By Anthony Burton, Feature Photo via Bandcamp

Ten years ago, Long Island emo stars Brand New released The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. What happened in the ten years to follow with the band, with their music, with the entire genre that they helped popularize can best be summed up with this anecdote: the band just announced that they scrapped an entire album’s worth of new material, on the grounds that it couldn’t hold a torch to Devil and God. As for the bands that made up the emo landscape around them — Taking Back Sunday, Fall Out Boy, and others — have either moved squarely onto the pop spectrum or shovelled out uninspired attempts to beat the same horse. For an entire genre whose star was shining bright in the MSN messenger days, what went wrong?

First, a brief history. Emo as a genre, the melodizing of hardcore instrumentation with an intimate nasal narration of confessional lyrics, started in the 80s with Rites of Spring, but it didn’t really fulfill itself until the mid-90s with bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and Jawbreaker (picture a less-Romantic Dashboard Confessional.) Then, in the early aughts, we move into the pop-punky melodrama of bands like Taking Back Sunday and early Brand New. These bands saw the restrained angst of mid-90s soft spoken lyricists moving towards more open, heart-on-sleeve confessions. To pinpoint a specific moment that emo burst into the mainstream, it’s probably sometime around when Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated” featured on the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack. What was either dismissed as being too unsubtle or overwrought now had an audience in the type of person to find Tobey Maguire and Kristin Dunst’s love arc the perfect level of romantic. Suddenly, it was very ok to be angsty, and high school mixtapes got a lot more direct.

But this newfound exposure for the genre in 2004 immediately lead to a bit of a schism. On the one hand, you had bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and even Panic! At the Disco co-opt the ethos of emo on a purely aesthetic level while making music that catered to an early tween pop-loving crowd (Pete Wentz at the Superbowl!). On the other hand, you had bands like Brand New and their arch-nemesis Taking Back Sunday trying to move this 90s emo into something more commercial while keeping the ethos in the sound itself. Through their early work, you can see an attempt at making something a little more permanently angst-based than the hormonal changes informing their contemporaries.

So what’s an emo band to do in the context of the commercial blitz of Dashboard-style directness and Panic!-induced sugar highs? Get a little more depressed in the truly melancholy sense of the term. Brand New was already halfway there with 2003’s Deja Entendu, an album that combined the high school mixtape jams of their previous efforts but hinted at something more sinister in tracks like “Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades.” Taking Back Sunday also picked this route, with 2004’s Where You Want to Be a mature and measured attempt to create a sonic landscape that reflected the emotion so often espoused in their lyrics. Where You Want to Be is a very good album, and a definite step into demarcating a space for a third wave of emo that wouldn’t fall victim to the seduction of performative pop angst, but Taking Back Sunday couldn’t stick the landing. Their follow-up, 2005’s Louder Now, shooting for arenas while trying to maintain the melodrama, a smashing of atoms that didn’t necessarily work in the same way.

Brand New sat and waited, and in 2006 finally released The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. The album hints at its essence with the cover and the title. The intro to opening track “Sowing Season (Yeah)” is a creepy echo that makes you wait anxiously for the good-hearted respite of the band’s poppier days. Then, all of 62 seconds into the album, the band crashes in with a riff and a scream that clouds the rest of the album in some anxiety. For the most part, it’s just a relentless, draining spiral of emotion without that glimmer of hope characteristic of the bands around them.

The link between what emo had become and high school was pretty well-established at this point in time. The sound best epitomized by the scrawl-on-your-notebook lyrics of Fall Out Boy (“Are we going up? / Or just going down? / It’s just a matter of time until we’re all found out”) or, even, early Brand New (“I remember I kept thinking / That I know you never would / And now I know I want to kill you / Like only a best friend could”) had its ass firmly planted on the cafeteria table that wistfully looks over to the cool kids. But what’s crucial about the geist that Devil and God was working out from is the glimmer of hope that’s built into this experience of high school: let’s see where Johnny Football is in ten years. Devil and God has none of this light at the end of the tunnel, tonally, and lyrically. It trends downward on album closer “Handcuffs,” where Lacey is resigning himself to claustrophobic moral failure. “I’d arrest you if I had handcuffs / I’d arrest you if I had the time,” he laments, with the conditional here delivered by the voice of someone filled with aspirations long past their best-before date. It’s an ending, structurally, but also on a broader level: in the midst of a magnum opus that is exactly such because it spends its time digesting the emotions usually worn out on the sleeve, Lacey seems to know that there’s no way forward from this, no blueprint of development laid out.

The last ten years have shown us that he might have, unfortunately, been right. The only other Brand New album to come out, 2009’s Daisy, is a not-entirely-successful attempt at deconstructing their own sound, with fuzzy radio interludes and disjointed sequencing that only says what it wants to say on a formal level. We’ve got this year’s scrapped album as further proof of the grave that the band dug for itself. Taking Back Sunday floundered after Louder Now, their stadium shots growing more tired as time passed. Most recently they’ve released an Americana album, that shot in the dark manoeuvre of a band lacking in steam. My Chemical Romance managed to parlay themselves into making seriously good rock music with a bit of edge, but they jumped out of the emo paradigm fairly quickly. We all know how much shapeshifting Panic! At the Disco has done. Fall Out Boy play easily palatable pop punk pablum at Superbowl halftime shows. The closest remnant from this era of emo is probably method fetishist Jared Leto’s 30 Seconds to Mars, but that’s all cynically affected angst. There hasn’t been much in the way of artistry to wring out of the emo approach.

In a hiccup of time, we need to revisit bands like Sunny Day Real Estate for the right context in which to place Devil and God. Mid-90s emo was affected, but it was such to get its point across: the affect was part of the message and complementary to the lyrics, as opposed to the main event. There’s a yearning “cool older brother” element to bands like Sunny Day: a little inaccessible, a hiding of the rest by presenting what is seemingly all there is. Devil and God makes this same feint, wearing its heart on its sleeve in a form alien enough to their contemporary landscape that it reaches beyond how we usually understand it. And that, in it’s own way, is the ethos of emo — creating something to identify with based on the inability to identify with much else. But if Brand New has taught us anything, it’s a sadly ironic lesson: the same band that identified the deepest recesses of our angst can’t seem to get anything else out.