Summer of Screamo is a month-long, weekly column spotlighting new, recent, and upcoming releases in screamo, emoviolence, and generally offbeat hardcore.Screamo very easily could’ve died off and become a mere footnote in the history of hardcore. The emotionally earnest subgenre saw its rise and fall in the brief period from the mid 90s to the early 2000s, right before the boom of Myspace and streaming services could spread its reach to a wider audience. Without proper internet documentation, the music had to rely on good old-fashioned physical records to be preserved. The problem was, vinyl pressings were small and distribution was smaller. Most documents of this era fetch a high price on Discogs these days due to their rarity. But while screamo seemed to completely disintegrate after its most notable acts hung up their guitars, the genre has been kept at a simmer over the last decade by a few devoted disciples, and it’s now starting to boil over.
There’s currently an outright glut of new screamo bands cropping up all over the world, and the genre is arguably more active now than it’s ever been. No longer reliant on mailorder distros and touring bands to spread the word by hand, the internet generation has unprecedented access to screamo’s rising acts.While screamo has long been defined by a handful of benchmark albums—Saetia’s sole LP in 1998, Orchid’s Gatefold LP in 2002, pg. 99’s [feel free to argue over which Document]—all of them pre-date 2005. Screamo’s new class is currently busy mapping out what comes next. These typically younger musicians pay respects to their forebears, albeit semi-ionically at times. They often wink at the genre’s sillier hallmarks, like its completelylowercasesongtitles, its period.heavy.band.names, and its Intro to Design-level of font usage. But self-awareness aside, the spirit of the movement remains the same. The subgenre still exists to buck against the worst and most lunkheaded tendencies that hardcore has to offer, whether it be its chugga-chugga breakdowns, its fashion trend fixations, or its machismo-driven circle pits. Screamo is an outright affront to the modern hardcore scene and all its goofy turns and styles.Below is a list of bands revitalizing the genre. And before I get nailed to the meme cross in the skr*mz boards on genre technicalities, let me offer the disclaimer that I might expand the malleable “screamo” umbrella to encompass powerviolence, grindcore, emoviolence, and whatever other dumb signifiers get attached to generally unmoshable hardcore. So please, find it in your hearts to have mercy on me if my hyperspecific categorizations of music nerdery don’t precisely align with yours. Thank you.
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Respire
MASSA NERA
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Gillian Carter
Portrayal of Guilt
Portrayal of Guilt represents the bridge between modern screamo and the scene of yesteryear. This month, the band released a five-inch picture disc (that I will gleefully purchase and never listen to a single time). It was produced by Majority Rule’s Matt Michel, a fact that’s immediate from the start, as his familiar grimey sheen from classics like Emergency Numbers bleeds through. The band has also been readying a highly anticipated LP to be released this fall that is a downright astounding assault of various hardcore styles, from fast-paced screamo to chaotic doom, and everything in between. It might end up being the best hardcore record that comes out this year (although it’ll probably need to take a seat behind that bewildering record by The Armed, who somehow successfully took Genghis Tron’s pioneering electrogrind sound and mixed it with Kurt Ballou’s glossy Converge-like production). Just utterly jaw-dropping. In the meantime, the seven-inch they released last year (also mastered by Jack Shirley) offers all the primer you need on them.
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NØ MAN
Soul Glo
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Supine
What of Us
Hundreds of AU
The Ultimate Screamo Band
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