre but simultaneously horrible for the artist,” says Aguiar.

“I think a lot of these record labels and promoters, the ones that produce the bands we like and the ones we resemble, are looking for the acts that really stand out. It’s turned into a competition of who’s the best version of this kind of band, and who has worked a little harder to get there.”

Speaking of working hard to get there, one hallmark of emo’s fourth wave is that it features more female musicians than any other wave. Especially after the widespread misogyny of emo’s third wave, the genre has often excluded women.

Reynolds grew up wanting to be a pop star, and while Kississippi’s first two EPs are rooted in emo, her full-length studio debut, Sunset Blush, is a mix of emo, emo pop and indie rock.

Most recently, Kississippi toured with Have Mercy, Gleemer and Super American, and the crowd — at least the one I observed at Subterranean in Chicago in summer 2018 — was delighted by Reynolds. She’s also been catching the attention of others in the know in this genre, who celebrate her success. Given the ecosystem of emo’s third wave, it seemed like maybe we’d never get to this point.

“[In the third wave], with the way bands were talking and how big they got, they were feeling that they were on top of the world and could do anything,” says Mullen. “The #MeToo movement has been fantastic, and having people say this is wrong and will not be tolerated. The bands of the revival were really good about that, and talking about their feelings. It’s nice to see this particular scene take that approach and be more cognizant.”

Today, bands such as Kississippi, Tiger’s Jaw, Pity Sex, We Are The In Crowd, Kittyhawk, Petal, Pool Kids, worlds greatest dad, and Carb on Carb are either entirely female or female-fronted — or don’t conform to the gender binary at all.

That means the scene is more accessible than ever for non-white men, who can have their voices included.

“With new technology, it’s possible for literally anyone to make music, and that’s a blessing and a half,” says Reynolds.

“You can do whatever you want however you want with no boundaries whatsoever. There’s more avenues and alleyways for people to discover music that they might not have had the opportunity to without the tools we have today,” she says, citing sources such as Facebook groups, live sessions like Audiotree and Little Elephant, independently run labels, blogs, as well as Youtube, Twitter and Instagram.

These mediums, says Reynolds, give listeners “constant opportunities” to be introduced to new art and media that “otherwise would have been pushed under the rug by those big labels, media outlets, and so on.”

She adds, “Now anyone can make their art visible in one way or another. And all of these things are constantly growing, and those tiny bands are, too. You can make a career off of the Internet and all of these outlets as a smaller artist without being a ‘rockstar.’ We’re lucky; music should be accessible for everyone, and it is now.”

Of course, the road to progress is filled with potholes. Even as Reynolds finds herself supporting larger artists — most often white men — on tours, she, and all women in this scene, will still have to worry about the idea that they’re being put on tours, not for the quality of their music, but simply because they’re women.

“That in itself is harmful and invalidating to artists who aren’t white dudes,” says Reynolds. “They’re making it about their image instead of sincerely respecting something that we’ve put our hearts into.” 

This issue is especially important to a close friend of Reynolds’, Mom Jeans.’ Butler, who doesn’t identify as male, but as gender non-binary.

“But obviously I reap a lot of male privilege throughout the industry,” Butler says. “My identification doesn’t really change anything as far as how I’m seen outwardly and how I’m treated.”

However, Butler stresses, there is room in emo for non-men and for people of color. “But obviously, not enough space has been made at all. To say that music made by non-men isn’t marketable is f*****g stupid.”

One of Mom Jeans.’ goals for their upcoming tour was to be the only band on their upcoming tour that at least outwardly presents as all white men.

Indeed, this shift in the power centers of music — from the studios and the labels back to the artists — is even ushering in, believe it or not, emo’s fifth wave.

As much as you can trace the waves of emo by sound, you can also pinpoint distinct methods of production. Indeed, that’s what we’ve been doing here for some 10,000 words as we’ve charted emo’s highs and lows on the charts and the role of record labels in those spikes.

And what will mark the fifth wave of emo will be the ultimate DIY scene — one in which bands completely write off labels and producers altogether. The sound may not, on the surface, be that different from the fourth wave. But in both ethos and in production value, these young bands are once again reinventing the wheel.

“The next generation of bands, they’re here already,” says Butler — noting that the recent Pool Kids record, Music to Practice Safe Sex to, was “sick.”

“They’re spurning the traditional production routine and process that 90 percent of bands feel like they have to go through,” says Butler. “When Mom Jeans. records a record, we do everything on pro tools in a studio. But there are kids out there right now who are deadass recording full-length albums on iPhones.”

That DIY flavor is widespread in 2018, which saw director Steven Soderbergh film an entire feature-length film, Unsane, on an iPhone 7. With all the technology at our fingertips today, why should artists have to make compromises when they can control their sound, control their production, book their own tours and sell their own merch? They may not ever get rich, but that’s rarely the goal.

Again, one has to avoid the temptation to close the loop on emo by connecting the fourth — fifth! — wave back to the first. If emo has taught us anything over the last four decades, it’s that it’s sticking around for good. It will keep reinventing itself, but at its heart will always be introspective people making music to share their feelings with the world.

Not, then, to close the loop, but to make it even smaller, consider the band Origami Angel, out of Washington, D.C. It feels fitting to end with a mention of them, as they exist on the cusp of emo’s fourth and fifth waves as a two-piece set hailing from the same city that produced emo 40 years ago. With their stripped-down sound and DIY ethos, they’re carrying the torch.

***

Still unsure about what exactly emo is or isn’t? Consult the “emo council” via IsThisBandEmo.com, Mullen’s brainchild. I pressed him to reveal how many members are on the council (many, from friends to bands to industry people) and to address whether the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek — and it is. Unfortunately, not everyone realizes that.

“‘Is This Band Emo’ is a thing I had always thought about,” Mullen says, noting he had been frustrated seeing TV coverage and articles misusing the word and further confusing listeners.

He got the idea to start the site, and then thought, How funny would it be if we had a council that you had to tweet at?

It was a joke, originally, but he slowly realized people were believing it. “I never wanted that,” he says. “It’s tongue-in-cheek; it’s serious but not serious at the same time.”

The site is, in some ways, always learning from itself; sometimes, users will search bands that aren’t in the database, which prompts the council to evaluate them for inclusion.

“I could see all the analytics of what people were putting in, and, people were putting in, like, Coldplay,” Mullen says, laughing. “If there’s a pop culture moment, people go in and type those bands in. Does it help to make the word less dirty? Probably not.”

Is This Band Emo, in many ways, ties together so many of the threads we’ve explored here — this sense of ownership people have over the genre, whether that exhibits itself in people yelling at Mullen when a band isn’t considered emo to Senses Fail “fans” attacking Nielsen for including politics in his songs and performances.

But while the whole idea of a snarky website that attempts to catalogue emo might sound pessimistic, Mullen insists he’s not a curmudgeon.

“I’m eternally optimistic about the independent scene and I just want it to cultivate bands,” he says.

“The revival was a reminder to me that there are still kids in basements, thank god.”

Ultimately, emo is right back where it started.

Footnotes

*Greenwald, Andy (2003). Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo. New York City, New York, U.S.: St. Martin’s Griffin (p. 11).

**–(p. 13).