Recontextualizing Third Wave Emo From an Underground / DIY Perspective - Overview
Boy howdy, is there a more controversial topic in this scene than Third Wave Emo? The maligned period in the genre’s great history was also Emo’s biggest commercial boom, with Emo-Pop and Emo-Adjacent juggernauts becoming household names. The story goes that once bands like Taking Back Sunday and My Chemical Romance burst onto the scene, Emo’s dwindling Second Wave immediately died off and the ethos of the genre perished with it until some brave Revivalists brought it back from the dead in the early 2010s. However, this simplistic view minimizes the hard work that the underground, basement and DIY Emo scenes around the world were putting in during this very same span.
Some bands looked at the 15+ year history of Emo to that point and continued to push those qualities. Others sought to innovate on Emo’s established sound, especially by fusing it with different genres. Others still invoked the relatively unknown Kinsella brothers’ unique approach to Emo and expanded upon it.
Many people believe no real Emo music was released during this time and, while the purpose of this series isn’t to discredit mainstream Emo-Pop or to define what “real Emo” is, I want to dispel that notion completely and recontextualize Emo as a continued underground movement from the Second Wave to the Fourth Wave instead of the disconnected death and revival of a genre.
A few notes before we continue:
Splitting Emo into different waves isn’t even a universally agreed-upon metric for defining the genre and its characteristics, but I find it to be a fairly useful way to categorize its history.
The general timeline that’s agreed on for the Third Wave is roughly 2002-2008. I used these years as a basis for gathering releases.
I am not a grand Emo historian who’s lived through every Wave and attended millions of shows throughout the world, so if you believe I’ve incorrectly categorized an artist or release, just let me know your opinions in the comments.
I will be putting each section in roughly chronological order. Specific release dates can be hard to find so I’ll do my best to put these out in order.
This version of the list will include all of the bonus records that I've included since I finished this project, so it'll be fairly comprehensive.
🎩 = Top-Tier release from the wave
💎 = Hidden Gem release from the wave
