The Rise of Emo Nostalgia

The AllAmerican Rejects play at Emo Nite LA.
The All-American Rejects play at Emo Nite LA.PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES DONNELY / EMO NIGHT

In the past couple of years, a strange phenomenon has taken hold: tens of thousands of city-dwelling professionals aged twenty-five to thirty-five have started flocking to regularly scheduled parties with the narrow theme of “emo.” Emo, originally short for “emotive hardcore,” is a fluid category that encompasses decades of music: the genre first emerged in the nineties, went pop in the aughts, and has lately settled into a nuanced, indie adulthood. But these themed emo nights look to a specific era: about a decade ago, after pop-punk bands like Green Day and Blink-182 had set the table for the radio-friendly emo acts to come. These later bands were, and remain, easily parodied, offering a combination of flamboyant melodies, furious percussion, and teen-age screams.

During the genre’s mainstream peak, which lasted roughly from 2001 to 2006, there was a popular emo act for every shade of adolescent feeling. My Chemical Romance was imperiously self-deprecating; Fall Out Boy was exuberant; Panic! at the Disco was vaudevillian—and all three went double platinum. Dashboard Confessional was lovelorn and sappy; Jimmy Eat World was cheerfully sincere. Brand New and Taking Back Sunday, jockish rivals from Long Island, sang about self-obsession and spite. The most radio-friendly emo frequency was bounded on one side by darker, post-hardcore bands, like Thursday, and on the other by silly pop-punk acts, like Sum 41, that were mainstream enough to appear on MTV’s “Total Request Live.”

Inside this sweaty, and almost entirely male, musical ecosystem, the simplest emotions bloomed into life-or-death melodrama. Taking Back Sunday described infatuation like so: “You could slit my throat / And with my one last gasping breath / I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt.” There was a streak of playfulness in emo, but it was the genre’s spectacular sentimental indulgence that really got people on board. It also insured that emo’s biggest fans fell within a certain age range.

A decade later, the emo teens are grown up, sort of, and they are re-immersing themselves in the sound of adolescence—that squeal of medical-grade angst and longing. There are emo nights in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Portland, Denver, Tampa, Houston, Baltimore, and Boston, among other cities. They are oddly specific celebrations of near-term nostalgia in which music made to help teen-agers flail their way to adulthood provides an opportunity for adults to succumb to the histrionics of teendom again.

The best-known and most heavily branded emo night takes place in Los Angeles on the first Tuesday of every month. Emo Nite LA boasts a cute logo of a cartoon gravestone; high-contrast, mid-aughts-style hipster party photography at every event; and a thriving line of merch. (Its most popular offering is a shirt that proclaims “SAD AS FUCK.”) Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus has d.j.'d the party; in 2015, at Emo Nite LA’s one-year anniversary, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba performed an acoustic set. The franchise extends to a handful of other cities; the event’s organizers estimate that, in the past two years, forty thousand people have attended Emo Nite LA events.

In December, Emo Nite LA celebrated its two-year anniversary, at the Echoplex, a popular venue on the east side of Los Angeles. A long line of black-clad party hopefuls stood on the sidewalk outside. It was a more inclusive crowd than you usually see in Los Angeles, as if warring high-school cliques had united for a night. When I went inside the venue, a marching band was playing Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” and the ceiling was covered with “SAD AF” balloons. To my right, a pair of husky lurkers talked about the Promise Ring; to my right, three girls who appeared to be dressed for social media Snapchatted themselves singing along to “Mr. Brightside,” the 2004 hit by the Killers, which was playing over the speakers. The Killers were not emo.

As you may have guessed already, I listened to quite a bit of emo in high school. But I had come to the Echoplex with a friend who had never cared for it. He bopped around, embracing the music on offer—which was easy, as the d.j. was, at that moment, playing another non-emo band, Third Eye Blind. When I asked him what the scene reminded him of, he said, “A group of middle schoolers who are really excited to be at the dance on the final night of camp.”

The organizers of the event are T. J. Petracca, Babs Szabo, and Morgan Freed, who run Emo Nite through their creative agency, called Ride or Cry. In 2014, at a birthday party, Petracca and Szabo sang a Dashboard Confessional song together at karaoke and had an epiphany. “Babs and I were like, What if we could listen to this when we went out?” Petracca told me over the phone. “What if, instead of Top Forty, we could listen to music we actually liked?” Part of the appeal, he and Szabo noted, was the idea of centering a happy, communal experience on music they once listened to when they were upset and alone. “My favorite thing is seeing people in ‘Sad as Fuck’ shirts, with a big smile on their face,” Szabo said.

The crowd that night at the Echo was smiling; wherever I looked, someone was air-drumming or spraying champagne. “This is the easiest shit ever!” a d.j. playing a Spotify track list told me, shouting over his speakers. Tyler Posey, of MTV’s “Teen Wolf,” manned his own laptop upstairs. Toward the end of the night, which closed with a euphoric, emo-E.D.M. mash-up rave, the All-American Rejects took the stage, and played acoustic versions of their mid-aughts hits: “Swing Swing,” “Move Along,” “Gives You Hell.” After one song, the vocalist, Tyson Ritter, called out, “If you’re over thirty in the crowd, say ‘FUCK YEAH!’ ” Many people yelled back.



As a teen-ager, I was both attracted to and angry about the total absence of female voices in emo. The genre didn’t “consider the world beyond boy bodies, their hearts or their vans,” Jessica Hopper wrote in 2003. Girls were important insofar as they made boys feel love or hatred; they were angels or succubi—always undressing, never allowed to speak. This gothily phallocentric boy-band ethos is part of why mid-aughts emo still seems, to many, like a joke. And yet the aspects of emo’s pop period that draw condescension—the obsession with suburban pixies, the smarmy and nasal vocals, the bombastic embrace of superficial suffering that the critic Andy Greenwald once described as “Rimbaud at the food court”—are precisely what most emo night attendees love.

For a while, Emo Nite LA was also known as Taking Back Tuesday—a name that drew ire from Taking Back Sunday’s frontman, Adam Lazzara. “I don’t want to become a parody of something I take real seriously,” he told Billboard, in July. “That’s the line that these people are walking. . . . You don’t make shirts that say ‘Sad as Fuck.’ Like you’re making a fucking joke out of it? Fuck you.”

In 2015, the Emo Nite LA founders filed a trademark application for “Emo Night,” provoking distaste from other guardians of the mutating emo revival. “It just seems so superficial,” Tom Mullen, the organizer of a longer-running New York emo night, told the music Web site Noisey. Patric Fallon, the organizer of a San Francisco emo night that first convened in 2009, noted that Emo Nite LA’s approach “parallels the course that the genre itself took from its first incarnations in the punk/hardcore underground’s D.I.Y. community to the shelves of Hot Topic.” Petracca, Szabo, and Freed have since abandoned their trademark application. They are, however, expanding: they’ve announced a nationwide tour for Emo Nite, and are in talks to bring the franchise to New York in 2017.