We recently posted our 40 favorite albums of 2024 so far, but even a list of 40 only scratches the surface of all the albums we’ve been loving this year, so we’re diving a little deeper with some genre-specific lists and here’s a list of 10 emo & post-hardcore albums we love from 2024. The list ranges from young rising bands to others who have been honing their craft for a minute, and it touches on noodly Midwest emo, scrappy emo-pop, theatrical sass, the more indie rock-leaning side of emo, and more. Defining similar subgenres always gets kinda tricky, and we also have a punk/hardcore list with other albums from the greater punk ballpark. Read on for the emo list, in alphabetical order.
Barely Civil – I’d Say I’m Not Fine
Take This To Heart
Third time’s the charm for Milwaukee’s Barely Civil, who are swinging for the fences like never before on LP3, I’d Say I’m Not Fine. Produced by TWIABP member Chris Teti (who’s also produced Fiddlehead, Anxious, etc), the 10-song album is like a patchwork quilt of various versions of emo: post-rock-infused climaxes, screamy post-hardcore, pastoral emo-folk, anthemic hooks, some dreamier/shoegazier moments, and more. It’s a level of ambition that Teti’s own band has mastered on multiple occasions, and it feels like a torch-passing moment to have him behind the boards for this remarkable record.
Be Safe – Unwell
Count Your Lucky Stars
Be Safe is the new band led by Matt Wojcik of late 2000s / early 2010s emo revivalists Perfect Future (whose vocalist/guitarist Brendan Stephens is now in the screamo bands Overo and It Only Ends Once), and their debut album Unwell is out now on the same label Perfect Future were on back in the day, Count Your Lucky Stars. It has a little mathy/shouty Midwest emo (“Replaceable Man”), but Be Safe’s slow, somber songs sound more like a cross between Pedro the Lion and Songs: Ohia. It sounds like what people sometimes call “sadcore,” and it is indeed very sad, with lyrics that mirror a depressive spiral and a delivery that’s drenched in tangible melancholy. As Matt’s story unravels, the music remains full of constant tension, rising to some loud, crashing peaks with even the most satisfying payoffs finding a way to land back on something unsettling. Unwell is a good title.
Carly Cosgrove – The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty
Wax Bodega
Philly emo band Carly Cosgrove may have kind of a goofy exterior (their band name, many of their song titles, and some of their visuals are, after all, references to Nickelodeon’s iCarly [and, in light of recent news, their mantra is now “Fuck Dan Schneider”]), but their sophomore album The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty couldn’t be more serious. Singer/guitarist Lucas Naylor wrote the album after going through a year-long depressive episode and being diagnosed with a personality disorder in the summer of 2022, and the resulting LP is essentially a highly personal concept album detailing that experience. It’s an album that’s emotionally devastating on multiple occasions, but also an album that’s upbeat, energetic, and very fun to listen to. Picking up where their 2022 debut LP See You In Chemistry left off, Carly Cosgrove deliver the kind of scrappy, melodic indie/emo/punk hybrid that bands like Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor, and Tigers Jaw helped shape in the previous decade, and they sound even louder and tighter on this LP. They made it at Studio 4 with Justin Bartlett (who Lucas knew from his time at Temple University and who’s since gone on to work alongside Will Yip), and drummer Tyler Kramer says says the idea was to make “a big, very live-sounding record” that harnesses the energy of their live show. If you ask me, that’s exactly what they’ve done.
For much more on the themes of this LP, Lucas walked us through the entire thing, track-by-track, and you can read that here.
Carpool – My Life In Subtitles
SideOneDummy
My Life In Subtitles is Rochester emo-punk band Carpool’s third LP and first for the long-running punk label SideOneDummy, and now that they have a bigger platform than ever, they’ve clearly seized the opportunity and leveled up. They announced the album with lead single “Can We Just Get High?,” a crunchy, extremely catchy pop punk banger that made their similarly-styled breakthrough single “The Salty Song (Erotic Nightmare Summer)” sound like a first draft in comparison, and that song is just the tip of the iceberg for My Life In Subtitles. It’s also not necessarily indicative of what the rest of this album sounds like. There are other emo-punk anthems, but the album is also bookended by two piano ballads and the songs in between range from screamo to dream pop. The shapeshifting vibes keep you on your toes, and the powerful songwriting and boundless energy ties everything together. My Life In Subtitles is the sound of a good band becoming a great one.
Pick up our limited-to-100 clear vinyl variant of the Carpool record.
Glitterer – Rationale
ANTI-
For Ned Russin, nothing feels more natural than being on stage with a band, bass in hand. It’s the mode in which he performed music for nearly 15 years straight as the co-vocalist of Title Fight, but when he formed his current project Glitterer in 2017, it began as a solo project and his early shows featured nothing but Ned performing his vocals over pre-recorded instrumentals. His earliest recordings almost never even used a single guitar.
The more Glitterer has gone on, the more Ned gradually re-embraced his roots, gradually bringing back louder, more overtly punk-informed moments to his records and incorporating other musicians at his shows. Eventually, he solidified Glitterer as a full band with DC/Baltimore musicians Nicole Dao on keyboard, Jonas Farah on drums, and now-former guitarist Connor Morin, and Rationale is the first Glitterer album written and recorded democratically by a band. Ned doesn’t consider it a solo project, and it doesn’t feel like one; there’s a certain feeling that can only happen when a group of people get in a room together and feed off of each other and trade ideas, and Rationale captures that feeling. As largely a loud, punk-informed rock record, it finds Ned in his most familiar comfort zone, but it also doesn’t feel like a retread of anything else he’s done. Its production flourishes match the bright hues of the album cover, balancing out the distorted guitars and Ned’s gritty shouts with a tasteful gloss. (It was produced by Arthur Rizk, who’s worked on every Glitterer record.) Ned talked on the BrooklynVegan podcast about wanting to make aggressive guitar music that can wash over you, that you could throw on without fully paying attention to it, but then when you do pay attention, you hear what makes it so intricate and interesting. On Rationale, he did exactly that.
For more on this album, listen to our new podcast episode with Ned Russin.
Oolong – Oolong
Chungis Recordings
Oolong are a Long Island emo band but they sound more like they’re from a Philadelphia suburb circa 2007. That is to say, “emo revival revival” is very real and Oolong is carrying the torch that was lit by Snowing, Street Smart Cyclist, and Algernon Cadwallader in the dingy basements of the mid-to-late 2000s. On the new nearly-hour-long self-titled album that they surprise-released on 4/20, they sound so authentically like that era that you could have told me this record actually came out in the late 2000s and I’d probably believe you. Before you say “sounds like Snowing and Algernon” really just means “sounds like Cap’n Jazz,” it’s become clear over time that those bands brought their own perspective and their own set of influences to what Cap’n Jazz was doing, and Oolong are picking up where they left off. And I’m sure, in a few years from now, we’ll look back and see the ways that Oolong made this thing their own, if we aren’t already. They’re a tight band with a lot of energy, and it’s easy to see that Oolong are already doing for the new generation what their forebears and forebears’ forebears did for legions of Midwest-style emo fans in the past.
Red Sun – best buds 🙂
Thumbs-Up Records
If you want good old fashioned Midwest emo with a good new fashioned twist, do not miss out on the debut EP from Oklahoma City’s Red Sun. It’s got pretty much everything you want from this kind of stuff: endless guitar noodling, super catchy refrains, little doses of screamo, and that distinctly emo mix where it’s just as perfect for a sweaty basement show as it is for a packed 1000-cap club.
SeeYouSpaceCowboy – Coup De Grâce
Pure Noise
Coup De Grâce sounds like a version of the mid 2000s that never happened, one where just about every then-prevalent style of alternative rock exists in unison. Fueled by Ramen’s pop-emo theatrics? Check. Bloc Party/Yeah Yeah Yeah-style dance-punk? Also check. Underoath and Every Time I Die’s bone-crushing metalcore? It’s got that. Some Blood Brothers/Fear Before-style sassy hardcore? That’s here too. It’s no coincidence that Coup De Grâce was produced by Matt Squire, who most famously produced Panic! at the Disco’s world-conquering debut A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, and SeeYouSpaceCowboy sound intent on winning over that band’s lovers and haters alike. They blend the fashionable with the unfashionable, the abrasive with the poppy, and they do it in a way that I don’t remember any actual mid 2000s band doing it. There’s plenty on Coup De Grâce for aging millennials to get nostalgic about, but mostly, this album pushes this music forward in a way that so many other Myspace-era revivalists do not. It’s a clear step up for SeeYouSpaceCowboy and I already feel confident calling it their best yet. [A.S.]
We’ve got an exclusive neon pink vinyl variant of the SYSC LP available in the BV shop.
Southtowne Lanes – Take Care
Dog Knights
Eugene, Oregon’s Southtowne Lanes have been around for over a decade, but they took a break after releasing their 2016 debut album Give Up the Ghost and they didn’t cross my radar at all until Ian Cohen named their new sophomore album Take Care one of his five favorite albums of 2024 so far on Indiecast. Ian compared it to Home, Like Noplace Is There-era Hotelier, La Dispute, and Touché Amoré, and if that kind of stuff is up your alley, I can’t imagine you won’t like Take Care. (If The Hotelier did screamy stuff like “Life In Drag” more often, it’d probably sound a lot like Southtowne Lanes.) The record was inspired by the unexpected passing of vocalist/guitarist Matt Kupka’s father, and Matt told Background Animal that the album “song by song, dissects the stages of grief – how they relate, how they changed me, how I dealt with them, and how they led me down to the depths of my own mortality, where it seemed there could be no light.” The deeply sincere, devastatingly honest style of songwriting favored by that late 2000s/early 2010s crop of emo/post-hardcore bands lends itself to writing impactful music about familial grief (Stage Four, The Lack Long After, etc), and Take Care is a flood of emotions just like those aforementioned classics. It’s also one cathartic climax after the next, with the kinds of post-rocky buildups and top-of-your lungs refrains that only come when you’re putting every ounce of yourself into the song.
Stay Inside – Ferried Away
self-released
Emo was never as big in NYC as it was in the suburbs, but, for my money, Stay Inside are the best emo band in NYC right now. And they are very much NYC emo–their new album Ferried Away has a song about a friend who moved to the suburbs to start a family, and thinking maybe they might ditch the city and do the same (“A Backyard”). It’s like, the inverse of all those emo bands who sing about their suburban hometowns. It’s also not the only song on the album about topics that affect you after your twenties, and it’s always nice to get an emo album that bucks against the stereotype that this genre has to be juvenile. It’s also nice when the “mature” themes are matched by music that captures the thrill of emo at its most cathartic, and that’s exactly what Ferried Away does. It treks through driving emo-pop, brooding post-hardcore, breezier indie rock, and a hint of harsher screamo, with uplifting horn arrangements that take these already-great songs to the next level.
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SEE ALSO:
* 10 Best Punk & Hardcore Albums of 2024 So Far
* Our 40 Favorite Albums of 2024 So Far
* 25 Best Metal Albums of 2024 So Far
* 10 Best Rap Albums of 2024 So Far
* Indie Basement: Best Albums of 2024 So Far
* For more punk/emo features, track reviews, and more, browse the In Defense of the Genre archives
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Top photo: Stay Inside at Alphaville in 2023 by Amanda Hatfield. More here.