If you ask enough fans when the “emo revival” started, chances are you’ll hear two different answers. Some people might tell you it began in the early 2020s. They’ll mention various bands’ reunions, or the return of Warped Tour, or neon-soaked festivals like When We Were Young, or emo’s influence on modern pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish. But others will think way further back than that. They’ll tell you about the basement shows that stretched throughout the 2010s—about bands like Algernon Cadwallader, Title Fight, and Modern Baseball, who kept this scene alive even after the major label feeding frenzy of the 2000s lost its appetite.
For that latter group of fans, including former BrooklynVegan editor Andrew Sacher, who now runs the excellent Substack Unhappy Place, there’s a poetic irony to the way mainstream culture has once again co-opted the “emo revival” label. After all, isn’t that exactly what happened to emo itself back in the early aughts?
Sacher gets into all of this in his book Emo Revival: Community, DIY, And Rebirth In Post-Hardcore And Emo. Out Sept. 8 via CLASH Books and available for preorder now, it’s an engrossing inside look at how emo rediscovered its soul by returning to its underground roots.
Sacher is a legend among emo fans for a reason; he’s been following this movement for more than 15 years, as evidenced by the impressive collection of musicians who make guest appearances in (and even blurbed) the book. His passion shines through both within its pages and in conversation. Even if you don’t care much about emo music, he tells The Fringe, it’s still one of the most consequential movements in rock music for the last 20 years, and its rebirth has been inspiring to witness. “It was like the DIY ethos of ’80s hardcore, with the accessibility of the internet and early social media,” he says, “and it became too big to ignore just because so many people believed in it so much.”
Read on to learn more about Sacher’s book, the emo revival, and how to support independent music journalism at a time when it’s desperately needed.
Emo Revival cover and headshot, courtesy of Andrew Sacher.
People love to argue about what “emo” is and what it isn't, so let’s start off with a rage-baity question: What is emo, actually? How do you personally define it?
This has and always will be impossible to answer. There are so many different versions of emo, and emo crosses over with so many other different genres. Some post-hardcore bands are emo, some aren’t. Some pop punk bands are emo, some aren’t. There are so many common traits of emo, whether it’s the noodly guitars of second wave emo, the dramatic arpeggios of third wave emo, or the vulnerable lyrics, but there’s really no single musical trait that you need to have in order to be an emo band. So the sort of non-answer I like to give is that you know it when you hear it. There’s this sort of over-the-top catharsis to emo that’s hard to perfectly describe but, if you listen to emo, you can probably picture it. Music that has that thing is emo.
A running theme of this book is how often emo has been mocked, misunderstood, or, often, both. Why do you think this genre tends to be so maligned?
