For Fans of Emo

Cap'n Jazz, American Football, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Promise Ring: what the Midwestern emo scene of the 90s built was not a sound so much as a posture toward the world. These bands played music that was technically complex, emotionally chaotic, and almost willfully obscure. They were not trying to get on the radio. They were trying to describe something precise about what it felt like to be young and uncertain in a landscape that offered no particular glamour. That specificity is why the records still sound so true.

The Black Parade is not just an emo album. It is a concept album in the tradition of Pink Floyd and David Bowie: a dying patient imagines the parade that will carry him away, and Gerard Way uses that framework to write about cancer, fear, the Catholic guilt of a New Jersey upbringing, and what it means to matter to people. Calling it a pop-punk record is like calling Tommy a guitar album. The grandeur was intentional, and it earned every bit of it.

Rivers Cuomo wrote Pinkerton in a dorm room at Harvard, processing a failed relationship with a Japanese woman he had never actually met in person, a hip surgery, and a creeping self-loathing about his own fame. The result was so uncomfortably confessional that it was initially dismissed as a creative failure. Within a decade it had been recognized as one of the defining documents of a generation's approach to making music. Its influence on every emo record that followed is immeasurable.

Mae Borowski drops out of college, comes back to a dying rust-belt town, hangs out with old friends, and tries to figure out what happened to her and what happens next. Night in the Woods is the only video game that credibly occupies the same emotional register as an emo record: the specific anxiety of early adulthood, the pull of nostalgia for a childhood home that no longer fits, the terrifying sense that the world has moved on without asking your permission. It is also very funny, which the best emo records often are.