Emo’s not dead, but despite what a certain cruise may have you think, it’s not because the once-popular emo and pop punk bands are still around and still playing the nostalgia-inducing hits. No disrespect to those bands (many of them are very good!), but emo’s alive and well because of the entirely new generation of bands taking the genre and doing something refreshingly new with it. When you look at the newer crop of bands leading emo in the present day, you can hear echoes from all throughout the genre’s nearly-40-year history, from first-wave ’80s emocore to the screamo and mathy Midwest bands of the ’90s to the 2000s emo-pop boom to the 2010s “revival” era and so much more, and the best bands are offering up fresh perspectives that separa...
