I’m accustomed to mainstream year-end lists providing a distorted reflection of my own experience. But, in a fitting coda to a frankly hallucinatory 2024, it feels like my own year-end list was lying to me.
The top three spots are occupied by audacious, ambitious albums from bands that, for either the majority or entirety of their career, have been described as emo. I don’t think that was even happening in recent peak years like 2014 and 2016. Yet, Foxing’s self-titled, Los Campesinos!’ All Hell, and Glass Beach’s Plastic Death are true one-of-one affairs. Each are a testament to the unique talents and vision of their creators, all of whom are completely severed from any greater scene or trend within a genre that largely chose revanchism in 2024.
I don’t know if the fifth wave of emo is officially over or if a new wave has taken shape yet. But, all of the latter’s defining characteristics — cross-genre pollination, progressive politics and a contrarian relationship with the preceding Revival — has given way to what appears to be a new generation raised on Mom Jeans and Modern Baseball. Meanwhile, based on the live clips I typically see posted on X, the closest thing we have to actively recording living legends is Origami Angel.
In short, 2024 felt like a “revival revival” — there were a lot of enjoyable records, a lot of promising bands, and from what I gathered from the message boards and TikToks and such that still actively cover emo, a lot of organic excitement about said records and bands. But, things also felt more insular and small-ball throughout the year, lacking any obvious Best In Class candidates that broke through into the greater conversation. Maybe this was just a year of Sports and Grow Up, Dude! rather than You’re Gonna Miss It All and Keep Doing What You’re Doing, a prelude to greater artistic achievements and crossover success. Then it’ll really be a “revival revival.”
Anyways, no “top ten” or even rankings this year — just me listing off a bunch of emo releases I enjoyed until I run out of space.
Bedbug — Pack Your Bags The Sun Is Growing
Though I wasn’t a huge booster of either in their time, seeing 10-year anniversary pieces for Frankie Cosmos’ Zentropy and the Forth Wanderers’ self-titled debut filled me with a certain longing that didn’t accompany celebrations for, say, Never Hungover Again or Home, Like Noplace Is There. Those were some certainly good times for emo, in part because the boundaries between the genre and more traditional indie labels and scenes felt more porous. Exciting as it is to see the Wax Bodega package deals and such, I do miss seeing The Hotelier tour with Told Slant, or Joyce Manor and Mitski exchanging pleasantries.
For whatever reason — probably the name — I thought that Bedbug was one of those 2014-era bands on Double Double Whammy or Orchid Tapes. But instead, they’re a Los Angeles-based bedroom pop project that’s been kicking around for nearly a decade and reached their zenith on Pack Your Bags The Sun Is Growing, an album very much in the spirit of that era. It’s a real “truth in advertising” title, promising a sprawling, exploratory style of emo that draws on twee, Pacific Northwest, and New England-style indie for one of the best “road trip” albums of 2024.
Ben Quad — Ephemera
After touring with Cursive and the Menzingers, playing Fest and, most shockingly, signing to Pure Noise Records, Cloud Nothings could no longer deny the obvious — they’re a legacy band in the greater emosphere now. And as the 10-year anniversary pieces on Attack on Memory and Here and Nowhere Else made clear, Cloud Nothings brought that about by being one of the few bands that actually got louder, rawer and meaner after their initial indie breakthrough.
Coincidentally, the most promising band I’ve seen following a similar trajectory happen to be their new labelmates, Ben Quad. The Oklahoma quartet topped my 2022 list, a tuneful, tappity-tap brand of nü-Midwest emo that positioned them to take the baton from Dogleg as The Most Likely Indie Crossover. Yet, later that year, they pivoted hard on “You’re Part Of It” — a Piebald-quoting song that sounds absolutely nothing like Piebald and yet became their biggest hit. Their bracing EP Ephemera went even further into the abyss, drawing on skramz and Fall Of Troy-style metalcore while maintaining the melodic dynamism of their earlier work, stoking the hype even more for LP2. Maybe Cloud Nothings aren’t the Pure Noise band that Ben Quad most resembles as it is Knocked Loose.
Carly Cosgrove — The Cleanest Of Houses Are Empty
Skim through any given emo album’s PR one-sheet and the frontperson will probably pay some lip service to how the songs with the jokey titles and SpongeBob SquarePants samples are actually about depression and trauma and therapy, the genre’s answer to “bodies and spaces.” To the outsider, Carly Cosgrove might be viewed as that kind of band, still making iCarly references on their second album, which Lucas Naylor described as being inspired by “habit, familiarity, unfamiliarity, depression, lethargy, and self-reflection.” But beyond The Cleanest Of Houses Are Empty being one of the few albums in this scene where depression isn’t handled in a way that feels performative or glib, it’s an album of pure artistic confidence, with Carly Cosgrove finding their voice as a band that updates the spring-loaded tension and unorthodox song structures of original Midwest emo into a present where folk-punk bands from New Jersey are Midwest emo. After seeing what Holy Ghost did to them, even the most hardcore Modern Baseball fans aren’t clamoring for LP4… but The Cleanest Of Houses Are Empty feels like the next best thing.
Ceres — Magic Mountain (1996-2022)
Though All Hell gave us plenty to celebrate on its own, the unprecedented, overwhelming critical praise felt like a lifetime achievement award for Los Campesinos!. Or, at least a make-up call for years of under-appreciation. Within that story is Los Campesinos! achieving their remarkable longevity by bucking nearly 40 years of emo history and embracing their beknighted status as emo elder statesmen during the 2010s, rather than distancing themselves from it. Ironically, their current influence feels nowhere near as strong as it did during the years between No Blues and Sick Scenes, evidenced by how its most obvious progeny sounds completely out of step with the genre’s dominant trends in 2024.
As with their previous two albums, Ceres’ Magic Mountain (1996-2022) was produced by Tom Bromley (aka Tom Campesinos!) and primarily works at the intersection of Frightened Rabbit’s scrappy miserablism and Gang Of Youths’ earnest rafter-reaching. Not every song on Magic Mountain sounds like that, because there are 26 of them; there are scratchy voice-memo demos, interstitial plot-movers, a song called “Britney Spears” which isn’t really about Britney Spears, and a brazen rip of “All My Friends” that’s titled “LCD.” But these help balance out Magic Mountain‘s otherwise ironclad dedication to Ceres’ strengths, resulting in their own All Hell — a comprehensive, self-referential look back on an under-appreciated band that has to treat every album like it might be their last.
Combat — Stay Golden
When Holden Wolf was in 5th grade, his favorite artists were hometown heroes Animal Collective and Dan Deacon. A decade later, his bombastically ambitious, Baltimore-based emo band Combat sounds nothing like them. But his pre-teen tastes are still an important biographical detail because it proves that dude has been a hopelessly online music dork for his entire life. And that’s really what Stay Golden is all about — as much as it honors the lineage of theatrical emo spanning Three Cheers To Sweet Revenge to The Monitor to Cosmic Thrill Seekers, Combat’s second LP is an unequivocally 2024 “how it feels to be something online” affair, inspired as much by bands as the experience of spending every waking hour on Discogs and Rate Your Music and realizing, as Wolf memorably put it, “I don’t know how to be normal.”
Drunk Uncle — O, Brittle Weather!
Drunk Uncle absolutely nailed the classic Count Your Lucky Stars sound on their second album and also became the greatest emo band to have its drummer repeatedly featured on Chapo Trap House. Between Drunk Uncle and Pendejo Time, shout to Jake Rhodes: legend in two games.
The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick — The Iliad And The Odyssey And The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick
There was zero possibility of TGAATPK being anything other than a cult favorite — the Philadelphia collective merged plodding slowcore, ornate emo, and arcane political tracts into something fascinating and unwieldy, heartfelt, and obtuse on their 2020 debut. Also, their name is The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick, which could’ve been taken as a TWIABP-style parody of post-rock if it wasn’t a reference to a 1972 Wim Wenders film. Four years later, The Iliad And The Odyssey And The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick proves that TGAATPK has sharpened their craft without abandoning their egghead ambition — the vocal interplay is more coherent, the lyrics more direct, the dynamics more unpredictable. Yet it’s a bittersweet triumph as TGAATPK confirmed their future as cult favorites rather than scene leaders by breaking up months after its release.
Gulfer — Third Wind
A lot of this list pays tribute to the up-and-comers whose craft has yet to catch up with their chops and energy. This is where Gulfer were at on their 2015 debut What Gives, but fast forward nearly a decade, three albums and one Forbes 30 Under 30 later, and the Montreal quartet’s math-y, melodic emo sounds downright effortless. Indeed, while Third Wind is perhaps the most pleasurable and warm listen on this list, it felt like it… sorta breezed by, subject to the a few positive reviews, but occupying that “not novel enough for the younger emo heads, too emo for indie” space that awaits too many bands in this sphere who make it to album four. Sadly, Third Wind was the final one for Gulfer, who called it quits as one of their era’s most under-appreciated bands.
Ogbert The Nerd — What You Want
Oolong — Oolong
Both of these bands were at the forefront of a mini “early revival revival” that flowered during the darkest parts of early COVID, a time when people would take anything that carried a whiff of communal, ca. 2009 Philly basement show energy… even if it was a Quarantine Emo DJ Night on Zoom. Neither Oolong nor Ogbert The Nerd had released an album in the next four years, leading me to believe that they wholly absorbed the lessons of OGs like Algernon Cadwallader and Glocca Morra and broke up before they could reckon with a time when their newfound inspirations were out of alignment with emo. Both returned in 2024 with albums that were, in some quantifiable ways, more “ambitious” — Ogbert The Nerd integrated horns and acoustic guitars, Oolong damn near made an hour-long record in a subgenre where 35 minutes is “epic.” But the latter also strategically released their self-titled second album on 4/20, with song titles like “Flop Dawg Attitude” and “F*ck It, Leg Hands.” Both Oolong and What You Want might as well be named In Defense Of The Genre, bypassing any sort of preconceived notions of maturing to prove that you can grow up with the same scraping hooks, noodly guitars and meme-poisoned lyrics that felt revelatory at 18, rather than growing out of them.
Pomfret — You’ll Be Back When Things Fall Apart
At the 2:17 mark of “$400 ‘Everyone Get Out’ (Waltz 2),” Pomfret throw in a sonic reference that confirms their primary artistic influence. Despite the song’s title, it’s not Elliott Smith. Rather, a riff enters that’s strikingly similar to The Hotelier’s “Your Deep Rest.” It may not have been intentional, but here’s an upstart band describing themselves as “Ozark mountain emo” evoking the most popular song on the greatest emo album of its era. These things happen when albums enter the canon and, thus, the public domain and if that sounds too soon for Home, Like Noplace Is There, here’s some perspective: the members of Pomfret were nine years old in 2014. If “$400” is inspired by The Hotelier, that was the point, but if it sounds a little too much like The Hotelier, that’s just them “flying too close to the sun.” Look at the band name, the album title, the album cover — it sounds exactly like you think it would, setting raw-throated anthemics to tappity-tap guitars and endlessly obsessing over awkward social interactions that occur in an unheralded college town in the Midwest (in this case, Springfield, Missouri). It also happens to be great at this sound.
Rain Recordings — Terns In Idle
A sample of Bandcamp tags from the Stockholm-based band: “big heart,” “whimsy rock,” “chamber pop.” Maybe I’m reading too much into the Swedish connection, but this is basically meeting my decades-long ISO: “emo with 10 percent more Peter, Bjorn And John and The Radio Dept.”
Red Sun / bonus — Unnecessary Riffage
Even if the emo cognoscenti spent most of the 2010s clowning the f*ck out of them, it was only a matter of time before “RIYL: Mom Jeans” became accepted currency. I mean, those crowds were huge and some of those kids were going to start forming bands that did their whole “Midwest emo plus pop-punk” thing, minus the cringe. Oklahoma City’s Red Sun weren’t even subtle about it on Best Buds :), a word-of-mouth sensation that led to them signing with Wax Bodega, the place where emo word-of-mouth sensations tend to end up these days. The progression they’ve shown already on Unnecessary Riffage — a split with bonus, yet another 2024 word-of-mouth sensation — is enough to make “Red Sun: 2025 emo AOTY contender?” seem like a foregone conclusion… even if it won’t make me change my mind about Mom Jeans.
SeeYouSpaceCowboy — Coup de Grace
Breathless profiles in general interest music publications, Grammy nominations, an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! — if I had to pick the highly anticipated Pure Noise album that would’ve achieved those goals in 2024… I’d probably still go with You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To; After their appearances at Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza, no one could say they were unprepared for Knocked Loose going supernova.
Still, I can’t help but feel like SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s flagrant and flamboyant third album Coup de Grace deserved just as much mainstream notice, especially in a year where The Blood Brothers embarked on a wildly successful reunion tour. Yes, there’s enough sasscore abrasion to reinforce SYSC’s rep as defenders of San Diego’s white belt legacy, but befitting their more accessible bent, one of the riffs sounds exactly like “Party Hard.” Another sounds a lot like Bloc Party’s “Banquet.” It definitely sounds like it was produced by the guy who did the first Panic! At The Disco album. While all of those sounds were once siloed from each other by critics and industry heads alike, there were plenty of young fans who piled them onto the same playlists and are rewriting history decades later. A true exemplar of indie sleaze and the best 2004 album of 2024.
Southtowne Lanes — Take Care
Emo’s fifth wave was predicated on re-calibrating the sonic and philosophical underpinnings of a scene that had gotten a little too serious and striving towards the end of the revival. And that’s all well and good, but don’t you miss those searing and soaring concept albums that made its subject matter feel like a literal matter of life and death… because that’s what it was often literally about? Rick Pitino voice: Stage Four or Wildlife or The Lack Long After or Home, Like Noplace Is There wasn’t walking through that door! Well, not from any band that formed after 2014 for the time being.
Instead, it was Southtowne Lanes, an unheralded band from Eugene, Oregon eight years removed from their previous album and planning to go in a Weatherbox or All Get Out-type heartland emo direction on their next one. That is, until Matt Kupka’s father unexpectedly passed away and Take Care evolved into an album that not only went through all five stages of grief (sometimes within the span of three minutes), but sent him back to rediscover why My Chemical Romance’s “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” made him want to be a musician in the first place. In short, imagine if “Helena” sounded more like “An Introduction To The Album” and this is the baseline for the level of intensity Take Care occupies for the most unfashionably extra and awesome emo album of 2024.
Yon Loader — Yon Loader
I’ve become mildly fascinated with Apple Music’s increasing reliance upon one-line, possibly AI-generated album descriptors, and Yon Loader’s self-titled debut does not disappoint: “his self-titled album holds plenty of mathy emo rock twists.” Then again, I’m no better, since my pitch is even more succinct — “do you like Rainer Maria? It sounds like Rainer Maria.”
Your Arms Are My Cocoon — Death Of A Rabbit
While I was intrigued by Your Arms Are My Cocoon’s 2020 debut, I assumed its no-fi bedroom electro-skramz thing was a purely internet phenomenon — if live music ever did return, I wasn’t sure how this stuff would translate outside of Rate Your Music discussion boards. I caught Tyler Odom’s two-piece setup open for Home Is Where and awakebutstillinbed in 2023 and YAAMC more than held its own amidst two of the past decade’s most celebrated (albeit relatively conventional) guitars-and-drums-and-screams indie-emo bands. The kids were going nuts over them, and I had to wonder whether YAAMC had the potential to make a true mainstream breakthrough on LP2.
Death Of A Rabbit is a much more expansive affair than its predecessor — for one thing, it has mastering credits (courtesy of Will Killingsworth) and the 10:41 of “Rubber Duck” is almost as long as Your Arms Are My Cocoon. Still, it’s as immediate and immersive as one would expect from songs written and recorded in “bedrooms and kitchens and cars,” every emotion and wild idea coming through unfiltered. I’d say that Death Is A Rabbit is still a largely internet phenomenon, but that’s where emo’s sixth wave is probably taking shape. Don’t be surprised if this is one of its formative documents.
