A couple of weeks ago, on the day the Supreme Court ruled for absolute presidential immunity, I went to an emo show.

Specifically, to see Hawthorne Heights headlining their Twenty Years of Tears tour with I See Stars, Anberlin, Armor for Sleep, Emery and This Wild Life… making it the best emo throwback gathering I’ve been to since last year’s Riot Fest.

The show itself was stellar, of course (even though I missed the openers):

I never thought I’d get to see Armor for Sleep play live, but it’s happened twice this year. It’s impossible not to feel it when they play tracks from What to Do When You Are Dead, especially “The More You Talk the Less I Hear” and “Car Underwater.”

Anberlin, being my favorite band, was the set that I threw my limited old-man energy into. The fans have voiced concerns about Matty Mullins acting as their temporary touring vocalist, but he killed it with the same level of energy Stephen Christian brings to the stage… and even that was with their set being cut in half due to technical difficulties.

I See Stars goes even harder than when I last saw them (Warped Tour 2016, which feels like an eon ago). I wasn’t expecting theirs to be the hardest set of the night—despite how intense some of their songs get—but theirs was the largest and wildest pit.

These bands are part of a larger trend in the overall emo/metal scene, these past few years. All were successful and highly influential in the scene and even beyond it in the 2000s, but petered out at various points in the 2010s. Their reunions are part of this larger revival, which you can call punk or emo or alternative or even one component of fifth-wave emo but, the fact remains that five years ago, this show wouldn’t have happened.

The rumblings for the revival might have been there, but I think it took the increase in the worldwide and day-to-day horrors that began accelerating in 2020 to jumpstart it. Because here’s a hard truth for fans of alternative music: the worse shit gets out here, the better our music becomes. The more necessary it becomes, an outlet for us to scream with, cry with, a space in which we can simply be not okay. Nowadays, with the destigmatizing of mental health issues, that space has grown larger, but things have become so uniformly fucked in the world and in our lives that we still need a darker space, where we can sit and listen or stand in a big room with a bunch of other sad kids who kinda grew up, but haven’t really been able to, and be, collectively, not okay.

So, this post is a bit of a downer… but, c’mon, it’s about emo music.

Just as the music gets better, it gets more popular. When most people think of emo music, it’s bands like Paramore and MCR that come to mind, the third-wave mall emo that, at sixteen, roundhouse-kicked you right in the heart. But that time also had the War on Terror, Islamophobia, conservatism and the resulting conformist violence that accompanies it. As plenty of emo fans know, My Chemical Romance was founded after Gerard Way watched the towers come down. The emo we grew up with was a direct response to, and death-growl against, a society that we didn’t fit into and didn’t even want to fit into. Could the bands I saw in June 2024 have all toured together in June 2004? Absolutely.

(Okay, except for I See Stars. They didn’t form until 2006, but the point still stands.)

So the world hasn’t changed much for the good, not in a fundamental way. Maybe it’s cyclical, but that sounds like a lazy excuse to write off how it feels like the human species takes a step and a half forward, then a half-step back. And sometimes, we just stand in place and spin around in circles until we throw up.

Not to say that emo (and alternative music in general) is only good when shit sucks. It just gets way more popular.

So. I stood in a room with a couple hundred other grown-up emo kids and enjoyed the show. I’m sure that in the back of our collective mind was the Supreme Court ruling, and the upcoming elections (this was before the assassination attempt), and whatever the hell is going on with the Biden nomination, and the myriad personal problems that compress the sadness and frustration into us—and conversely make the spaces and times in which we can let them out that much more explosive. It wasn’t a transcendent experience, but we had fun, and a big part of that was just accepting that shit sucks and you can either cry about it, or go to a show and yell about it. Or both. Either are valid responses to all this absurdity.

Hawthorne Heights headlined, and since this tour was for the twenty-year anniversary of The Silence in Black and White, they played it all the way through. “Ohio is for Lovers” being one of the emo anthems, they of course saved it for last. JT likes to spend a good amount of time onstage talking about how important this music and the scene is—he deeply understands just how much it all means to so many people, and the band’s gratitude makes their sets that much better. Here’s to hoping that when I see them again in 2044, throwing out my hip in the pit, that we won’t be carrying the same fears into it that we did in 2024 or 2004. Maybe we’ll just be here for the nostalgia.

And fun Chicago fact, but that album was recorded in Chicago, and “Ohio is for Lovers” was written because JT was here and missing his girlfriend back in Dayton. He even said that Chicago is one of the song’s parents (the other being Dayton).

Photo credit: @HawthorneHgts