Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 2010

Emo revival

Emerged 2010 Origin USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
3
Speed
5
Melody
9

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

A new generation rediscovers the Midwest sound, this time with Bandcamp instead of fanzines.

How it sounds

  • Home-recorded production with clean guitars and unprocessed vocals.
  • Structures borrowed from Midwest emo, with tapping and open tunings.
  • Long, nearly prose-like lyrics about anxiety and small towns.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
110-160 bpm
Song length
3-5 min
Tuning
Open and altered tunings inherited from Midwest emo, with clean guitars ringing against each other rather than power chords.
Production
Warm and intentionally unpolished, recorded cheaply and frequently self-released. The lo-fi is a citation of the 1990s records as much as a budget.
Written about
Anxiety, Friendship and its failures, Place, Growing up online

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two clean interlocking parts in altered tunings, using open strings to keep chords unresolved — the Midwest emo technique, revived deliberately.
  • Bass Melodic and busy, filling the space the clean guitars leave, and frequently the most technically confident playing on the record.
  • Drums Loose and comfortable in odd metres, played without announcing them.
  • Vocals Sung earnestly and imperfectly, frequently shouted at the peak, and mixed inside the band. Untrained singing is a genre requirement rather than a limitation.

What it isn't

That reviving a sound is nostalgia. The revival's bands mostly grew up after the records they are drawing on, and what they took was the technique rather than the memory — ringing open tunings producing unresolved harmony, which turns out to suit anxiety as well as it suited adolescence. Bands who copy the sound without the harmonic thinking produce something that sounds right and does nothing, which is the same failure the original genre had.

Told apart from

  • Midwest emo The revival takes its entire technical vocabulary from Midwest emo, and the difference is thirty years of self-awareness about doing so.
  • Emo Emo proper is post-hardcore's inward turn in 1985. The revival is a return to the 1990s branch of that, not to the 2000s commercial wave.
  • Emo pop Emo-pop is the commercial genre the revival is explicitly reacting against, despite sharing the word.
  • Math rock The interlocking clean guitars and odd metres are shared, and several revival bands are claimed by both scenes.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Around 2010, a generation raised online rediscovered records from 1997 and remade them with Bandcamp instead of fanzines. Nobody in the scene accepted the 'revival' label. The genre stayed small but consistent, and produced some of the decade's best rock writing.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.