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 bled

Tried to hide the heart from the head

And I said I bled

In the arms of a girl I’d barely met (“For Want Of”) and And from inside

Outside can just fall apart

And you wonder

Just 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 from

My secret’s come undone

My heart revealed my cause

I’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 nice

Smile, say goodnight

Say goodnight in a breath

Simple 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. My daughter while listening to some songs I'm working on – "Daddy, why don't you sound happy?". My 4 year old just discovered Emo — Anthony Raneri (@AnthonyRaneri) January 11, 2018 “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 bill

That says you’re up late night starting

Fist fights vs. fences in your backyard

Wearing your black eye like a badge of honor

Soakin’ in sympathy

From friends who never loved you

Nearly 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 real

And I want you to know

That I’m not alright

When you tear open my chest

I’ll try not to flinch

Won’t make promises

You 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.” Forceful, bullying and sexually aggressive behavior. What's the point of being in a band if you stand for nothing? — Senses Fail (@SensesFail) July 28, 2015 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. ***