the shape of screamo

Genre & History by /u/arglwydes

Screamo's heyday was like 1998-2006, give or take a year there. There were some early 90s bands (Portraits of Past, Angel Hair), mostly in CA, playing stuff that actually sounds like late 90s screamo, but they would have just been called emo back then and the bands would have denied being emo. Even if they leaned into the emo aesthetic, most bands rejected the label. A few of those bands started doing the studded belt and black hair dye thing that would eventually become the exaggerated scene kid look. That grew out of Gravity and 31G bands, but supposedly it can be traced back to Ian Svenonius from Nation of Ulysses who kind of did that, but with a curly fro while wearing a suit.

Screamo stayed underground while a lot of other emo was merging with pop punk and metalcore. From 99-02, you had The Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World becoming more and more poppy. Jason Oda, creator of Emo Game, called emo "not entirely underground but not entirely mainstream" right around that time. Long Island bands that worshipped Lifetime were starting to develop a sound that fit right in with New Found Glory, The Starting Line, and whatever other bands were riding the wave from Green Day, The Offspring, and Good Charlotte's popularity. A lot of these bands would play together at Warped Tour. Taking Back Sunday came out with Tell All Your Friends in 02, on Victory Records. Victory had been putting out tons of metalcore and toughguy stuff up until that point. Emo bands started getting T-shirts sold at Hot Topic and you started to see a division between the underground punk diy scene and the above-ground mallcore scene. I remember Hawthorne Heights putting out their first full length on Victory in 04 and it felt like something had changed. They were copping TBS's sound, and not well. There was a stigma against being into the mallcore stuff if you hung out with the underground people, but a lot of underground folks listen to it anyway. On the flipside, most mallcore kids didn't know anything about the underground scene.

The word "screamo" started to get applied to the screamier side of these mallcore bands- Thursday, Thrice, UnderOath, Atreyu, Poison the Well, Story of the Year... There was little to no crossover with the underground scene, except for Thursday. Those dudes started out in the same local scene as You & I. The mallcore screamo tended to be more influenced by the Victory Records kind of metalcore moreso than any actual screamo. By the mid 00s, you had a lot of people talking about the underground stuff as "real screamo" and eventually "skramz". "Skramz" was supposedly coined by one of the guys from Seeing Means More in a thread from an old forum called Cross My Heart With a Knife. I wasn't active on CMHWAK back in the day, I was on last.fm where I first started seeing people talk about skramz. It felt like a joke, but it caught on because it was useful to distinguish between the mallcore stuff.

By 2005, My Chemical Romance had gotten huge. Emo kids were now called EMOs (often in all caps for some reason) or just "scene kids". The emover and studded belt aesthetic had kind of gone mainstream by that point. At least, it had clearly become a dominate highschool subculture. Even Green Day was touring in eyeliner. Jason Oda's "not entirely underground, not entirely mainstream" didn't really feel true anymore.

I was in college around that time and going to every skramz show I could get to without access to a car. We had a local band called Love Always, Your Friend. They were based out of a warehouse called Mierda Verde that had tons of punk shows. Their guitarist was more into crust and metal stuff, he had really long hair. The vocalists were more into emo and had more of that look. They would play with their backs to the audience with no introduction. They'd just play their two songs and that's how you knew the show had started. I'm pretty sure those guys smoked a lot of weed, not straight edge at all.

Because every punk venue needs a kitchy name, we had one called The Owl Sanctuary. I saw I Would Set Myself on Fire For You there. The girl who lived there had a hardcore show on the local college radio station and would organize a music festival called Slut Fest but that was a lot of toughguy hardcore. She played some screamo on her show, I shadowed her when I was training for a board operator license and I remember her playing some Ampere.

Mierda Verde got shut down by the fire department and those dudes moved out to a different warehouse on the other side of town they called The Tomb. Love Always, Your Friend kinds of went defunct. The local scene went more in a crust/metal/grind direction and I lost interest. I did play in a band with one of the vocalists a few years later and the local scene was mostly dead by then. What was left was not screamo at all. By 2010, you had Loma Prieta leading a bit of a skramz revival out in CA and Algernon Cadwallader pushing the twinkeldaddy stuff that would really catch on by the mid 2010s. I had checked out by that point.

I saw Ampere at a house show here around 2007. Will Killingsworth and their drummer dressed like normal people. Their vocalist and bassist had kind of an understated emo look. I had no idea who they were (not much in the way of youtube back then), so I just showed up and started talking to them thinking they were random scenesters there for the show. They were eating vegan barbecue and I think Stephen had recently broken his collarbone delivering packages in NY.

Going back to the 90s, we used to have a lot of emo bands come through. Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses, and Bikini Kill came and played a venue called The Loft. The Loft was around for 20 or 30 years, so that was before my time, but they still had fliers from those shows. They also had a lot of pop punk and mallcore shows in the 00s. I saw Silverstein and From Autumn to Ashes there. Circle Takes the Square played there in 06. None Left Standing was a 90s emo band based out of house here called the Posi Palace. They shared a drummer with one of my friends' bands. Their guitarist went on to be in The Promise Ring. The Promise Ring and Braid played the student union here all the time. Bob Nanna, from Braid, would do solo acoustic stuff here all the time before he got cancer. Maritime (half of The Promise Ring) did too. We eventually got a TPR reunion show around 2010 or 11.

Most screamo shows were in basements. The merch table usually had a milk crate full of random vinyl that some band member was trying to get rid of. It was a good way to find niche records. If it was at a real venue, they almost never played on the stage. The only bands I've seen use the stage were Envy and CTtS, and every other band at those shows played on the floor with the crowd. You found out about shows from local fliers on telephone poles or bands' myspace pages. Pure Volume was a site for bands, but that was more for the mallcore scene. Everyone, even the diy punks, had a myspace by like 2005. Facebook was limited to college students back then, and bands couldn't have their own accounts yet. A lot of emo records were only released on vinyl, so you couldn't find them online until right about then. People started ripping them and sharing them on SoulSeek (a file sharing program that was big with scene). Older bands started putting out discography CDs in the early 00s.

Some favorite memories- getting Chinese food with Circle Takes the Square in Montclair, NJ. The tall dude from IWSMOFFY offering to sell me and my friend a bloody shoe because "it's totally screamo". The Vocalist from Bear vs Shark bear-hugging my roommate mid-song just to be weird. Maritime playing in my dorm building cause their outdoor show had gotten rained out. Buying merch from Bob Nanna and Billy Werner who were both super cool dudes (also got a shirt from Mike Kinsella and he was kind of a dick). Vocalist from Love Always bled all over my guitar, handed it back to me and said "don't worry, I don't do any needle drugs." One time I was setting up a show for Who Calls So Loud that didn't happen cause they broke up, but I got to talk to Matt Bajda over the phone. Also got to see Ian MacKaye give a talk on campus here and people mostly asked him about the origin of the word emo and growing up with Henry Rollins.