If you were to run into me today on campus, you wouldn’t think me to be someone who had an “emo phase.” I wear blue Nike Dunk Lows, my closet is filled with muted neutral colors, and I even watch The Bachelor if I’m back to my dorm in time for 8 p.m. However, there is a past version of myself who, indeed, donned Hot Topic t-shirts, plastic wristbands, and black chokers.
What remains of this era is my love of emo music; emo music is generally a combination of punk rock, indie rock, and alternative rock, with a diverse array of sounds. As a style, emo is characterized as angsty, sensitive, and dissonant. Emo music is generally angry, sad, nostalgic, or a combination of the three, aiming to express complex emotions in a vulnerable, unique way.
There are various recent offshoots of emo music, some of which include screamo (Pierce the Veil, Bring Me the Horizon, Sleeping with Sirens), emo pop-punk (All Time Low, the All-American Rejects, Avril Levigne, Green Day), and emo rap (Juice WRLD, Lil Peep, Lil Uzi Vert, XXXTentacion), but the emo movement as a whole began to gain traction in the mid-1980s (Rites of Spring, Embrace).
It picked up speed in the 1990s (blink-182, Green Day, Jimmy Eat World), and saw its climax from 2000-2010. The generally accepted champion of this 2000-2010 era is My Chemical Romance, founded in 2001 by lead singer Gerard Way; other major successes of this era include Paramore, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At The Disco (granted, Panic! At The Disco’s only true emo album is A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, which came out in 2005). After 2010, the emo era generally declined, with the exception of various underground bands across the country.
The bands of my emo phase, which lasted from 2016-2018, included Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, Twenty One Pilots, Paramore, All Time Low, and My Chemical Romance. I have *too many* memories of this period of my life, whether it be listening to Panic! At The Disco’s then-new album, Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! with friends and obsessing over Brendon Urie’s vocals in “This is Gospel,” or piecing together when the next Twenty One Pilots album was going to be coming out, or drawing the Twenty One Pilots logo on ourselves during class because we thought we were *so angsty and cool.*
Although many aspects of this time I today find highly embarrassing, emo music still brings me back to childhood, to jumping on my friend’s bed to MCR (My Chemical Romance), to being young and stupid and uncaring of how ridiculous we may have looked to others. There’s a certain sense of freedom and nostalgia in these memories, and I think that’s the whole point of the emo genre. There’s nothing more wholesome than two veteran emos talking about their favorite bands, how crazy they used to be, and how much fun they had.
Here are some of my favorite emo songs that have survived the various evolutions in my taste over the past 6 years, feel free to check them out!
1. “All I Wanted” and “The Only Exception” by Paramore
2. “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” and “Thnks fr th Mmrs” by Fall Out Boy
3. “The Calendar,” and “Nearly Witches (Ever Since We Met…)” by Panic! At The Disco
4. “Trees,” and “Fairly Local” by Twenty One Pilots
5. “The World is Ugly,” “Teenagers,” “I Don’t Love You,” “Famous Last Words,” and “Disenchanted” by My Chemical Romance
Works Cited: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/emo-music-guide