Midwest emo: three waves of the twinkly guitar

Seattle, 1994, on Sub Pop. This is the fuse. *Diary* isn't strictly Midwest emo, but nothing here happens without it. Jeremy Enigk's voice swoops from a murmur to a howl over guitars that shimmer more than they crash, and the whole thing feels like a private diary read too loud. Every band below grew up on it.

Chicago teenagers, one gloriously chaotic record with a title longer than some of its songs. Tim Kinsella yelps and free-associates while the band lurches between hardcore and something far more tender. Half the players here (the Kinsella brothers, Davey von Bohlen, Victor Villarreal) go on to build the genre. This is the big bang.

Denver's quiet cornerstone, from 1997. *Stereo* runs slower and hazier than its peers, long reverbed songs that seem to melt at the edges. It never got the reissue-era worship American Football did, which is part of why the people who know it guard it. A foundational record hiding in plain sight.

New York by way of the wider post-hardcore diaspora, 1996, and the band that proved this stuff could soar. *Do You Know Who You Are?* is muscular and melodic at once, all rising guitar lines and open-hearted delivery. They broke up almost immediately after, which only sealed the myth.

Austin, Texas, 1997. The loud, aching heart of the second wave. Chris Simpson sings like every line costs him something, and the band swings between whispered restraint and full collapse. *The Power of Failing* is emo as devotional music, and it still floors people who come to it cold.

Milwaukee, 1997, and the record that later gave a book about emo its title. Davey von Bohlen sings with a lisp and a grin, sharpening Cap'n Jazz's mess into hooks you can actually hold. Brighter and poppier than Mineral, and no less influential. This is where emo learned to be catchy.

Champaign, Illinois, 1998, produced by J. Robbins. The technical peak of the second wave: interlocking guitar parts, two vocalists stepping on each other, stop-start rhythms that shouldn't groove but do. If you want to hear where the "math" in later math-emo comes from, start here.

Kansas City, 1999. The record that pushed the sound toward the mainstream and, whether they meant to or not, drew the map for a decade of pop-punk-adjacent emo. Big choruses, keyboards, heart on the sleeve. Purists roll their eyes; the songs win anyway.

Mesa, Arizona, 1999, the ambitious one. Before "The Middle" made them radio fixtures, Jimmy Eat World made *Clarity*, a lush, string-swept album that ends on a sixteen-minute closer. It flopped at the time and slowly became untouchable. The bridge between basement emo and something widescreen.

Urbana, Illinois, 1999. The still point the whole genre orbits. Three college kids, nine songs, one house on the cover, and guitars in tunings that turn melancholy into geometry. It sold nothing on release and became sacred text a decade later. When people say "twinkly," this is the sound they mean.

Lawrence, Kansas, 2001. This is where the genre reaches for the sky. *Low Level Owl* trades verse-chorus songs for tape loops, long instrumental drifts, and a headphone-deep atmosphere closer to post-rock than to Cap'n Jazz. Proof the twinkle could scale up into something vast.

Philadelphia, 2008, the record that lit the fuse on the revival. Algernon Cadwallader wore their Cap'n Jazz worship openly, all yelped vocals and finger-tapped guitar runs, and a wave of kids on the internet heard it as permission. Most of the bands below owe this one directly.

Allentown, Pennsylvania, 2010, and gone almost as fast as they arrived. Snowing packed frantic tapping, throat-shredded vocals, and self-deprecating wit into songs that rarely outstayed two minutes. A cult favorite of the revival's messy early years, beloved partly because there's so little of it.

Michigan, 2014, the revival's soft, sincere center. Keith Latinen sings about loss and distance in a small, trembling voice over guitars that ache more than they dazzle. Where a lot of revival bands chased speed, Empire! Empire! chased feeling, and ran their own label, Count Your Lucky Stars, to keep the scene alive.

Connecticut, 2015. Emo gone maximal. A rotating cast the size of a small orchestra turns the genre's intimacy into something sprawling and communal, layering strings, synths, and shouted group vocals. *Harmlessness* is the revival dreaming bigger than a basement.

Philadelphia, 2016, the revival growing up. *Holy Ghost* splits its songwriting between Brendan Lukens and Jake Ewald, one wrestling with mental health in the open, the other with grief, and the wry dorm-room humor of their early records curdles into something braver. A fitting place to end: the kids who found these records online, making one of their own.