This year’s Best Friends Forever festival featured a reunited Texas Is The Reason and Knapsack, Burning Airlines, Rival Schools, Jawbreaker, Mineral’s final show, and a Jimmy Eat World headlining set that featured as many songs from Static Prevails as Bleed American; Even then, “Sweetness” and “The Middle” were tacked on last as a veritable encore, existing outside of the spirit of the preceding weekend where Jim Adkins reminisced about his days of dragging bass cabs up staircases and having slept on floors with everyone on the lineup over the age of 40. And yet, while I left Las Vegas inevitably overcome by nostalgia, it wasn’t for late-’90s emo, even as someone who is in the process of literally writing a book about late-’90s emo.
Rather, I found myself incapacitated with longing during otherwise perfectly enjoyable afternoon sets from Pity Sex and Tigers Jaw. Staring off wistfully into the middle distance, thinking, “Man, the mid-2010s were a time.” Whether or not you believe it was a peak time for emo music, it was unquestionably a peak time for emo music’s documentation. Even if it was reductive, the narrative helped: Emo was viewed not just as a repudiation of the previous era of Bamboozle and Warped Tour hegemony, but a counterbalance for indie rock getting a little too slick. Not just in terms of the stylish, synth-pop that was being championed as “indie” at the time, but the increasing lack of friction between pop artists and publications genuflecting for access. Bands like Tigers Jaw and Pity Sex may not have displaced the Vampire Weekends or Haims of the world, but they were at least part of the same dialogue, which had never been true for emo even during its supposed golden age.
Oh, how I long for the days of seeing a dozen modestly positive reviews for Run For Cover bands! I say this not even as a writer, just as a consumer of emo music. Sometimes I have no idea what’s actually making noise in the scene. Chalk it up to the continuing decimation of music publications or the prevailing form of emo not being of interest to more, ahem, refined critical tastes. Or, chalk it up to me not being willing to get in the trenches on TikTok or Reddit or X, or even able to figure out where these bands are being discussed with both intensity and intelligence. But if you were reliant on mainstream music publications to keep you up to speed on emo, it may as well not have existed at all in 2025. Hot Mulligan is on the same line of the Bonnaroo lineup as Wet Leg and Blood Orange and I saw barely anything written about their last album. I worried about whether some of the bands on this list were too obvious for inclusion and yet… can anything in this genre be accused of overexposure in 2025?
I feel like I say this every year and maybe it’s just confirmation bias: Though plenty of bands leveled up within the scene, I’m not sure I can point to any emo album from 2025 breaking containment, being the “token emo” (or even punk) album on year-end lists. If there are still publications willing to run Best Emo Album Of All Time lists in 2030, what will represent the 2020s? Are there modern classics that are being acknowledged in the underground or is this period similar to 1991-1993 or 2007-2009 which tend to get glossed over on past lists?
Or, are we overlooking the next Marietta? If I remember Best Friends Forever for anything, it won’t be Mineral’s farewell or Jimmy Eat World playing a song they did on a Jebediah split to thousands of people at a Las Vegas festival in 2025, but the absolutely bonkers reception I witnessed for a band that seemed to exist in the middle tier of whatever emo iceberg was being passed around in 2015. To make things clear, big fan of Marietta over here. Definitely got into some minor skirmishes upon saying that As It Were was a superior album to Summer Death. But I never once got the impression that they were viewed as scene leaders, and in the time since, I hadn’t heard them being name-dropped as massive influences on the newer wave of emo bands, or seeing Summer Death fetch Just Married-style prices on Discogs. Yet, based on the fevered reaction of the crowd, you’d think Title Fight or Modern Baseball had reunited (and, inevitably, the wishcasting began for a Best Friends Forever 2026 headlined by one of those two bands). I asked the bookers how this iteration of Best Friends Forever compared to the previous one and, despite leaning even more heavily into the ’90s, they said the crowd was noticeably younger this time around.
The point being that, even when emo bands break containment and are being canonized in real time, there’s still no guarantee we’ll “get it right” for the future. That’s what makes following emo so thrilling and frustrating: It’s a genre by the kids, for the kids, for the moment rather than posterity. So I might as well just admit that this list isn’t meant to capture a moment in time or even predict 2035’s 10-year retrospectives. Washed as it might seem, these are just the emo albums I enjoyed the most in 2025, presented in alphabetical order (and they are albums, so apologies to My Point Of View and Febuary and really, most of the screamo bands I enjoyed this year).
Algernon Cadwallader — Trying Not To Have A Thought
There’s an alternate universe where this album is emo’s answer to Clipse’s Let God Sort ‘Em Out: an unexpected reunion rubber-stamped by old heads who have their suspicions of the last decade or so confirmed, that sh*t was better back in my day. And yes, I’m a 45-year old telling you that Trying Not To Have A Thought is the best emo album of 2025, but it’s not because Algernon Cadwallader picked up right where they left off at Parrot Flies. Rather, it’s as if the original quartet kept Algernon Cadwallader going in secret for the past 15 years alongside their newer projects, slowly integrating the classic indie jangle of Dogs On Acid, the oblong rhythms of Hop Along, decades worth of political activism that went unheeded during the emo revival, and the production know-how Joe Reinhart honed with Joyce Manor and Modern Baseball. Peter Helmis has never sounded more in control of his voice (which means he knows how to lose control), the hooks are sharper, the lyrics more pointed, the jams are groovier, making good on their promise of “Joan Of Arc meets Pavement” — a once frankly inconceivable nexus between emo diehards and college rock snobs who have a lot more in common thanks to Algernon Cadwallader’s catalog. Trying Not To Have A Thought doesn’t just raise the bar for the bands Algernon influenced, it did so for indie rock as a whole in 2025. I’ll still call it the best emo album of the year even if I know that sells it short.
Anxious — Bambi
The one-off singles after Little Green House were too catchy, the guy from One Step Closer is no longer in the band, and the guy who was in a Broadway production of School Of Rock was now writing half the songs. Hell, Anxious was just too damn photogenic to limit their ceiling to “we have Title Fight at home” when “can someone make a Jimmy Eat World album?” has been an open question for the past six years. Of course, Anxious were going to “level up” into pure pop-rock on their sophomore album. But even if Bambi was inevitable, the level of craftsmanship in “Counting Sheep” and “Some Girls” still manage to stun, a perfect balance of emo sentimentality, harmonic complexity and the occasional scrim of New England angst to remind everyone why it’s on a Best Emo Albums list.
Aren’t We Amphibians — Parade! Parade!
In the scope of emo history, San Diego is probably the only city with a more deadly serious reputation than Washington D.C. — the birthplace of screamo, white belts and Spock haircuts and Drive Like Jehu. “Fun” bands working within this realm typically either make sasscore or sound like Blink-182. But it’s 2025 and even San Diego State has a handful of kids who are making Midwest emo TikTok stitches — someone’s gotta represent for them. Enter Aren’t We Amphibians, who began the year with 2025’s most impactful four-way split and held serve on their debut Parade! Parade!. It’s extremely hard to stand out in the crowded field of post-Gami Gang emo-pop, and it’s all the more impressive that AWA don’t have a specific quirk or gimmick; Rather, Parade! Parade! is all about balance, between goofiness and earnest ambition, skramz and pop, yearning for a Midwest basement scene and when San Diego feels like a grim holding cell.
Arm’s Length — There’s A Whole World Out There
I try not to let peer pressure shape this list, though it’s increasingly difficult to not anticipate “where’s so and so?” clogging up my mentions. That said, I think Arm’s Length would be the only band who would be offended by their omission — they just take emo that seriously. The Hotelier, La Dispute, Pianos Become The Teeth: these are the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Stones for this Canadian trio. Actually, let’s get more specific — “Your Deep Rest” is their “God Only Knows,” the epitome of what all songwriting should aspire to. That was also true of Arm’s Length’s 2022 debut Never Before Seen, Never Again Found and they’ve only grown more intense in their evangelism on its follow-up. Suicide, body dysmorphia, generational trauma, substance abuse, existential dread, and not a single moment of levity course throughout There’s A Whole World Out There, an album that speaks entirely in life-or-death stakes: “ROMANTICIZE THE F*CKING PAST FOR ONCE, YOU COULDN’T EVEN DIE IF YOU TRIED, FIRST OF THE FAMILY TO DIE OF OLD AGE.” These are the hooks and they’re all enormous and delivered with unshakeable conviction. It all teeters on the edge of being ridiculous because that’s where the action is for the kind of emo Arm’s Length are making, one that’s only over-dramatic or extra in retrospect and never in the moment to the person who relates to it even in the slightest.
First Day Back — Forward
The original iteration of Midwest emo couldn’t have happened without the financial advantages that came with the territory — a relatively cheap cost of living, readily accessible basements and VFW halls, massive land-grant university towns starved for live music and a lack of industry attention, and competition that allowed early awkward phases to happen in relative peace. But at their core, these bands were just made up of misfits from the neighborhood who found refuge from high school football in Fugazi. So it’s not all that shocking that the most convincing piece of second-wave Midwest emo in 2025 comes from a band out of Santa Cruz — in a city overrun by acid-fried psych rock, how stoked would you be to find three or four other 20-somethings willing to name a band after a Braid song? While the referentiality serves as the entry point, the title of First Day Back’s debut is just as important: Forward starts out with an off-key scream and the momentum never relents, its straight-to-tape immediacy evident even during the violin instrumentals. Now let’s just hope they didn’t internalize the part where legendary Midwest emo bands break up after their breakthrough album.
Good Luck — Big Dreams, Mister
Shortly after the release of Big Dreams, Mister, my colleague Nina Corcoran boasted of seeing Good Luck, “Playing at the back of a bar at midnight to a sold-out crowd of people grinning wildly and singing along.” Granted, said bar is a 100-cap room and unless you count Jeff Rosenstock’s social media accounts, that was really about it as far as mainstream coverage for Good Luck’s first album in 14 years. It’s just as well — though 2008’s Into Lake Griffy was beloved by many of the same people flipping out over Algernon Cadwallader’s similarly timed comeback, Good Luck was your favorite band’s favorite band, “underappreciated” if you only count the number of appreciators rather than the intensity of the love. And on Big Dreams, Mister, the Bloomington, Indiana trio take stock of what it means to keep soldiering on when the scene has dispersed, to heed the spark of creation as a pure labor of love and reaffirm their influence on any emo band that liked to teetered on the edge of jangle-pop and folk-punk. You could call this stuff “elder emo” if TikTok hadn’t already turned that term into the most embarrassing sh*t imaginable.
Home Is Where — Hunting Season
Here’s a freebie for anyone looking to get a jump on 2026 thinkpieces: In a couple of months, Pinegrove’s Cardinal celebrates its 10th anniversary. Beyond that band’s still inconceivable legacy as a flashpoint for late-2010s cancel culture and scene self-policing, it’s worth exploring whether emo’s relationship with country music has progressed all that much in the past decade. There’s no shortage of bands who are comfortable with throwing a banjo in the mix or a little geographically ambiguous twang, but how many sound truly country? I offer Home Is Where’s raucous third LP Hunting Season, which could pass for “Southern rock” if it wasn’t for the twisty, tappy guitar leads and surrealist imagery that makes it immediately identifiable as the product of the same band who made “Conjoined Long Distance Twins” and “Assisted Harakiri.” Now living as an exile from their home state, Bea McDonald offers her funniest and most frightening treatise on the duality of the Florida Thing — somehow both quintessentially American and a grotesque mutation, an overheated ecosystem that spawns both the lovable eccentrics that populate McDonald’s lyrics and the hatred that forced her out.
Key Vs. Locket — I Felt Like A Sketch
Is hyperpop the new emo? By that, I mean, “Is hyperpop the misunderstood genre that teenage artists make before they transition to more mature styles of music?” I realize it’s a small sample size and I’m by no means an authority to speak on larger trends in this world, but I couldn’t help but notice the likes of Jane Remover, Brakence, Quannnic, Quadeca, and Twikipedia being passed my way every time I’ve expressed feeling that emo was stuck in a major rut. Weren’t those all hyperpop acts? They were, and at some point, decided to get serious by making music that could be described in some way as “emo-esque,” if not emo itself. Imagine that! When I saw r/emo and Album Of The Year buzzing over Key Vs. Locket, I assumed it couldn’t have come out of nowhere, and indeed, the Brazil-to-Brooklyn artist is the same person behind Twikipedia’s equally buzzed-over 2024’s For The Rest Of Your Life. I Felt Like A Sketch jettisons the shoegaze/hyper-pop hybrid of its immediate predecessor but maintains the “anything goes” mindset of the highly online, smattering its well-thought out twinkles with chamber pop, ska, jazz, and bossa nova. It’s an album brimming with ideas and often thrilling execution, a glimpse of emo’s future if Key Vs. Locket doesn’t up and change their whole identity in a year.
Sport — In Waves
“The last thing we need to do is re-litigate the definition of ‘twinkle daddy,'” I dunno about that. If you’re reading (let alone writing) an emo album ranking list in 2025, that’s well within our wheelhouse. So let’s take it back to 2013 or so, when that term actually had some critical utility to describe a variant of the genre that had the requisite sparkly arpeggios alongside some burly, bearded vocals that wouldn’t be out of place opening for Hot Water Music. Crash Of Rhinos, Dikembe, Hightide Hotel, things of that nature. “Weed emo” or whatever you want to call the wave that started in 2016, pretty much wiped that stuff out and so of course the best revival of this sound had to come from a French act that last released an album in… 2016. Even if no less than 13 European labels are handling its distribution, Sport isn’t fooling anyone — In Waves is for the heads. But don’t mistake its throwback sound as complacent nostalgia. At once prettier and tougher than their previous albums (“this song is a tribute to Werner Herzog / there’s a man with vision” goes the intro of “Caveat,” straight #bars), In Waves brims with purpose, a labor of love from a band proudly out of time.
Weatherday — Hornet Disaster
“Sprawling,” “expansive” — throw these words into an emo album review and I’m almost guaranteed to check it out. Due to the genre’s predominant trends, I didn’t see them much this year, but here we have Weatherday’s 19-track, 76-minute behemoth of a second album trying to make up for the rest for their peers playing smallball. And really, what else could Sputnik do six years after Come In, which was putting up Barry Bonds numbers at Rate Your Music (i.e., going toe to toe with Car Seat Headrest, which I suppose is the Sammy Sosa of this metaphor)? As with Glass Beach’s Plastic Death and Your Arms Are My Cocoon’s self-titled last year, Hornet Disaster was a long-gestating sophomore bow not forged in the crucible of incessant touring or escalating commercial expectations or a stunning stylistic shift. Rather, it’s the work of an artist going inward while their musical palette broadens; In the case of Hornet Disaster, Weatherday transcends their origins as “internet music” and draws from the crackling immediacy of Guided By Voices (when the songs are short) and the world-building of early Microphones (when the songs are long), a truly immersive experience that marks a boundary around everything else until its dream logic is the law of the land.
