Emo rap: 15 records from a Tumblr collective to the top of the Billboard 200

Nobody called it emo rap in 2014, and the genre still walks through this record to get anywhere. Yung Gud and Yung Sherman made beats that sound waterlogged, and the Swedish teenager on top sings flat without apologizing for it. "Yoshi City" is the template for a lot of what follows: sad, druggy, a little funny, sung by someone who plainly wasn't trying to be a good rapper. Sky Team released it in September 2014.

A rap star's grunge record, all 26 tracks of it, released in December 2015. Critics hated it (Metacritic settled at 44), and Cudi insisted it was five years ahead of its time. He was early by about two. The singing is rough and plenty of the songs are half built, but put it next to Hellboy and the impulse is the same one: someone from hip-hop reaching for the guitar music he grew up on and not caring what rap fans think of the result.

Wicca Phase Springs Eternal started gathering GothBoiClique over Tumblr; the name came from a beat Cold Hart had made, and for a while the crew ran as a sub-group of Seattle's Thraxxhouse. Yeah It's True, the first collective tape, came out on June 25, 2016, three months before Lil Peep officially joined. It sprawls the way crew tapes always do. It also didn't reach streaming services until 2024, and the version filed here is the 2026 deluxe, which is why the year on the card looks wrong.

Peep's first great tape, and his softest. The title track sits on Brand New's "The No Seatbelt Song," "Skyscrapers" on Death Cab for Cutie's "Brothers on a Hotel Bed," and "Yesterday" leans on "Wonderwall," which tells you how little he cared about looking cool. "White Tee" is his first song with Lil Tracy. The mixes are cheap and the vocals sit low, and that is a lot of the appeal: it sounds like a fan making edits of his favorite records, because it is.

This is where the sample diary turns into a sound. Underoath's "Too Bright to See, Too Loud to Hear" runs under the title track, Bright Eyes under "Worlds Away," toe under "Fucked Up," and Avenged Sevenfold's "Unholy Confessions" under "Move On, Be Strong," with a voiceover from the animated Hellboy: Blood and Iron to open it. He was 19. It lived on SoundCloud until his family put it on streaming services for its fourth anniversary in October 2020.

Trippie Redd's voice does something nobody else here can do: it cracks upward into a yelp that sounds about to give out halfway through a word. "Love Scars" had been on SoundCloud since November 2016 and carried this May 2017 tape. It's rougher and more tuneful than the GothBoiClique records, and the Ohio rapper is the clearest bridge from that underground to the version of the sound Juice WRLD took to the charts a year later.

Seven songs in under 24 minutes, and the first time Peep sounds like he's making an album on purpose. The guitars are cleaner, the choruses are real choruses, and "Awful Things" (with Lil Tracy) and "Save That Shit" are as close as he got to pop songs. Three months after it came out he was found dead on his tour bus before a show in Tucson; the medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose of fentanyl and alprazolam.

The hardest record here to sit with. It runs 22 minutes, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, "Jocelyn Flores" is about a friend who died by suicide that May, and it debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 87,000 units. It came out on August 25, 2017, while he was awaiting trial on charges that included aggravated battery of his pregnant girlfriend; he was shot dead in June 2018 before the case was heard. It's on this list because the genre's history is false without it, not because it needs defending.

Same release day as 17. Uzi isn't an emo rapper, and that is exactly why the record belongs here. "XO Tour Llif3" went up on SoundCloud in February 2017, peaked at No. 7 on the Hot 100 with "all my friends are dead" as its hook, and closes this album, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, his first. That week the mood the GothBoiClique kids had been building on free tapes was sitting at the top of the album chart.

Joe Mulherin, from Vermont, plays the guitars instead of sampling them, and Erik Ron's production gives them the weight of an actual band. It's the most emo record on this list in the old sense: nine songs, 34 minutes, second-wave emo melodies over hip-hop low end, which is close to how Jon Caramanica put it in The New York Times. DCD2, Pete Wentz's label, released it in October 2017, a year before Mulherin moved to Fueled By Ramen.

The genre's commercial peak, made by its best hook writer. "Lucid Dreams" is built on an interpolation of Sting's "Shape of My Heart," peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, and drew a $15 million lawsuit from Yellowcard, who said it copied the melody of their 2006 song "Holly Wood Died." Sting called it his favorite of all the songs that borrowed his. Juice WRLD died in December 2019, aged 21.

Posthumous albums usually sound like somebody emptying a hard drive. This one sounds like the record Pt. 1 was pointing toward, eleven songs that keep Pt. 1's cleaner guitars and give the hooks more room. It came out on November 9, 2018, almost a year after his death, and debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200.

Adam McIlwee co-founded Tigers Jaw and left in 2013, and Suffer On is where Wicca Phase walks halfway back toward a band. It's the first Wicca Phase record he wrote entirely himself on guitar and keyboards, and it came out in February 2019 on Run For Cover, the label that had released Charmer, his last album with Tigers Jaw. Goth-pop with the 808s still underneath. DIY gave it four stars.

Where the guitar half of the idea went once SoundCloud stopped being the room everybody met in. Randall Findell builds songs out of twinkly Midwest-emo guitar, then he and Wyatt Otis chop and glitch them until they sound like hyperpop; Columbia released it on December 2, 2022, and Pitchfork gave it 7.3. It's more anxious than sad, a lot of it about living online, and it makes the best case on this list that the genre had somewhere left to go.

The man who started GothBoiClique made a folk-country record. McIlwee tracked most of it live with producer Ben Greenberg, there isn't an 808 on it, and Ethel Cain sings on "Meet Me Anywhere." It looks like an odd place to end until you remember how the genre began, with people borrowing from records older than they were. He's just borrowing from further back now. Run For Cover released it on September 19, 2025.