The heart-on-sleeve indie rockers have said sorry for inadvertently helping to spawn a generation of miserable, eyeliner-wearing bands with not a song between them

Finally, someone has apologised for helping invent emo. The Get Up Kids, the recently re-formed Missouri band that launched the soundtrack to 10 million eyeliner-wearing adolescences, have said that they are sorry.

"If this is the world we helped create," guitarist James Suptic said, after looking into the crowd at a reunion gig, "then I apologise."

The Get Up Kids were either second- or third-wave emo, depending on who you ask. What is certain is that they formed in 1995, released four albums, broke up in 2005 and reunited last year. And yet their earnest, heart-on-sleeve punk pop inspired much of the more theatrical late-noughties emo boom.

"There should be a How to Be a Pop-Punk Kid Starter Kit with bands like the Get Up Kids, so kids would know whose shoulders bands like us are standing on," Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz told Alternative Press in 2005. "Fall Out Boy would not be a band if it were not for the Get Up Kids."

"Honestly, I don't often think about the state of emo," Suptic told Drowned in Sound. "We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place. I could name maybe three bands we played with. It was just a sea of neon shirts to us ... the punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It's like glam rock now."

While acts like Fall Out Boy pay tribute to Get Up Kids, the feeling isn't mutual. "If a band gets huge and they say we inspired them – great," Suptic said. "The problem is most of them aren't very good. What does that say about us? I don't know. Maybe we sucked."