Is emo music getting better?

Interlude

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

I’ll start off by admitting this piece may not be for everyone. It’s different than my usual fare, super niche, and possibly only anecdotally true! So feel free to skip if you have no interest in emo music 😊.

First, a little background gleaned from a combination of my own memory and the book Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 by Chris Payne.

What we call emo music today transcends musical genre (thanks in large part to the diversity of the third wave), but it’s often associated with pop-punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, metalcore, and other alternative artists who write “emotional” lyrics. I will not be a purist and define what that means, so that definition remains broad in my mind. But because of its historic connection with hardcore punk music, it’s often associated with punk and its many derivatives.

Emo music began in the mid-1980s DC hardcore punk scene. Bands like Embrace and Rites of Spring began experimenting with more personal and vulnerable lyrics (as opposed to the often aggressive and “fuck authority” lyrical content of early punk). Though lasting only a couple of years and limited to the DC area, this is typically understood as emo’s “first wave.”

Emo’s “second wave” of the mid-1990s (also called “Midwest emo”) had a typically lighter/poppier/more complex sound. Bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, The Promise Ring, American Football, and The Get Up Kids embody the sound associated with this wave (although bands like Lifetime and At the Drive-In retain the hardcore sound, becoming pioneers in what become melodic hardcore and post-hardcore respectively—more melodic and creative expressions of hardcore punk).

Third wave emo is the emo that blew up in the early-mid 2000s. It’s the emo you’ve heard of (if you’ve heard of it at all!) Payne pinpoints its beginnings to 1999 with the release of Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool, but some think that’s too early. Regardless, it’s the wave of Fall out Boy, Taking Back Sunday, Paramore, Panic! At the Disco, and My Chemical Romance; the “screamo” (or post-hardcore) sound of Senses Fail, Underoath, Chiodos, and The Used; the acoustic sound of Dashboard Confessional and Secondhand Serenade; and even the super heavy and chaotic sound of Norma Jean. It’s appearances on SNL, late night shows, MTV, and mainstream radio. Emo purists (which I find are mostly second wave fans) may not consider all these bands emo, since they tend to have narrower definitions and deprecate the success of the third wave artists. But that’s not my concern. Kind of like my belief that a Christian is anyone who identifies as one, an emo band is any band that has a historic connection to this scene!

Fourth wave emo (sometimes referred to as the “emo revival”) acts as a continuation of the third wave from the late 2000s through the mid-2010s. I’m not super familiar with this wave, but apparently it marked a move away from the popular screamo sound of the third wave’s mainstream success back towards a lighter Midwest sound (i.e. Modern Baseball). It was also popular for dance-pop/rock acts (i.e. Metro Station, Cobra Starship, 3OH!3) and introduced emo rap, building on the third wave’s diversification of genre.¹

While today’s emo, fifth wave emo, sees a continuation of the Midwest sound (Mom Jeans, Saturdays at Your Place, Carly Cosgrove)², it also includes lots of bands moving back towards third wave’s pop-punk and post-hardcore styles (i.e. Hot Mulligan, Action/Adventure, Magnolia Park, Knuckle Puck)³. But here’s where it seems different (and better): Instead of exaggerated and overdramatic (and sometimes misogynistic?) androcentric perspectives on heartbreak⁴:

“The truth is you could slit my throat. And with my one last gasping breath I'd apologize for bleeding on your shirt.”⁵

“Cut my wrists and black my eyes, so I can fall asleep tonight, or die. Because you kill me.”⁶

“My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me. So won't you kill me, so I die happy? My heart is yours to fill or burst, to break or bury. Or wear as jewelry, whichever you prefer.”⁷

“Excuse me while I fall apart. Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart. Let me take the wheel and I'll crash this car. Do you have to make this so hard?”⁸

fifth wave emo lyrics are about body dysmorphia:

“I can't hide enough. Under a bright light you'd find every crooked line I've got. All they taught I read as shameful. How my nature's fatal. Now, I can't stand when I'm being touched. Only damage, hoping this next shot hits. Maybe then I'll forget what they've done.”⁹

grieving a grandmother’s dementia:

“Didn't think that I would see your memories fade. How your eyes don't light up when you see my face. Would you remember if I never left? I should've stayed.”¹⁰

and racism:

“Black lives only matter for a moment. You only say it if it’s profit or promotion. You only post just to make you look devoted. But I can see through you and your bullshit.”¹¹

Along with the fact that Gen Z is more likely to attend therapy, this change in lyrical content can be ascribed to the fact that these bands are less (sometimes much less!) white. Action/Adventure is made up of all members of color. New pop-punk band, The Paradox, is made up of all Black members. Magnolia Park is majority people of color and Black fronted.

In Action/Adventure’s music video for their song Barricades where they sing

Would you listen if we looked any different?
'Cause these are all the things that we can't change

Would you listen if we all looked the same? (If we all looked the same?)
'Cause it's getting so much harder to pass through all these barricades

the band members hold up signs that read: “You don’t look the way you sound,” “You’re not Black enough,” “Let me guess…rappers???,” “I’m surprised you guys were that good,” and “You sound sooo white.”¹²

On the podcast OurSpace with Matt Vettese, Brompton Jackson of Action/Adventure said that after posting the Barricades video to TikTok, not only did the “elevator pitch for who we are as a band and what we stand for” viral video skyrocket their career, but they got so much positive feedback from fans of color who wish they had a band like them to listen to when were in high school. His response:

“Dude me too, that’s why were doing it … People did not look like us in 2006, 2007, 2008 … If you were to look at the statistics it is a predominately Caucasian genre. We get it … We don’t want to alienate the bands of white dudes or anything … But it is about growing the space in general to make it so that people of color, and queer people, and women feel more included and feel safer in the scene because you feel safest and most included when you’re surrounded by your peers … We don’t need to replace anything, we can just make it bigger and better.”¹³

I know these "waves” seem kind of silly. They’re just made up after the fact to help explain the genre’s trajectory. And clearly there are exceptions everywhere, so I’m not even sure it makes sense dividing it up like this.¹⁴ But the waves do, at least, point to progression. Over time, emo has embraced more genric(?)¹⁵, lyrical, and racial diversity. Which is why despite the third wave’s connection to the formative years of my youth,¹⁶ I’m liking the message and sound of the fifth wave even better.

I hope you noticed something missing up until this point. Where are the women?

Paramore was the only major band from the third wave that was female fronted. And while some more obscure/experimental bands had female members and vocalists (i.e. Circle Takes the Square), singers of more poppy female fronted bands, like The Hush Sound, were often compared Hayley Williams (despite a different sound!), as if the scene could only accommodate one female vocalist. And before one argues this is because there weren’t enough women interested in this type of music, by the mid 2000s women and girls made up the majority of this scene’s concertgoers. And in an online conversation several years ago for Crack Magazine, Phoebe Bridgers told Hayley Williams of Paramore that she broke up with her “screamo” boyfriend around 2006-2007 because he said “chicks shouldn’t sing in bands like that.”¹⁷ So misogyny clearly played a large role. And I can’t say I was immune to that thinking. 😬

But bands like Tonight Alive, Hot Milk, and Pool Kids¹⁸ are popular female fronted bands of these newer waves. And they’re all amazing and I hope to see even more gender diversity in the sixth wave…

I’ll never follow this scene the way I did when I was in high school and college. That’s just the nature of adulting. But this new wave has me interested again!

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1. Third wave act Gym Class Heroes combined pop-punk and hip hop, but was an anomaly at the time.

2. Added 9/2025 to show my increasing knowledge of the fifth wave. 😜

3. 9/2025 update: Also check out 408, Real Friends, State Champs, The Story So Far, and Four Year Strong. Some might technically be fourth wave, but they’re new to me!

4. I don’t mean to belittle songs about heartbreak (I am, after all, also a Swifty!). And as I wrote here, plenty of third wave emo songs are about things other than heartbreak. But that’s the stereotype.

5. Taking Back Sunday—You’re So Last Summer

6. Hawthorne Heights—Ohio is for Lovers

7. Dashboard Confessional—Hands Down

8. Matchbook Romance—Playing for Keeps

9. Hot Mulligan—John “the Rock” Cena, Can You Smell What the Undertaker

10. Hot Mulligan—Smahccked My Head Awf

11. Magnolia Park—Don't Be Racist

12.

13.

14. And not to mention all the genre and subgenre names! 🙄 (I didn’t even reference easycore!)

15. Google AI says: “The word ‘genric’ is being proposed as a new word, tentatively defined as something pertaining to or about genres. It's being monitored for evidence of usage, suggesting it's not yet a standard word.” Well here I am using it, Google!

16. Here’s a playlist of my favorite deep—but not too deep—cuts (can you tell I grew up in NJ? 😆):

17. https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_iD28PIRey/

18. Had to add Pool Kids after a reader recommended them in the comments section of this piece 😊.