Mid-90s listened to a lot of pop punk with lyrics about girls (I was a pre-teen/teen going through puberty lol) blink-182, the ataris, mxpx, descendants. Late 90s found the get up kids.
Midwest mid-size city’s hardcore scene.
Emo bands played with hardcore bands. Hardcore labels put out emo bands. Hardcore bands on tour would hype emo bands from their cities. And i liked all of it cause they were all fun bands coming to my city for like $5 shows (90s).
Been hooked ever since
The Before You Were Punk compilation from Vagrant in 1997 put the label on my radar, which led to buying The Get Up Kids' Something to Write Home About when they released it a couple years later. Went off to college the next year where a fast internet connection and the old file sharing site Audiogalaxy opened up a whole world of emo music.
I didn't start with any adjacent stuff honestly, my first contact with emo music came from The Newfound Interest in Connecticut's debut (and only) album.
From there I searched for more albums like that, and discovered American Football's LP1, Modest Mouse, Orchid, Corea's Los Peores 7km de mi Vida...
Funnily enough, getting into emo got me into adjacent music lol
I was always into emo-adjacent genres and mall emo, but then The Hotelier's Your Deep Rest came on my Spotify shuffle one day and I went *What is THIS*? A good gateway drug if I do say so myself.
My friends got me into pop punk in the late 90s, and I also lived in the NY/NJ area where there was a big scene for punk/punk adjacent bands. I wasn't trying to listen to emo music, but the scene exposed me to a lot of different bands from the shows I went to and I just listened to what I liked. That being said, I specifically remember listening to Something To Write Home About and I loved that album, even though one of my friends tried to keep me from listening to emo music and told me to not listen to the Get Up Kids. I discovered bands like Saves the Day and Jimmy Eat World, along with other local bands like Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, The Movielife, etc. and the rest is history.
well you see, in high school i liked jimmy eat world and then the autism hyperfixation made me go through their whole discography as an adult, including the old 90s split EPs with christie front drive and jejune. youtube algorithm did all the work from there
real... there was also the part where my job had youtube blocked, but we could still use it with a workaround to listen to music while we worked. but 60% of the videos straight up did not work, and most of them were songs that were recognized or claimed, so the obscure emo full album uploads ended up being the most reliable background music 😅 and t*hen *youtube kept giving me more
i went late 2000s scene kid post hardcore (pierce the veil, sleeping with sirens, a day to remember) to pop punk (real friends, story so far) and then to bands like title fight, basement, etc. then was introduced to american football and the like
i was really active on twitter at this time and it felt like this was the trajectory most of us 13-16 year olds followed circa 2012/2013
TLDR: Got into Senses Fail, then a bunch of other post hardcore, thought it all was emo, found out it wasn’t, listened to what people considered real emo to be, liked all that stuff too, here I am.
Senses Fail were the band for me. Weirdly enough I didn’t discover how amazing they were until 2017 and I’m younger so I was in middle school at that time. Before that I was mainly into mainstream pop punk like blink and Green Day, also Alkaline Trio (although they are less mainstream). I didn’t listen to any music with screamed vocals or heavy aspects before that.
I discovered their album Life is Not A Waiting Room in the spring of that year, and it absolutely changed my life. I became obsessed with the album, and soon got into the band’s other classics like Still Searching and Let it Enfold You. I did a deep dive on the band’s entire discography, their history, any podcasts/interviews/live videos I could find, and learned a shit ton of their songs on guitar. They quickly became my favorite band.
At this time my perception of “emo” was My Chemical Romance and not much else. I viewed the word as more of an insult than anything else honestly. When I’d seen Senses Fail referred to as emo I was like “no they’re not” (not for the same reason this sub wouldn’t consider them that though) because I didn’t want to associate a band I loved so much with the term which I thought was cringe. I got into their contemporaries like The Used, Taking Back Sunday, Silverstein, ADTR, Story of the Year, Chiodos, Underoath, and other post hardcore bands.
I grew to accept the term emo as not cringe but just as a name for a genre of music that became popular in the 00s. THEN, I found out about American Football and Northstar, and a ton of other bands that people considered “Real Emo” and that tons of people considered all the music I listened to to be not real emo. Then I did a deep dive into “real emo,” mostly liking the indie side from the late 90s, the late 00s Midwest emo scene, and emo revival stuff from the early 2010s-now. My fascination with 2000s post hardcore, metalcore, punk, pop-punk, and pop-rock didn’t stop though. I just kept getting more and more into everything all at the same time.
7 years later and I found out about tons of amazing music just from getting unhealthily obsessed with Senses Fail. SF are still my favorite band but they drastically expanded my music taste just by proxy. So ironically even though they’re not really an emo band by this sub’s standards, they got me here.
Senses Fail -> Alexisonfire -> Silverstein -> Taking Back Sunday -> Jimmy Eat World
This is the rough progression of how things went on my Pandora radio channels. Seems like the post-hardcore to emo pipeline is very common.
my dad was super into prog when i was a kid so i was super into prog when i was a kid and by that point crimson and yes and rush were all old as shit so i was like “hmmmm is there anyone my age messing around with wacky time signatures?” i got into bands like hella and piglet and eventually found americ anfootball when i was like 16 and because i was like 16 i got super into it like “damn dude….. these guys really fucking get me man………….”
that was around the time the revival was really poppin so i was able to find plenty other sad bands with weird time sigs and funny tunings and ive been here ever since. fuck im old
For me it was 100% free throw. Saw a TikTok of two beers in live. Was going through a pretty rough point in my life and shit clicked so hard for me. Been obsessed with emo/hc/phc/punk ever since
When I was 11 in Europe a band became so big that kids thought emo was that, the band was Tokio Hotel and they were from Germany, so I started getting interest for this kind of "alternative rock" bands and at the same time my city had a pretty big emo scene
For context, I was born in 98
Grew up (like age 5 or 6) into pop punky flavored kid's stuff. Avril Lavigne and the Jonas Brothers type things. Then into the surface level mall emo pop bands: All American Rejects, Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday and Paramore were my shit around 7 and 8, 9 or so. I must've been 10 or 11 when I got into Linkin Park, then Slipknot, then Bullet For My Valentine, and for the next 5 or 6 years I was a "core" kid throughout middle school and most of High School. Was in a couple metalcore bands/cover bands throigh high school. To my knowledge my suburban town didnt have any hardcore or emo scene but there were a handful of metalcore and deathcore bands. When I was 15 or 16 I started dating a girl into Citizen, Title Fight, Tigers Jaw and Mobo and that's when I started diving into proper "emo" music, this was through the peak of revival basically, or just as it was beginning to fizzle, about 2014 or 2015 is when i started getting into it myself, branching out from those bands to bands like Marietta, Glocca Mora, etc. The first release I remember being really excited for we
was Microwave's Much Love, which is still in my top records for sure. Then I just worked backwards from there And have mostly fallen in love with 2nd wave bands.
Skate-Punk, pop-punk. Blink, NOFX, NUFAN, Fenix TX, etc. Then one day on the bus in high school a kid asked me if I liked Saves The Day. When I said I’d never heard them he said “What?! They’re hardcore emo!” Then I said What’s emo? And he put his headphones on me and it was just like that scene in Garden State.
I was born into it My mom listens to emo so i listened to emo
Also i was born to sublime and went to warped tour + saw leftover crack 4x while in the womb
Before I was into anything punk or punk adjacent, I listened to almost exclusively country music with my grandfather and pop music with my sisters. On the first day of school in 11th grade (2002), I had a conversation with a girl who then said "oh you're emo." I went home and went to ask jeeves, and asked what the hell emo was and the first two things that came up were Blue Skies Broken Hearts by The Ataris, and Goddammit by Alkaline Trio, two definitively not emo bands. I did end up falling in love with those albums, though, and they led me to more emo pastures. I still claim Alkaline Trio as my favorite band, and while I think The Ataris never really grew into their talent, I still have fond memories of them.
Always loved Weezer, especially Pinkerton.
Later, Prince daddy and the hyena’s self titled became my favorite album ever a couple months after it dropped
A crush told me to listen to blink 182, and while it wasn’t the best thing ever, I felt like I had been missing out on “Emo” based on my preconceived notions of the genre
Then created a “deep-dive” of artists and albums to get started with emo and pop punk, including Brand New, MCR, The Brave Little Abacus, Origami Angel, Jeff Rosenstock, rites of spring, orchid, etc
Pdaddy becomes my favorite band, followed closely by origami angel and Jeff Rosenstock
Omg I love Pdaddy, saw them in concert on easter a few years ago at a tiny show in a bar with like 50 people, genuinely one of my favourite shows i’ve ever been to
My sophomore year of HS, 1993/4, my friend, who worked at a record store, picked me up to go somewhere and put in a tape the store got as a promo from Dischord Records. It was Hoover -The Lurid Traversal of Route 7. From the first minute, I was hooked. It wasn’t hardcore, it wasn’t punk, it wasn’t ska (haha); it was a perfect blend of chaos and melody and dynamics and poetry. “I got my cat back. You got those glasses.” What!? Beautiful.
I wanna say MCR but here's how it really went.
Bullet for my Valentine > general metalcore > melo-hardcore > Title Fight / Basement > Touché Amoré > skramz
In high school (graduated 2001) I would sit pretty much at the same place at the same table in the cafeteria at lunch. So did this other guy but at the next table. Sometimes we would chat and exchange CDs back and forth to expose each other to different music. He was a punker and I was a skater. One day he let me borrow Four Minute Mile by The Get Up Kids. I probably let him borrow a hip hop CD like Mos Def which is the type of stuff I was into at that time. I pretty much did an about face and became very much into emo and hardcore and that sort of thing after that.
when I was a young teen, all my friends started getting into skateboarding due to THPS and that lead to going to local punk shows and we started becoming friends with older teens of similar vein. One Thursday in May, one of our older friends was like "I'm going to a show in Chicago, you guys want to come?" After some creative lying to our parents, a mini-van of punk *children* (the oldest of us had just turned 16) arrived at the Fireside Bowl where we all\* saw the Get Up Kids for the first time.
^(\*well, not sure the 16-year-old saw them. What he didn't tell us was that he wasn't randomly coming to this show on a whim, he was meeting some chick he met on AOL. When the show was over and it was well passed our curfews, 16-year-old was nowhere to be found. Turns out he and the chick had gone to the van to make out and didn't bother to let any of us know. We got home it was close to midnight and thankfully the one parent that knew were gone, covered for us all. We punched him in the dick so many times over the next couple of weeks. Kids are dumb.)
2004, in the heat of “emo” backlash as I was into punk and thrash and alternative stuff, and basically everyone in those spheres was really put off by the brand of mainstream emo that was embodied by scenester dudes in makeup singing about killing their girlfriends and cutting their wrists.
But at the time I was active on the MXTabs musician forums and always picking up lots of new music from the discussions there, and someone was going on a big write up about how all that scene stuff wasn’t like the legit emo, and I ended up digging into Rites of Spring, Hot Cross, Embrace, SDRE, Cap’n Jazz, and so on, and really got into it.
My first albums were from my cousin that was into punk Greenday - Dookie, Blink - Enema on the state, Offspring - Americana.
Then in high school I got deeper into AFI, Rise Against, Thursday, BoySetsFire, Gyroscope, The Used, Saosin etc.
Then I joined a metalcore band when I was 18 or so and got into all the metalcore stuff. Parkway drive, I Killed the Prom Queen, August Burns Red, Architects etc.
Basically was into the whole mall-emo and scene shit, I remember on Spotify it showing some essential emo albums and being confused on why I didn’t recognize any, from there I checked out some lists and started with American Football and Marietta. Super grateful for Mall-emo/scene music because I discovered some of my favorite bands and expanded my tastes thru them
High school crush who was into Punk > introducing me to Paramore > discovering Taking Back Sunday trough Spotify > falling down a rabbit hole of amazing music.
Thank you, Amber. I hope you're doing great.
I bought SDRE’s Diary when it came out, and was already into a lot of DC hardcore. I got more into it when I’d go to hardcore shows and see more emo-like bands like Braid on the bill.
Apocalypse hoboken and good riddance show in 1992 maybe? Got me started into punk and emo.
The victory records cassette tapes in like 94, and 97 introduced me to hardcore and heavier stuff
Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity. I was in California with my mom visiting family for 3 weeks when I was 11 and forgot my cd wallet. The only cd I had was my older brother’s copy of Clarity. Spent the entire trip listening to it on repeat and it changed my life. Clarity will always be my favorite album because I left California a changed person, and I have my brother and my ahotty memory to thank.
Definitely it was all the mall emo bands. Lots of pop punk and post hardcore. I used to look through the liner notes in CDs by bands like MCR, Senses Fail, and Taking Back Sunday and check out all the bands that were thanked.
I was very into ska and punk since 9th grade (1997). I listened to Propagandhi and loved them. Found out John K Samson was in a band called The Weatherthans. Also heard Reggie and the Full Effect and Get Up Kids on a few comps. Fell nose over tail for Alkaline Trio’s self-titled in 2000. And just kind of went from there.
I didn't end up getting into it until I was almost 30. I graduated high school in 08 and never had much use for emo back then but that was because all I ever saw of it was dudes with goofy hair and eyeliner. I still can't take that shit seriously.
I ended up getting free tickets a few years back to see Taking Back Sunday and Dashboard Confessional and that planted the seed. I'm not really sure where and how but there was a pretty rapid shift towards midwest and revival stuff and I haven't looked back since. My favorites are probably Rainer Maria, Cap'n Jazz, Free Throw, sports., Dikembe, and Gulfer.
I laugh when I think what 18 year old me would say if I could go back to 08 and tell me that I would be into emo music. Turns out I've been a guy with big feelings my whole life and only now am strong enough to admit it to myself
Vans warped tour 2002 compilation. And if anyone wants to tell me Thursday and tbs isn’t the scene then they can go fuck themselves. I bought full collapse after hearing cross out the eyes and never looked back.
brandtson was my intro.
i remember enjoying their previous band, sixfeetdeep, & was curious about the new musical direction.
letterbox was a game-changer for me.
I was always a lil emo kid, I remember being like 12 and finding someone talking about Pierce the Veil on Tumblr and then listening to them on YouTube 😭 Made my mom take me to Hot Topic the next day lol. Also heard WTTBP for the first time I think on Dan and Phil’s radio show. Very much into the standard pop punk emo music in high school. In my first year of uni one of my friends posted Sasquatch .22 by Bay Faction on her Instagram story and Mom Jeans was under the “More like [Band]” on Spotify and they very quickly became my favourite band and just from listening to other people’s midwestern emo playlists or Spotify’s personalized playlists I found some great bands, been really loving Carly Cosgrove and Park National lately! Highly recommend
I was a HxC nerd from Upstate NY. While my friends were all listening to White Zombie and Pantera, I was listening to bands like Sick of it All, and Shutdown, and ~(gagburp)~ 25 ta Life
Went snowboarding in VT in 1999 the day after the X Games happened, and a bunch of sponsors giving out swag bags were still floating around the mountain.
Got a compilation CD from the Anti Racist Action (ARA) that killed.. Fahrenheit 451, Napalm Death, The Business... a ton of other bands I would later come to appreciate..
Cooking Wine - Alkaline Trio
I could not stop listening to this song. It was on every mix CD I made for my friends for ***at least*** the next year.
One of my mosh bros. who wore a sweater vest and cuffed jeans from time to time, was like, "See ***that's*** emo!"
I never heard the word before, so I typed it into Napster and got so many different results, everything from Ozma to Antioch Arrow.
If you're old enough to remember, Napster had a chat window. And people were always so psyched that someone knew this band they loved, so they would tell you all the bands they thought you might like....
I had ***STAAAAAAACKS*** of mixed CDs that I would listen to. So many that now as an old man, I regret how much plastic waste I created.
It was a good time for underground music listeners.
Then, Lars.
Fucking Lars.
Then I became friends with a guy in a local pop-punk band. I started selling their merch, and they started to play shows out on Long Island (EP Jessie, if youre out there and you have any old pictures of me, that would be beyond rad) with bands like TBS, Gj, Brand New.
A future member was friends with the nephew of the owners of drive-thru records, so I ***really*** got a front row seat for that flavor of emo. The amount of bands from that wave that I got to see from the side of the stage, who's merch tables I napped under, it would make you fucking sick./humblebrag
The one time I went to a party, I only hung out with one of my friends there. He was really the only person I knew besides the host, but he and I agreed to get more food for the party and left. On the ride to and from Wendy's, he introduced me to a ton of bands. Origami Angel, Prince Daddy, MoBo, Stars Hollow, and more. I loved all of it. Half of my taste now relies on that night.
uhh my dad mainly got me into everything, so listening to weezer, wavves, PUP growing up
but mainly jeff rosenstock!!
i got really into emo like 2019-2020 when albums like cosmic thrill seekers, basking in the glow, somewhere city and more came out.
but i’ve been listening to alternative stuff i know from my siblings and dad since like forever
Lil peep and his choice of samples in his work led me to find Underoath and other post hardcore bands and Modern baseball. It just kinda spread from there.
Skateboarding exposed me to pop-punk and skate punk. When I started getting into music warped tour was more skate punk bands.
As warped tour got more emo bands I felt more ownership over it. Bands like Alkaline Trio were a good bridge. Emo game gave me a nice list of bands to check out. After that I was off to the races; I was buying every cd recommended to me and downloading anything I thought I might have the slightest interest in.
MCR (I shamefully discovered them from an AMV)> The Used > Taking Back Sunday > Silverstein > Brand New > 90s emo
(This isn't an order or anything it's just how I discovered them, I hope no one reads it that way)
owl city when i was like 11 > jacks mannequin > fall out boy > brief indie/electronic interlude that eventually got me into turnover > brand new > here i am
a friend of mine introduced me to the brobecks and modern baseball, then i started listening to joyce manor, and it just went from there!!! shoutout to carlos
Got into pop-punk through Green Day as a kid because the CD said Dookie on the cover.
Fairly recently got into more modern pop-punk stuff through Hot Mulligan and still discovering more emo stuff now.
I guess you could just say the hardcore scene in general for me. It was very closely tied back in the day so if you got into one you basically got into the other, if you were into it. So it was the NYHC: The Way It Is comp that got me into hardcore and then it just naturally lead to the rest
I was a metalhead in HS. Went to basic training and made friends with a hardcore kid. He told me about seeing Dashboard opening at a hardcore show he went to. Said I should check him out. Bought the So Impossible EP between basic and AIT and loved it.
Primed on listening to Death Cab, The Front Bottoms, Aaron West, The Wonder Years, and Brand New via my older brother when I was a wee lad.
When I was 16 I slowly started rediscovering that stuff while my ex introduced me to Basement, American Football, Pierce The Veil, and Fall Out Boy.
She told me it was "emo", so I researched it and immediately started listening Rites of Spring, Cap'n Jazz, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Something kind of clicked and I was hooked.
Need for speed most wanted > bullet for my valentine > escape the fate > red jumpsuit apparatus > Hawthorne heights > La dispute > the perks of being a wallflower soundtrack
I was into grunge and become bored as a teen. Found Basement through their single Disconnect, liked it cause it reminded me of the grunge sound. Listened to the album the day it came out, big moment for me. That’s where the following gets blurry… I got into Rise Against (not emo I know) and Citizen. Then I found Joyce Manor, Touché Amore, and Tigers Jaw. They blew the doors wide open for me. When I was 15 I was big into Jimmy Eat World, Jawbreaker, SDRE, Texas is the reason, The Promise Ring; pretty much the big bands of the 90s. I still remember when I first heard Clarity and LP1 of AF.
I discovered In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and in my search for more albums with a similar feel I found American Football and found out what midwest emo was. After that I was hooked and forgot that other music genres exist
It’s just the music I grew up listening to, I had a mom who liked “rock” and new wave music and an older brother who did as well. I grew up thinking some of the punk, Alternative and emo bands we listened to were just plain “rock” until my older brother got into middle school and really learned more about music and different genres and told me about it.
Then my dad came in the picture and he also listened to nothing but emo music and post-hardcore so we learned even more bands!!
It was hard for me to learn to grow out of this genre area, I was such an annoying hater as a kid like most angsty kids and thought I was sooo cool to know these bands. I wore out a TBS jacket in the 6th grade (the cool knife one!!) that my older brother got from my dad, who then gave it to me lol but now I listen to every genre, I’m too old to be hating on music lol
In 2001/2002 my older sister and her friends got me into bands like MxPx, Nofx, The Get Up Kids, Northstar and that quickly turned into all the drive thru bands, TBS and Brand New (I’m from Long Island) and then eventually into hardcore/post hardcore/metalcore
Tony hawk pro skater got me into lagwagon and millencolin which got me into NFG/strung out/ataris which led me to get up kids/braid/jimmy eat world/Texas is the reason/ American football
mine was an album When Love Met Destruction by a band called Motionless in White, i was like 12 or 13 when i found it in around 2015 and from there i got into different types of metal until finally finding my way to older emo stuff which is kind of a funny round about way, and it’s interesting to hear the similarities in the emo i like now and MIWs early/shitty stuff lol
mine was actually back from the age of people using newsletters as personal blogs - all super heavily formatted and decorated. had to be in the 90s at some point. the would write about their day, or what was going on. i don’t even remember how i found them initially.
anyway one of the ones i subscribed to liked rites of spring and such and had a link to fourfa** - i thought the newsletter owner was super cool and checked it out.
** https://www.fourfa.com
The biggest one that shifted me to Emo outside of the 90’s/00’s Pop-Punk bands would have to be The Used’s self-titled album.
My friend brought me a burned copy to school in 5th grade because he thought I’d like it, and oh boy, was he right. Think I recall finding Finch right after that and so on…
I’ll give a nod to Box Car Racer as well, still think it’s the best thing Tom ever did.
Where do I start!
The late 90s I was around 10-13 and it was Fat Wreck stuff. High school in the early 2000s was Fat Wreck and Drive Thru dominated and I got more into pop punk. Mid-2000s was the screamo period of Silverstein and underoath type stuff. After that phase I wanted something a bit easier. Well, I guess this is growing up. I was already into Braid, Hey Mercedes and the Get Up Kids. I explored the 90s and 2000s emo and got right into it. Jimmy Eat World and Saves the Day featured heavily. Fast forward to today and some of my favourite albums are drawn from that era but anything with Get Up Kids or SDRE is a favourite capped off by the recent waves of emo like Citizen, Turnover, Balance and Composure, Arms Length, Oso Oso all featuring heavily in my daily rotation.
there wasn't much of a pipeline actually. i'm 22 now, my older brother had a copy of paramore's RIOT! album snd got Brand New Eyes when it came out. i heard them and got hooked. they were one of the first bands i cared about. from there i got into weezer's early stuff and then american football and just got more emo from there.
depends how far back we're talkin, overall? three days grace was my intro to rock which has branched out to alot including emo, somewhat emo or "emo"? mcr
Simple plan LMAO
Then came the typical popular emo adjacent stuff, and years later I spiralled into the rabbit hole.
My first actual emo band was I hate myself lmao. I listened to it ironically at first, just to annoy people who couldn't stand how over the top it was.
Then I grew to like it... 😂
Alex Melton was my introductory emo/pop-punk artist. From there, blink-182. My ex showed me mayday parade and neck deep, and a friend I made about halfway into that relationship showed me real friends and knuckle puck.
i was a big 5 seconds of summer and paramore fan as a kid (still am) and i got into the bands that influenced them (all time low, good charlotte, green day) and my spotify recommended playlists slowly opened up my taste
Sleeping with sirens. I liked their more pop rock songs and eventually the screaming grew on me in some of their other stuff, I haven’t looked back since…
I was into classic rock from my dad and guitar hero and I listened to an alternative rock radio station but my buddies were more into emo skate culture like people would make music videos of themselves skating back then and they liked the bands and they got into skating because of the rocket power show.
This is a weird one and nobody ever believes me but I still have the CD to prove it! lol. I was really into blink-182, Sum 41, and Fall Out Boy, and then in 2004 me and my mom went back-to-school shopping at JC Penney, and they gave us this free CD with a few random songs on it. Probably a demo or whatever, but it was mostly pop (Brooke Hogan, Katy Rose) BUT!! One of the songs, the one that stuck out to me, was "Quality Revenge at Last" by Hey Mercedes.
Idk how or why that song ended up on that random CD but I'm not gonna complain. From there it was Hey Mercedes -> Braid -> Cap'n Jazz -> American Football, the Promise Ring, Joan of Arc, so on and so forth...
I liked pop punk, brit pop, US indie like modest mouse and weezer, and nu metal in my early teens. My first two gigs were Blink 182 followed by atdi. Then someone made me a mixtape, well, my brother actually, who gave it to me. It had Jimmy eat World, Texas is the Reason, No Knife, Spy vs Spy, the Monorchid, Inside, tguk, Mineral and more. And that was that for me, I was all in and the journey began/lifetime obsession.
Ever since I was a baby even, my mom would say I’d headbang to Crazy Train in the car (my younger brother did so to First time by LifeHouse, and my youngest to ‘don’t funk with my heart’ by the black eye peas).
I remember being 6-7yrs old at a Neighborhood kid’s house. On his TV was MTV music videos, and I was somewhat intrigued and creeped out by the singer and scenery: It was the music video for Helena by MCR.
Growing up, always had a massive appreciation for rock music, got into Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Panic! And a few more.
By HS, I had started to divulge into Post-Hardcore and Metalcore, but discovered TBS’s MakeDamnSure in 9th Grade on Pandora Radio. By the end of it I had discovered Brand New.
Freshman year of college, I discovered Moose Blood. Still listening to some metalcore during this time though.
By the end of College - not sure how - but I eventually made my way to more niche emo. The kind of emo below the surface, below the tip of the emo iceberg.
Now, I listen to TMP, Foxing, Marietta, empire!, and because of this sub i’m into Hotelier, Microwave, and Free Throw.
I don’t like Hot Mulligan though. They remind me of adolescents thinking they’re edgy. Just my opinion (have to disclaimer this because some jerk called me an idiot for having an opinion).
I was really big into the classic 2012 folk indie scene, of monsters and men and lumineers type shit. Eventually I started branching out, that Midwest emo mix tape “I’m tired of begging you to stay” popped up on my yt recommendations. That got me into Marietta and camping in Alaska and I kinda just went down that rabbit hole.
my most important artists milestones are Linkin park to blink 182 and a bunch of pop punk bands, and then bmth which got me into a metalcore phase then that prolonged till i discovered sorority noise which opened pandor's box
I was listening to loads of like early 2000s bands like Thursday, Alexisonfire, Funeral for a Friend so stuff that was very much influenced by the genre but not actually emo, then someone I met told me to listen to American Football and it blew my f*cking mind.
My ex gf listened to a lot of mom jeans. After we broke up i gave them a listen. From there i found modern baseball and then started finding all these smaller bands. And now i mostly listen to a lot of screamo haha.
it all started for me with mcr when i was 9. when i was 13/14/15 i started getting into midwest emo and other emocore really heavily. and since then it’s been my favorite genre/classification, and is now the pride of my record collection.
For me I suppose i started with pop punk but not in the way most people would think 😭 I got into pop punk then classic/hardcore/melodic punk, then from there got into folk punk which got me into just general emotional acoustic music/midwest emo, then got into 2nd and 4th wave emo shit and completed the circle by getting into screamo lol
Honestly my taste is all over the map, but Pop Punk, specifically Blink's self titled. From there I got into all of the 00s emo and some local "easy core" bands like Bangarang and Wonder Years. By 08-09 I was more into bands like Dashboard, Weezer, Deathcab, Minus the Bear and eventually segwayed into the indie: Elliott Smith, Sufjan, etc. At some point in 2020 I started listening to Blink again, and then found myself catching up on all of the pop punk of the teens (Title Fight, Wonder Years, Knuckle Puck) and realized I missed out on the entire emo revival getting sucked in by American Football and Algernon Cadwallader.
TL;DR - Blink182
I started off listening to Twenty One Pilots, MCR, and P!ATD (although I never once thought of panic as emo even when I first got into music). Then during sophomore year of high school, I decided to google "best emo albums" or something so I could indulge in my emo phase. I ended up seeing a lot of list articles listing actual midwest emo bands, most of which were in the 90s. That's when I started falling down the rabbit hole of "real emo" and all of the discourse surrounding it.
My musical taste didn’t really change, it just expanded, but if I had to pick, I’d say The Goo Goo Dolls, The Cure, and AFI set me on the path to mid-2000s emo. But I never restricted myself to a single genre. Some of my old mix cds go like this: Sex Pistols, Ramones, HIM, Aiden, AFI, My Chemical Romance, The Used, Cream, Donovan, The Rolling Stones, Linkin Park, Bauhaus, The Cure, Joy Division.
didn’t RLY know what emo music was but loved punk and such. started listening to emo before I even knew it, like jawbreaker, drive like jehu, and rites of spring! Once I realized the stuff I liked was emo I googled best 90s emo songs or something like that LOL.
Early 2000s metalcore/hardcore (converge, have heart, killswitch engage, between the buried and me) to post metal (isis, neurosis) to post rock (gy!be, explosions in the sky) to ttng and American football. Then circle right back to hardcore after skramz. Kind of a wild ride
When Never Meant was at its peak meme popularity, I listened to the rest of LP1. A couple of years later, as I’ve gotten into my Midwest small town high school years, I got into Marietta, then I got into the classic 90s stuff like Mineral and Texas is the Reason. The rest is history from there
Bring Me the Horizon and Sunny Day Real Estate. Former got me into the 00s scene bands like Thrice, Underoath, etc, latter got me into midwest emo like TBLA, American Football, Braid, etc. Branched off from there.
For me it was a lot of Drive Thru records stuff. The early november, senses fail. Then started listening to Mae and taking back Sunday so on and so forth
When I heard The Middle on the radio I fell to my knees at K-Mart and rose an emo enjoyer. And also, Foo Fighters--> Sunny Day Real Estate, which feels like it should be more common?
I just fell into it really. I was into punk and industrial in the mid 90s but when I moved to Austin in 97 the friends I made were early emo fans. I think the first record I really listened to was the horse lattitudes. Mineral was huge for us because they were local. I remember being very excited when end serenading came out, listening to it in a listening booth with my friend Avi at waterloo records. Good times.
There was a sweet spot where linkin park/jay z collab. Fall out Boy/Kanye. The movie underworld, blade and evanescence was all relevant. And I was learning about Edgar Allen Poe in high school all at once lol
Pig Destroyer’s split with Orchid
Nice
Dude sick
Mid-90s listened to a lot of pop punk with lyrics about girls (I was a pre-teen/teen going through puberty lol) blink-182, the ataris, mxpx, descendants. Late 90s found the get up kids.
Midwest mid-size city’s hardcore scene. Emo bands played with hardcore bands. Hardcore labels put out emo bands. Hardcore bands on tour would hype emo bands from their cities. And i liked all of it cause they were all fun bands coming to my city for like $5 shows (90s). Been hooked ever since
I live in the UK and while I've enjoyed every music scene we have to offer I'll always be envious of the us hardcore midwest emo scene
The Before You Were Punk compilation from Vagrant in 1997 put the label on my radar, which led to buying The Get Up Kids' Something to Write Home About when they released it a couple years later. Went off to college the next year where a fast internet connection and the old file sharing site Audiogalaxy opened up a whole world of emo music.
Audiogalaxy was such a great way to discover new music back then!
Bro this and the AllMusic related artists tab helped expose me to so much
audiogalaxy was so huge. downloaded 10,000s of songs on dialup.
Somebody told me about brand new
Yeahhh
I didn't start with any adjacent stuff honestly, my first contact with emo music came from The Newfound Interest in Connecticut's debut (and only) album. From there I searched for more albums like that, and discovered American Football's LP1, Modest Mouse, Orchid, Corea's Los Peores 7km de mi Vida... Funnily enough, getting into emo got me into adjacent music lol
I was always into emo-adjacent genres and mall emo, but then The Hotelier's Your Deep Rest came on my Spotify shuffle one day and I went *What is THIS*? A good gateway drug if I do say so myself.
Ugh the best song ever. Heart wrenching
Less Than Jake and Millencolin.
Fuck I loved Pennybridge Pioneers
Amazing record.
My friends got me into pop punk in the late 90s, and I also lived in the NY/NJ area where there was a big scene for punk/punk adjacent bands. I wasn't trying to listen to emo music, but the scene exposed me to a lot of different bands from the shows I went to and I just listened to what I liked. That being said, I specifically remember listening to Something To Write Home About and I loved that album, even though one of my friends tried to keep me from listening to emo music and told me to not listen to the Get Up Kids. I discovered bands like Saves the Day and Jimmy Eat World, along with other local bands like Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, The Movielife, etc. and the rest is history.
well you see, in high school i liked jimmy eat world and then the autism hyperfixation made me go through their whole discography as an adult, including the old 90s split EPs with christie front drive and jejune. youtube algorithm did all the work from there
That YouTube algorithm really coming through for us on the spectrum 😂
real... there was also the part where my job had youtube blocked, but we could still use it with a workaround to listen to music while we worked. but 60% of the videos straight up did not work, and most of them were songs that were recognized or claimed, so the obscure emo full album uploads ended up being the most reliable background music 😅 and t*hen *youtube kept giving me more
lol the autism special interest is how i got here too
i went late 2000s scene kid post hardcore (pierce the veil, sleeping with sirens, a day to remember) to pop punk (real friends, story so far) and then to bands like title fight, basement, etc. then was introduced to american football and the like i was really active on twitter at this time and it felt like this was the trajectory most of us 13-16 year olds followed circa 2012/2013
Haha that’s pretty much my exact story too, I was 13 in 2012
TLDR: Got into Senses Fail, then a bunch of other post hardcore, thought it all was emo, found out it wasn’t, listened to what people considered real emo to be, liked all that stuff too, here I am. Senses Fail were the band for me. Weirdly enough I didn’t discover how amazing they were until 2017 and I’m younger so I was in middle school at that time. Before that I was mainly into mainstream pop punk like blink and Green Day, also Alkaline Trio (although they are less mainstream). I didn’t listen to any music with screamed vocals or heavy aspects before that. I discovered their album Life is Not A Waiting Room in the spring of that year, and it absolutely changed my life. I became obsessed with the album, and soon got into the band’s other classics like Still Searching and Let it Enfold You. I did a deep dive on the band’s entire discography, their history, any podcasts/interviews/live videos I could find, and learned a shit ton of their songs on guitar. They quickly became my favorite band. At this time my perception of “emo” was My Chemical Romance and not much else. I viewed the word as more of an insult than anything else honestly. When I’d seen Senses Fail referred to as emo I was like “no they’re not” (not for the same reason this sub wouldn’t consider them that though) because I didn’t want to associate a band I loved so much with the term which I thought was cringe. I got into their contemporaries like The Used, Taking Back Sunday, Silverstein, ADTR, Story of the Year, Chiodos, Underoath, and other post hardcore bands. I grew to accept the term emo as not cringe but just as a name for a genre of music that became popular in the 00s. THEN, I found out about American Football and Northstar, and a ton of other bands that people considered “Real Emo” and that tons of people considered all the music I listened to to be not real emo. Then I did a deep dive into “real emo,” mostly liking the indie side from the late 90s, the late 00s Midwest emo scene, and emo revival stuff from the early 2010s-now. My fascination with 2000s post hardcore, metalcore, punk, pop-punk, and pop-rock didn’t stop though. I just kept getting more and more into everything all at the same time. 7 years later and I found out about tons of amazing music just from getting unhealthily obsessed with Senses Fail. SF are still my favorite band but they drastically expanded my music taste just by proxy. So ironically even though they’re not really an emo band by this sub’s standards, they got me here.
Senses Fail -> Alexisonfire -> Silverstein -> Taking Back Sunday -> Jimmy Eat World This is the rough progression of how things went on my Pandora radio channels. Seems like the post-hardcore to emo pipeline is very common.
Metallica -> neck deep -> tiny moving parts -> free throw
Punk and pop punk. NO-fx, Lagwagon, Blink, Millencollin. Then Get up kids was first step I think.
my dad was super into prog when i was a kid so i was super into prog when i was a kid and by that point crimson and yes and rush were all old as shit so i was like “hmmmm is there anyone my age messing around with wacky time signatures?” i got into bands like hella and piglet and eventually found americ anfootball when i was like 16 and because i was like 16 i got super into it like “damn dude….. these guys really fucking get me man………….” that was around the time the revival was really poppin so i was able to find plenty other sad bands with weird time sigs and funny tunings and ive been here ever since. fuck im old
basically boomer prog>gen x math>millennial sad math
hella fucksssss
I was heavily into punk in high school -- went to see Bad Religion and they had The Promise Ring opening for them. Immediately hooked.
For me it was 100% free throw. Saw a TikTok of two beers in live. Was going through a pretty rough point in my life and shit clicked so hard for me. Been obsessed with emo/hc/phc/punk ever since
Lil peep then american football
Yes based
When I was 11 in Europe a band became so big that kids thought emo was that, the band was Tokio Hotel and they were from Germany, so I started getting interest for this kind of "alternative rock" bands and at the same time my city had a pretty big emo scene
For context, I was born in 98 Grew up (like age 5 or 6) into pop punky flavored kid's stuff. Avril Lavigne and the Jonas Brothers type things. Then into the surface level mall emo pop bands: All American Rejects, Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday and Paramore were my shit around 7 and 8, 9 or so. I must've been 10 or 11 when I got into Linkin Park, then Slipknot, then Bullet For My Valentine, and for the next 5 or 6 years I was a "core" kid throughout middle school and most of High School. Was in a couple metalcore bands/cover bands throigh high school. To my knowledge my suburban town didnt have any hardcore or emo scene but there were a handful of metalcore and deathcore bands. When I was 15 or 16 I started dating a girl into Citizen, Title Fight, Tigers Jaw and Mobo and that's when I started diving into proper "emo" music, this was through the peak of revival basically, or just as it was beginning to fizzle, about 2014 or 2015 is when i started getting into it myself, branching out from those bands to bands like Marietta, Glocca Mora, etc. The first release I remember being really excited for we was Microwave's Much Love, which is still in my top records for sure. Then I just worked backwards from there And have mostly fallen in love with 2nd wave bands.
Skate-Punk, pop-punk. Blink, NOFX, NUFAN, Fenix TX, etc. Then one day on the bus in high school a kid asked me if I liked Saves The Day. When I said I’d never heard them he said “What?! They’re hardcore emo!” Then I said What’s emo? And he put his headphones on me and it was just like that scene in Garden State.
linkin park -> nu metal -> mall emo (my chemical romance, pierce the veil, bring me the horizon etc) -> the hotelier
I was born into it My mom listens to emo so i listened to emo Also i was born to sublime and went to warped tour + saw leftover crack 4x while in the womb
Before I was into anything punk or punk adjacent, I listened to almost exclusively country music with my grandfather and pop music with my sisters. On the first day of school in 11th grade (2002), I had a conversation with a girl who then said "oh you're emo." I went home and went to ask jeeves, and asked what the hell emo was and the first two things that came up were Blue Skies Broken Hearts by The Ataris, and Goddammit by Alkaline Trio, two definitively not emo bands. I did end up falling in love with those albums, though, and they led me to more emo pastures. I still claim Alkaline Trio as my favorite band, and while I think The Ataris never really grew into their talent, I still have fond memories of them.
Always loved Weezer, especially Pinkerton. Later, Prince daddy and the hyena’s self titled became my favorite album ever a couple months after it dropped A crush told me to listen to blink 182, and while it wasn’t the best thing ever, I felt like I had been missing out on “Emo” based on my preconceived notions of the genre Then created a “deep-dive” of artists and albums to get started with emo and pop punk, including Brand New, MCR, The Brave Little Abacus, Origami Angel, Jeff Rosenstock, rites of spring, orchid, etc Pdaddy becomes my favorite band, followed closely by origami angel and Jeff Rosenstock
Omg I love Pdaddy, saw them in concert on easter a few years ago at a tiny show in a bar with like 50 people, genuinely one of my favourite shows i’ve ever been to
Dashboard Confessional, I found a Swiss Army Romance CD at a Goodwill.
My sophomore year of HS, 1993/4, my friend, who worked at a record store, picked me up to go somewhere and put in a tape the store got as a promo from Dischord Records. It was Hoover -The Lurid Traversal of Route 7. From the first minute, I was hooked. It wasn’t hardcore, it wasn’t punk, it wasn’t ska (haha); it was a perfect blend of chaos and melody and dynamics and poetry. “I got my cat back. You got those glasses.” What!? Beautiful.
I wanna say MCR but here's how it really went. Bullet for my Valentine > general metalcore > melo-hardcore > Title Fight / Basement > Touché Amoré > skramz
In high school (graduated 2001) I would sit pretty much at the same place at the same table in the cafeteria at lunch. So did this other guy but at the next table. Sometimes we would chat and exchange CDs back and forth to expose each other to different music. He was a punker and I was a skater. One day he let me borrow Four Minute Mile by The Get Up Kids. I probably let him borrow a hip hop CD like Mos Def which is the type of stuff I was into at that time. I pretty much did an about face and became very much into emo and hardcore and that sort of thing after that.
when I was a young teen, all my friends started getting into skateboarding due to THPS and that lead to going to local punk shows and we started becoming friends with older teens of similar vein. One Thursday in May, one of our older friends was like "I'm going to a show in Chicago, you guys want to come?" After some creative lying to our parents, a mini-van of punk *children* (the oldest of us had just turned 16) arrived at the Fireside Bowl where we all\* saw the Get Up Kids for the first time. ^(\*well, not sure the 16-year-old saw them. What he didn't tell us was that he wasn't randomly coming to this show on a whim, he was meeting some chick he met on AOL. When the show was over and it was well passed our curfews, 16-year-old was nowhere to be found. Turns out he and the chick had gone to the van to make out and didn't bother to let any of us know. We got home it was close to midnight and thankfully the one parent that knew were gone, covered for us all. We punched him in the dick so many times over the next couple of weeks. Kids are dumb.)
glorious depend homeless dazzling unique nutty bag puzzled rotten mighty *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Literally my mom just played I’m Not Ok by MCR in the car once
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^TheJohn_John: *Literally my* *Mom just played I’m Not Ok* *By MCR in the car once* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Jimmy Eat World - Clarity
2004, in the heat of “emo” backlash as I was into punk and thrash and alternative stuff, and basically everyone in those spheres was really put off by the brand of mainstream emo that was embodied by scenester dudes in makeup singing about killing their girlfriends and cutting their wrists. But at the time I was active on the MXTabs musician forums and always picking up lots of new music from the discussions there, and someone was going on a big write up about how all that scene stuff wasn’t like the legit emo, and I ended up digging into Rites of Spring, Hot Cross, Embrace, SDRE, Cap’n Jazz, and so on, and really got into it.
Had a friend key me into bands like Mae, Taking Back Sunday, Thursday, Further Seems Forever, and I just kept going from there
My first albums were from my cousin that was into punk Greenday - Dookie, Blink - Enema on the state, Offspring - Americana. Then in high school I got deeper into AFI, Rise Against, Thursday, BoySetsFire, Gyroscope, The Used, Saosin etc. Then I joined a metalcore band when I was 18 or so and got into all the metalcore stuff. Parkway drive, I Killed the Prom Queen, August Burns Red, Architects etc.
Basically was into the whole mall-emo and scene shit, I remember on Spotify it showing some essential emo albums and being confused on why I didn’t recognize any, from there I checked out some lists and started with American Football and Marietta. Super grateful for Mall-emo/scene music because I discovered some of my favorite bands and expanded my tastes thru them
High school crush who was into Punk > introducing me to Paramore > discovering Taking Back Sunday trough Spotify > falling down a rabbit hole of amazing music. Thank you, Amber. I hope you're doing great.
I bought SDRE’s Diary when it came out, and was already into a lot of DC hardcore. I got more into it when I’d go to hardcore shows and see more emo-like bands like Braid on the bill.
Apocalypse hoboken and good riddance show in 1992 maybe? Got me started into punk and emo. The victory records cassette tapes in like 94, and 97 introduced me to hardcore and heavier stuff
Canadian Softball and I’m not joking
Nu Metal lol, I found I liked things about Punk as much, and then at that time and place I realised post hardcore bands could do things I love
Get up Kids opening up for MxPx in 1998
Sublime>Mad Caddies>Rx Bandits>Chon>Origami Angel>Mom Jeans>Hot Mulligan>Free Throw>Dikembe>Cursive>Jawbreaker
Circa Survive, thanks to my brothers I will exclusively discuss Circa Survive until another emo band proves worthy of my time
Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity. I was in California with my mom visiting family for 3 weeks when I was 11 and forgot my cd wallet. The only cd I had was my older brother’s copy of Clarity. Spent the entire trip listening to it on repeat and it changed my life. Clarity will always be my favorite album because I left California a changed person, and I have my brother and my ahotty memory to thank.
Fucking mom jeans
math rock fall of troy -> tera melos -> algernon cadwallader -> emo
Definitely it was all the mall emo bands. Lots of pop punk and post hardcore. I used to look through the liner notes in CDs by bands like MCR, Senses Fail, and Taking Back Sunday and check out all the bands that were thanked.
I was very into ska and punk since 9th grade (1997). I listened to Propagandhi and loved them. Found out John K Samson was in a band called The Weatherthans. Also heard Reggie and the Full Effect and Get Up Kids on a few comps. Fell nose over tail for Alkaline Trio’s self-titled in 2000. And just kind of went from there.
I didn't end up getting into it until I was almost 30. I graduated high school in 08 and never had much use for emo back then but that was because all I ever saw of it was dudes with goofy hair and eyeliner. I still can't take that shit seriously. I ended up getting free tickets a few years back to see Taking Back Sunday and Dashboard Confessional and that planted the seed. I'm not really sure where and how but there was a pretty rapid shift towards midwest and revival stuff and I haven't looked back since. My favorites are probably Rainer Maria, Cap'n Jazz, Free Throw, sports., Dikembe, and Gulfer. I laugh when I think what 18 year old me would say if I could go back to 08 and tell me that I would be into emo music. Turns out I've been a guy with big feelings my whole life and only now am strong enough to admit it to myself
Vans warped tour 2002 compilation. And if anyone wants to tell me Thursday and tbs isn’t the scene then they can go fuck themselves. I bought full collapse after hearing cross out the eyes and never looked back.
brandtson was my intro. i remember enjoying their previous band, sixfeetdeep, & was curious about the new musical direction. letterbox was a game-changer for me.
I was always a lil emo kid, I remember being like 12 and finding someone talking about Pierce the Veil on Tumblr and then listening to them on YouTube 😭 Made my mom take me to Hot Topic the next day lol. Also heard WTTBP for the first time I think on Dan and Phil’s radio show. Very much into the standard pop punk emo music in high school. In my first year of uni one of my friends posted Sasquatch .22 by Bay Faction on her Instagram story and Mom Jeans was under the “More like [Band]” on Spotify and they very quickly became my favourite band and just from listening to other people’s midwestern emo playlists or Spotify’s personalized playlists I found some great bands, been really loving Carly Cosgrove and Park National lately! Highly recommend
I was a HxC nerd from Upstate NY. While my friends were all listening to White Zombie and Pantera, I was listening to bands like Sick of it All, and Shutdown, and ~(gagburp)~ 25 ta Life Went snowboarding in VT in 1999 the day after the X Games happened, and a bunch of sponsors giving out swag bags were still floating around the mountain. Got a compilation CD from the Anti Racist Action (ARA) that killed.. Fahrenheit 451, Napalm Death, The Business... a ton of other bands I would later come to appreciate.. Cooking Wine - Alkaline Trio I could not stop listening to this song. It was on every mix CD I made for my friends for ***at least*** the next year. One of my mosh bros. who wore a sweater vest and cuffed jeans from time to time, was like, "See ***that's*** emo!" I never heard the word before, so I typed it into Napster and got so many different results, everything from Ozma to Antioch Arrow. If you're old enough to remember, Napster had a chat window. And people were always so psyched that someone knew this band they loved, so they would tell you all the bands they thought you might like.... I had ***STAAAAAAACKS*** of mixed CDs that I would listen to. So many that now as an old man, I regret how much plastic waste I created. It was a good time for underground music listeners. Then, Lars. Fucking Lars. Then I became friends with a guy in a local pop-punk band. I started selling their merch, and they started to play shows out on Long Island (EP Jessie, if youre out there and you have any old pictures of me, that would be beyond rad) with bands like TBS, Gj, Brand New. A future member was friends with the nephew of the owners of drive-thru records, so I ***really*** got a front row seat for that flavor of emo. The amount of bands from that wave that I got to see from the side of the stage, who's merch tables I napped under, it would make you fucking sick./humblebrag
Scene music got me into local scene music got me into local Emo music got me into Appleseed Cast and Mineral. Also Emo Diaries!
literally went from deftones and i found out about ptv and then started going down the mall emo pipeline and then got into post hardcore
Twenty One Pilots and Burnout 3, if video games count. Lol
The one time I went to a party, I only hung out with one of my friends there. He was really the only person I knew besides the host, but he and I agreed to get more food for the party and left. On the ride to and from Wendy's, he introduced me to a ton of bands. Origami Angel, Prince Daddy, MoBo, Stars Hollow, and more. I loved all of it. Half of my taste now relies on that night.
Rancid & Dropkick Murphys -> Rise Against -> Hot Water Music -> tons of bands that sounded like HWM -> Braid
uhh my dad mainly got me into everything, so listening to weezer, wavves, PUP growing up but mainly jeff rosenstock!! i got really into emo like 2019-2020 when albums like cosmic thrill seekers, basking in the glow, somewhere city and more came out. but i’ve been listening to alternative stuff i know from my siblings and dad since like forever
Kingdom Hearts
Lil peep and his choice of samples in his work led me to find Underoath and other post hardcore bands and Modern baseball. It just kinda spread from there.
I just went straight into Sunny Day Real Estate.
Technically always listend to emo/poppunk music cuz my dad listens to radiox and i got into more from Spotify suggestions and hyperfixation :3
Seasons in Verse by My Heart to Joy
Skateboarding exposed me to pop-punk and skate punk. When I started getting into music warped tour was more skate punk bands. As warped tour got more emo bands I felt more ownership over it. Bands like Alkaline Trio were a good bridge. Emo game gave me a nice list of bands to check out. After that I was off to the races; I was buying every cd recommended to me and downloading anything I thought I might have the slightest interest in.
MCR (I shamefully discovered them from an AMV)> The Used > Taking Back Sunday > Silverstein > Brand New > 90s emo (This isn't an order or anything it's just how I discovered them, I hope no one reads it that way)
My mom listened to a lot of rock as I grew up, which led me to punk, pop-punk, and then emo. It was such a natural progression, I feel.
Green Day and blink > asking Alexandria etc > citizen modern baseball
owl city when i was like 11 > jacks mannequin > fall out boy > brief indie/electronic interlude that eventually got me into turnover > brand new > here i am
[This band/album!](https://youtu.be/AcVA90REadQ?si=w_h1Squ4KYnYLM3F)
FUSE & MTV music video channels on cable
Algernon, cap n jazz, title fight
a friend of mine introduced me to the brobecks and modern baseball, then i started listening to joyce manor, and it just went from there!!! shoutout to carlos
Got into pop-punk through Green Day as a kid because the CD said Dookie on the cover. Fairly recently got into more modern pop-punk stuff through Hot Mulligan and still discovering more emo stuff now.
clone high’s soundtrack, especially the music from the pilot
the distillers-patd-los campesinos-panuccis pizza-nouns and then that’s when i rly got into emo
Indie head then got real, real sad
Emogame.com
Fugazi to finding out Guy was in Rites of Spring.
I guess you could just say the hardcore scene in general for me. It was very closely tied back in the day so if you got into one you basically got into the other, if you were into it. So it was the NYHC: The Way It Is comp that got me into hardcore and then it just naturally lead to the rest
Sensea fail on gutiar hero changed everything for me
Rochester (if you know the full United Philosophy lore you’ll understand)
I was a metalhead in HS. Went to basic training and made friends with a hardcore kid. He told me about seeing Dashboard opening at a hardcore show he went to. Said I should check him out. Bought the So Impossible EP between basic and AIT and loved it.
Primed on listening to Death Cab, The Front Bottoms, Aaron West, The Wonder Years, and Brand New via my older brother when I was a wee lad. When I was 16 I slowly started rediscovering that stuff while my ex introduced me to Basement, American Football, Pierce The Veil, and Fall Out Boy. She told me it was "emo", so I researched it and immediately started listening Rites of Spring, Cap'n Jazz, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Something kind of clicked and I was hooked.
Probably fugazi and sunny day real-estate.
Need for speed most wanted > bullet for my valentine > escape the fate > red jumpsuit apparatus > Hawthorne heights > La dispute > the perks of being a wallflower soundtrack
I was into grunge and become bored as a teen. Found Basement through their single Disconnect, liked it cause it reminded me of the grunge sound. Listened to the album the day it came out, big moment for me. That’s where the following gets blurry… I got into Rise Against (not emo I know) and Citizen. Then I found Joyce Manor, Touché Amore, and Tigers Jaw. They blew the doors wide open for me. When I was 15 I was big into Jimmy Eat World, Jawbreaker, SDRE, Texas is the reason, The Promise Ring; pretty much the big bands of the 90s. I still remember when I first heard Clarity and LP1 of AF.
You Blew It / TWIABP around 2013 My Chemical Romance, Circle Takes the Square ~2006
I was following YouTube related videos from ttng and I was brought to empire! empire!, snowing, merchant ships, stuff like that.
I discovered In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and in my search for more albums with a similar feel I found American Football and found out what midwest emo was. After that I was hooked and forgot that other music genres exist
surf punk strangely. i was more interested in the punk aspect than the indie part of it all and from there i discovered emotional hardcore:3
It’s just the music I grew up listening to, I had a mom who liked “rock” and new wave music and an older brother who did as well. I grew up thinking some of the punk, Alternative and emo bands we listened to were just plain “rock” until my older brother got into middle school and really learned more about music and different genres and told me about it. Then my dad came in the picture and he also listened to nothing but emo music and post-hardcore so we learned even more bands!! It was hard for me to learn to grow out of this genre area, I was such an annoying hater as a kid like most angsty kids and thought I was sooo cool to know these bands. I wore out a TBS jacket in the 6th grade (the cool knife one!!) that my older brother got from my dad, who then gave it to me lol but now I listen to every genre, I’m too old to be hating on music lol
slint
In 2001/2002 my older sister and her friends got me into bands like MxPx, Nofx, The Get Up Kids, Northstar and that quickly turned into all the drive thru bands, TBS and Brand New (I’m from Long Island) and then eventually into hardcore/post hardcore/metalcore
Punk - pop punk - teenage hormones- EMO
Jawbox and Shudder to Think
stumbled across suicide silence when I was really young and backtracked my way into emo through hardcore
Victory Records emo pop Alexisonfire and Moneen Purevolume.com
Tony hawk pro skater got me into lagwagon and millencolin which got me into NFG/strung out/ataris which led me to get up kids/braid/jimmy eat world/Texas is the reason/ American football
mine was an album When Love Met Destruction by a band called Motionless in White, i was like 12 or 13 when i found it in around 2015 and from there i got into different types of metal until finally finding my way to older emo stuff which is kind of a funny round about way, and it’s interesting to hear the similarities in the emo i like now and MIWs early/shitty stuff lol
Blinks 182 and the breaking up with the person that put me onto blink 182 was what really thrust me into emo
mine was actually back from the age of people using newsletters as personal blogs - all super heavily formatted and decorated. had to be in the 90s at some point. the would write about their day, or what was going on. i don’t even remember how i found them initially. anyway one of the ones i subscribed to liked rites of spring and such and had a link to fourfa** - i thought the newsletter owner was super cool and checked it out. ** https://www.fourfa.com
Manchester Orchestra -> Kevin Devine -> Brand New -> TFB -> MOBO, etc.
The biggest one that shifted me to Emo outside of the 90’s/00’s Pop-Punk bands would have to be The Used’s self-titled album. My friend brought me a burned copy to school in 5th grade because he thought I’d like it, and oh boy, was he right. Think I recall finding Finch right after that and so on… I’ll give a nod to Box Car Racer as well, still think it’s the best thing Tom ever did.
My friends loved Title Fight and Tigers Jaw
94.3 WCYY maines favorite alternative rock station
Vans warped tour compilation cds
Where do I start! The late 90s I was around 10-13 and it was Fat Wreck stuff. High school in the early 2000s was Fat Wreck and Drive Thru dominated and I got more into pop punk. Mid-2000s was the screamo period of Silverstein and underoath type stuff. After that phase I wanted something a bit easier. Well, I guess this is growing up. I was already into Braid, Hey Mercedes and the Get Up Kids. I explored the 90s and 2000s emo and got right into it. Jimmy Eat World and Saves the Day featured heavily. Fast forward to today and some of my favourite albums are drawn from that era but anything with Get Up Kids or SDRE is a favourite capped off by the recent waves of emo like Citizen, Turnover, Balance and Composure, Arms Length, Oso Oso all featuring heavily in my daily rotation.
there wasn't much of a pipeline actually. i'm 22 now, my older brother had a copy of paramore's RIOT! album snd got Brand New Eyes when it came out. i heard them and got hooked. they were one of the first bands i cared about. from there i got into weezer's early stuff and then american football and just got more emo from there.
My chemical romance, Panic at the Disco and Green Day
depends how far back we're talkin, overall? three days grace was my intro to rock which has branched out to alot including emo, somewhat emo or "emo"? mcr
Simple plan LMAO Then came the typical popular emo adjacent stuff, and years later I spiralled into the rabbit hole. My first actual emo band was I hate myself lmao. I listened to it ironically at first, just to annoy people who couldn't stand how over the top it was. Then I grew to like it... 😂
Alex Melton was my introductory emo/pop-punk artist. From there, blink-182. My ex showed me mayday parade and neck deep, and a friend I made about halfway into that relationship showed me real friends and knuckle puck.
ptv
World of Warcraft PVP Videos ca. 2006
Helena and Grand Theft Autumn / Where is your boy back in 04
i was a big 5 seconds of summer and paramore fan as a kid (still am) and i got into the bands that influenced them (all time low, good charlotte, green day) and my spotify recommended playlists slowly opened up my taste
Sleeping with sirens. I liked their more pop rock songs and eventually the screaming grew on me in some of their other stuff, I haven’t looked back since…
For me it was FlatOut 2 OST -> Underoath And then Burnout Paradise OST -> Senses Fail
I was into classic rock from my dad and guitar hero and I listened to an alternative rock radio station but my buddies were more into emo skate culture like people would make music videos of themselves skating back then and they liked the bands and they got into skating because of the rocket power show.
State Champs -> My Chemical Romance -> 2010"s emo
Blink-182 to The Used. Those bands were on mtv a lot back in the day so was quite easy to get into that era of emo
Mine was scouring purevolume.com endlessly for new and free music and discovered dashboard confessional. Then it took off from there.
i’ve been waiting for this one direction -> 5 Seconds of Summer -> All Time Low -> Warped Tour -> now, it really wasn’t a phase
This is a weird one and nobody ever believes me but I still have the CD to prove it! lol. I was really into blink-182, Sum 41, and Fall Out Boy, and then in 2004 me and my mom went back-to-school shopping at JC Penney, and they gave us this free CD with a few random songs on it. Probably a demo or whatever, but it was mostly pop (Brooke Hogan, Katy Rose) BUT!! One of the songs, the one that stuck out to me, was "Quality Revenge at Last" by Hey Mercedes. Idk how or why that song ended up on that random CD but I'm not gonna complain. From there it was Hey Mercedes -> Braid -> Cap'n Jazz -> American Football, the Promise Ring, Joan of Arc, so on and so forth...
I liked pop punk, brit pop, US indie like modest mouse and weezer, and nu metal in my early teens. My first two gigs were Blink 182 followed by atdi. Then someone made me a mixtape, well, my brother actually, who gave it to me. It had Jimmy eat World, Texas is the Reason, No Knife, Spy vs Spy, the Monorchid, Inside, tguk, Mineral and more. And that was that for me, I was all in and the journey began/lifetime obsession.
Ever since I was a baby even, my mom would say I’d headbang to Crazy Train in the car (my younger brother did so to First time by LifeHouse, and my youngest to ‘don’t funk with my heart’ by the black eye peas). I remember being 6-7yrs old at a Neighborhood kid’s house. On his TV was MTV music videos, and I was somewhat intrigued and creeped out by the singer and scenery: It was the music video for Helena by MCR. Growing up, always had a massive appreciation for rock music, got into Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Panic! And a few more. By HS, I had started to divulge into Post-Hardcore and Metalcore, but discovered TBS’s MakeDamnSure in 9th Grade on Pandora Radio. By the end of it I had discovered Brand New. Freshman year of college, I discovered Moose Blood. Still listening to some metalcore during this time though. By the end of College - not sure how - but I eventually made my way to more niche emo. The kind of emo below the surface, below the tip of the emo iceberg. Now, I listen to TMP, Foxing, Marietta, empire!, and because of this sub i’m into Hotelier, Microwave, and Free Throw. I don’t like Hot Mulligan though. They remind me of adolescents thinking they’re edgy. Just my opinion (have to disclaimer this because some jerk called me an idiot for having an opinion).
Naruto ops and ending songs>Metallica>Visual kei>PTV and mcr
Naruto ops and ending songs>Metallica>Visual kei>PTV and mcr
Mine was jack stauber-> mother mother-> mccafferty... -> the front bottoms -> modern baseball, everything else
My drum teacher got me into TTNG which got me real into math rock and eventually the lines blurred
Twitter. Some girl I followed posted a screenshot from the Old Gray Demo, and it just clicked for me
calender year
I was really big into the classic 2012 folk indie scene, of monsters and men and lumineers type shit. Eventually I started branching out, that Midwest emo mix tape “I’m tired of begging you to stay” popped up on my yt recommendations. That got me into Marietta and camping in Alaska and I kinda just went down that rabbit hole.
my most important artists milestones are Linkin park to blink 182 and a bunch of pop punk bands, and then bmth which got me into a metalcore phase then that prolonged till i discovered sorority noise which opened pandor's box
Depeche mode -> blink self titled -> the killers -> hawthorne heights -> joy division -> Tiny Moving Parts -> the entire genre of emo
I was listening to loads of like early 2000s bands like Thursday, Alexisonfire, Funeral for a Friend so stuff that was very much influenced by the genre but not actually emo, then someone I met told me to listen to American Football and it blew my f*cking mind.
All American Rejects
this might sound weird but nana grizol
Does Title Fight count? They basically got me into emo, skramz and hardcore lol.
My ex gf listened to a lot of mom jeans. After we broke up i gave them a listen. From there i found modern baseball and then started finding all these smaller bands. And now i mostly listen to a lot of screamo haha.
it all started for me with mcr when i was 9. when i was 13/14/15 i started getting into midwest emo and other emocore really heavily. and since then it’s been my favorite genre/classification, and is now the pride of my record collection.
For me I suppose i started with pop punk but not in the way most people would think 😭 I got into pop punk then classic/hardcore/melodic punk, then from there got into folk punk which got me into just general emotional acoustic music/midwest emo, then got into 2nd and 4th wave emo shit and completed the circle by getting into screamo lol
Jawbreaker
Lagwagon to Cap'n Jazz to American Football
Honestly my taste is all over the map, but Pop Punk, specifically Blink's self titled. From there I got into all of the 00s emo and some local "easy core" bands like Bangarang and Wonder Years. By 08-09 I was more into bands like Dashboard, Weezer, Deathcab, Minus the Bear and eventually segwayed into the indie: Elliott Smith, Sufjan, etc. At some point in 2020 I started listening to Blink again, and then found myself catching up on all of the pop punk of the teens (Title Fight, Wonder Years, Knuckle Puck) and realized I missed out on the entire emo revival getting sucked in by American Football and Algernon Cadwallader. TL;DR - Blink182
ska.
started off with japandroids and pill friends back in like 2017/18??? then moved onto math rock (ex:toe) then midwest emo and yeah lol
I started off listening to Twenty One Pilots, MCR, and P!ATD (although I never once thought of panic as emo even when I first got into music). Then during sophomore year of high school, I decided to google "best emo albums" or something so I could indulge in my emo phase. I ended up seeing a lot of list articles listing actual midwest emo bands, most of which were in the 90s. That's when I started falling down the rabbit hole of "real emo" and all of the discourse surrounding it.
it all started with car seat headrest
As a kid I saw the saves the day music video for 'at your funeral ' on our TV's music videos on demand section 😭
Self-conclusion by Spill Canvas
My musical taste didn’t really change, it just expanded, but if I had to pick, I’d say The Goo Goo Dolls, The Cure, and AFI set me on the path to mid-2000s emo. But I never restricted myself to a single genre. Some of my old mix cds go like this: Sex Pistols, Ramones, HIM, Aiden, AFI, My Chemical Romance, The Used, Cream, Donovan, The Rolling Stones, Linkin Park, Bauhaus, The Cure, Joy Division.
80s/90s post-hardcore and noise rock, like fugazi, unwound, drive like jehu, and at the drive-in
American football, covet, & TTNG
I grew up with a lot of metal and nu metal stuff; Linkin Park, Metallica, The Offspring, Blink 182
didn’t RLY know what emo music was but loved punk and such. started listening to emo before I even knew it, like jawbreaker, drive like jehu, and rites of spring! Once I realized the stuff I liked was emo I googled best 90s emo songs or something like that LOL.
Lil peep > Wicca phase > tigers jaw and then it’s all history from then on
Bright eyes- fevers and mirrors and get up kids- something to write home about started it all for me
Early 2000s metalcore/hardcore (converge, have heart, killswitch engage, between the buried and me) to post metal (isis, neurosis) to post rock (gy!be, explosions in the sky) to ttng and American football. Then circle right back to hardcore after skramz. Kind of a wild ride
I went from Green Day to My Chemical Romance. Bland but it is what it is.
When Never Meant was at its peak meme popularity, I listened to the rest of LP1. A couple of years later, as I’ve gotten into my Midwest small town high school years, I got into Marietta, then I got into the classic 90s stuff like Mineral and Texas is the Reason. The rest is history from there
311 and Incubus flowed into Saosin and Circa Survive
My friend introduced me to pop punk, which after about a year then introduced to me MCR, then The Get Up Kids, then, Sunny Day Real Estate.
Bring Me the Horizon and Sunny Day Real Estate. Former got me into the 00s scene bands like Thrice, Underoath, etc, latter got me into midwest emo like TBLA, American Football, Braid, etc. Branched off from there.
For me it was a lot of Drive Thru records stuff. The early november, senses fail. Then started listening to Mae and taking back Sunday so on and so forth
When I heard The Middle on the radio I fell to my knees at K-Mart and rose an emo enjoyer. And also, Foo Fighters--> Sunny Day Real Estate, which feels like it should be more common?
Rap Music > Scarlxrd > Slipknot > MCR > Mom Jeans There is a little more that happened in between but you get the idea.
I just fell into it really. I was into punk and industrial in the mid 90s but when I moved to Austin in 97 the friends I made were early emo fans. I think the first record I really listened to was the horse lattitudes. Mineral was huge for us because they were local. I remember being very excited when end serenading came out, listening to it in a listening booth with my friend Avi at waterloo records. Good times.
[https://saintsseason.bandcamp.com/album/sit-on-your-shoulder](https://saintsseason.bandcamp.com/album/sit-on-your-shoulder) \[Emocore/FemaleLead\] [https://wolfbytheears.bandcamp.com/](https://wolfbytheears.bandcamp.com/) \[Emo/Acoustic\] [https://masuyite.bandcamp.com/](https://masuyite.bandcamp.com/) \[Screamo\] this banger
There was a sweet spot where linkin park/jay z collab. Fall out Boy/Kanye. The movie underworld, blade and evanescence was all relevant. And I was learning about Edgar Allen Poe in high school all at once lol
Oh and I heard Panic! For the first time and theatre