By 2004, the emo boom was really boomin’. Emo was just the pop music of its time at this point (one form of it, at least), and bands in the Victory/Vagrant/Drive-Thru mold were popping up left and right. It’s the year things started to get a little too oversaturated, so it makes sense why a lot of the great bands in this world wanted to break from that mold in the years that followed–some were already doing that in 2004. A lot of mainstream emo started to look and sound the same around this time, but there was (obviously) a lot more going on within the genre than what was being shown on MTV. To look back on this pivotal year for this enduring style of music, I’ve put together a list of the 15 best emo and post-hardcore albums of 2004, and it ranges from massive hit albums to underground gems, from anthemic pop-emo to ferocious post-hardcore to the genre’s more indie/art rock side. It’s ranked by yours truly, based on how I was feeling about these albums 20 years later, but I would’ve ranked this list in drastically different ways over the years and probably will want to re-rank it again by the 25th anniversaries.
Read on for the list…
15. Hot Rod Circuit – Reality’s Coming Through
Vagrant
The closest Hot Rod Circuit ever got to the pop-emo zeitgeist was Sorry About Tomorrow opener “The Pharmacist”–a great song, if a bit of an outlier on an even more great album–but they clearly weren’t interested in following the pop punk-ified emo path to success that so many of their contemporaries were on at the time. All things considered, Reality’s Coming Through is Sorry About Tomorrow‘s “darker, weirder followup,” an album that helped cement HRC’s status as a cult band. The hard-charging opener “Inhabit” finds Hot Rod Circuit at their most forceful (and features a bridge sung by one of the band’s biggest fans, Say Anything’s Max Bemis), and darker, heavier deep cuts like “Fear the Sound,” “Tell the Truth,” and “Unfaithful” were firmly planted within the underground that HRC came from. When the album does lean radio-friendly, it does it by embracing heartland rock and power pop. Even if they didn’t cover Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” as one of the album’s bonus tracks, you wouldn’t have to look any further than the countrified rock of “The Best You Ever Knew” to know that HRC were getting their Petty on. Even less subtle is the song called “Cheap Trick” (“Surrender” reference included). The cinematic single “Save You” is easy to compare to likeminded peers Jimmy Eat World, and it gives anything on Jimmy’s own 2004 album (more on that one soon) a run for its money. Made with veteran producer Tim O’Heir, Reality’s Coming Through can sound like a Big Rock Record when it needs to, and it still can sound rough around the edges when it needs to do that. It wasn’t a big commercial success, but 20 years later, it sounds way more timeless than a lot of the 2004 emo albums that were.
14. Piebald – All Ears, All Eyes, All the Time
SideOneDummy
Piebald’s All Ears, All Eyes, All the Time isn’t quite the classic that its perfect predecessor We Are the Only Friends We Have is, but it captures a lot of the same magic. That is to say, it’s what happens when some kids from the Boston hardcore scene make smart, clever, quirky power pop (which ends up counting as emo — I don’t make the rules). It ranges from poppy punk ragers (“The Jealous Guy Blues”) to Beatlesque piano pop (“Haven’t Tried It”), but usually exists in some delightfully weird middle ground between those two extremes. It has the energy and strong backbone of a band who came up in punk, and an onslaught of infectious choruses. It’s an underrated album by a band who’s usually underrated in the first place, and it’s also a reminder that nobody in the 2000s did it like Piebald. They were in a lane of their own in those days, and this album found at them at the top of their weird, wild powers.
13. Alexisonfire – “Watch out!”
Equal Vision/Distort
Like a lot of bands just starting out–especially when the members are still in their teens–Alexisonfire didn’t really know what they were doing on their 2002 self-titled debut album, and they certainly didn’t know how special it would become. They had the idea to mix the influence of their favorite harsh screamo bands with the influence of their favorite melodic emo bands, which at the time was still a novel idea, and they embraced not just screamo’s abrasive vocal style but also the genre’s lack of traditional song structure. After a surprisingly popular music video turned the band into rising stars and helped ink the Canadian band a deal with Equal Vision in the States, they entered a real studio with a real producer/engineer/mixer (Julius Butty) for the first time, and they made the more refined “Watch out!”.
The difference between “Watch out!” and its predecessor is clear from the very first song, “Accidents.” It’s got a clear structure, an immensely catchy chorus, an even more singalongable set of “whoa-oh”s, and a gang-vocal bridge that triples down on the band’s then-new goal of encouraging crowd participation. And having a producer like Julius Butty in the room made for a much more focused process and a much more hi-fi record. “He just took basement bands and really elevated them,” lead screamer George Pettit says in the new BV magazine, and “Watch out!” absolutely sounds much more grandiose than the basement-dwelling record Alexisonfire had released two years earlier. The band were getting more into atmospheric bands like The Appleseed Cast and Mogwai, and Julius–who had a history of playing in industrial bands–was big on using the studio as an instrument, and he helped Alexisonfire make “Watch out!” not just a more polished album than its predecessor, but a much more ethereal one.
We recently teamed up with Alexisonfire on a career-spanning vinyl box set and an accompanying 80-page magazine that chronicles the first 20 years of their career. Get it in the BV shop.
12. Northstar – Pollyanna
Triple Crown
Despite hailing from Huntsville, Alabama, Northstar are a key part in the story of the Long Island-centric emo boom. They became tight with Taking Back Sunday early on, and signed to the New York label Triple Crown–home of TBS frenemies Brand New. It’s easy to see why TBS liked them, and it’s hard to imagine TBS fans not liking them. There was definitely some mutual appreciation/influencing going on between Northstar and TBS specifically (and some impossible-to-ignore similarities between Nick Torres and Adam Lazzara’s voices), and Northstar’s second and final album Pollyanna scratches a very similar itch as the record that TBS released that same year (which Nick also sang on) (more on that one soon).
Produced by Matt Squire (who would go on to become an in-demand producer for huge emo/pop punk bands like Panic! at the Disco and All Time Low), Pollyanna polished up the edges of Northstar’s endearingly raw debut Is This Thing Loaded? and leaned into the band’s pop side without losing an ounce of the band’s original charm. Pollyanna embraced the melodramatic teenage poetry of the era without crossing over into self-parody, and their musical arrangements remained more interesting than the bands who latched fully onto pop punk. They had grooves, rhythmic variety, and gorgeous guitar arpeggios that tied directly back to their roots in ’90s emo, as so many of their peers were blurring those ties. Pollyanna is an album by a band who respected where they came from but weren’t afraid to push forward and embrace change.
11. Underoath – They’re Only Chasing Safety
Solid State
A lot of bands mixed metalcore and pop-emo in the early/mid 2000s, but few did it better than Underoath did on They’re Only Chasing Safety. After a lineup shakeup, this was their first with lead screamer Spencer Chamberlain (previously of This Runs Through), and it also found the band zeroing in something far more polished and pop-centric than anything they’d made with previous vocalist Dallas Taylor (who formed Maylene and the Sons of Disaster after leaving Underoath). Their efforts paid off, and They’re Only Chasing Safety launched Underoath into the mainstream, where, if you weren’t looking closely, they might’ve seemed interchangeable with the countless other similar bands of that era. But Underoath had a lot more depth to them than a lot of the bands they were often grouped with–which became even clearer on subsequent albums like Define the Great Line–and that’s evident on They’re Only Chasing Safety too. It’s the band’s poppiest album, but it has about as many brutally heavy moments as pop-friendly ones, with songwriting that avoids most of the overused clichés of the era. (As a band often tagged “Christian metalcore,” they avoided the clichés of that genre too.) TOCS is always on the verge of seeming a little too polished for the hardcore scene, and a little too heavy for the pop world, but somehow, it brought both together. It’s a rare feat, and it takes a transcendent band like this one to do it.
Underoath are also playing this album on tour this year.
10. Colossal – Welcome the Problems
Asian Man Records
At this point in emo history, so many bands have mimicked Mike Kinsella’s guitar style that the phrase “Kinsella riffs” has become shorthand for an entire style of mathy, noodly, twinkly guitar playing, but in 2004, you had to look pretty damn hard to find any newer band doing anything of the sort. One band that was doing it that year was Chicago-area band Colossal, who put out their debut EP Brave the Elements in 2003 and debut album Welcome the Problems the following year. They were too late to catch emo’s second wave and too early for emo revival, but Welcome the Problems helped build a crucial bridge over that gap and it’s become more and more influential in the years since, especially as it continues to get recognized for being as prescient as it truly was. A lot of the “revival” bands channelled American Football and other Kinsella bands through more of a pop-punky lens, but Colossal connected their love of American Football to the jazzier Chicago post-rock and math rock bands that AF themselves were influenced by, like Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. In guitarist/vocalist Pat Ford, Colossal had a master of clean, noodly guitar tones and calm, low vocals, and Pat and guitarist/backing vocalist Jason Flaks knew how to wear their influences on their sleeves and stand out from their forebears all at once. (Jason also brings the weepy, American Football-esque trumpets.) On Welcome the Problems, the pair were backed by what’s functionally a Midwest punk supergroup. Drummer Rob Kellenberger had played alongside future Lawrence Arms and Alkaline Trio vocalists in Slapstick, and he was also in Tuesday with Slapstick/Alkaline Trio’s Dan Andriano, and he played alongside Smoking Popes’ Josh and Eli Caterer in their post-Popes band Duvall. Eli Caterer also handles bass on this record, and two other drummers also play on it: Scott Adamson (who did some time in Kinsella band Joan of Arc) and The Lawrence Arms’ Neil Hennessy.
Colossal stood out from just about every band they shared members with (and flew more under the radar than most of them), with 10 songs that stay devoted to clean, mathy, jazzy emo. Even with its overtly ’90s influences, it sounds ahead of its time because it’s untouched by the direction that mathy emo would go in by the end of the 2000s. Colossal didn’t really have any contemporaries to look to, so they had to carve their own path, and it resulted in a truly unique gem.
9. Circle Takes The Square – As The Roots Undo
Robotic Empire
In a genre that’s built on chaos, Savannah, Georgia screamo band Circle Takes The Square emerged as even more chaotic than most of the rest. As The Roots Undo, their sole album until their 2012 comeback LP Decompositions: Volume Number One, covers more musical ground on one album that some bands do in entire careers. CTTS used ’90s-style screamo as a launching point, and from there they explored spoken word, avant-garde passages, progressive rock song structures, spirituals, sweeping post-rock build-ups, and so much more. It’s structured like a concept album, with recurring themes and lyrics, multi-part suites, and songs that are written to flow directly into the next. 20 years and tons of permutations of screamo later, there’s still nothing that sounds like this one.
8. Owen – I Do Perceive + (the ep)
Polyvinyl
It’s a stereotype to say that emo lyrics sound ripped from someone’s diary, but that’s rarely as true as it is for Mike Kinsella. The way he writes is so candid and frank that sometimes it really feels like we aren’t meant to be hearing it, and that’s what made his 2000s hot streak so relatable to so many people. In 2004, he put out not one but two releases, an EP called (the ep) and his third full-length album, I Do Perceive. Emo heartbreak songs in the mid 2000s were often vindictive and vague, but Mike Kinsella–who never felt any kinship with most third wave emo–wrote about one night stands (“Skin And Bones”), cheating (“Who Found Whose Hair in Whose Bed?”), exes (“In the Morning Before Work”), and drunken bad decisions (multiple songs) in a way that feels too real to accuse it of being anything but honest. The narrator in his songs is not always a likable character, but he’s self-aware enough to make it clear that he knows it too. On I Do Perceive and (the ep), Mike delivers his sad-bastard tales with some of the most quietly-gripping melodies of his career, backed by the noodly guitar style that had been his trademark ever since the first American Football album.
7. The Blood Brothers – Crimes
V2
The same month that The Blood Brothers released the instant classic Burn Piano Island, Burn, they got back in the studio (this time with Sleater-Kinney/Bikini Kill producer John Goodmanson) and proved that they clean up good. Crimes is just about as chaotic as its predecessor, but everything sounds a little cleaner and Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney’s voices veer closer to what the average person would call “singing,” though cleaning up did not mean watering anything down. Crimes is just as uniquely intense as any Blood Brothers record before it, and when it comes to this album’s political/social commentary, the band did not mince words. Even the softest, quietest moments sound wild, and even the catchiest hooks come entirely out of left field. It sounds as explosive and volatile as the social/political landscape it was responding to, and it manages to sound crisp and controlled too.
The Blood Brothers are also reissuing this album and going on a reunion tour.
6. Planes Mistaken For Stars – Up In Them Guts
No Idea
Few albums embodied the phrase “post-hardcore” in 2004 more perfectly than Up In Them Guts did. It’s one of the most vicious albums to come out of this world at that time (that’s the hardcore) and also one of the most ambitious (that’s the post-). The late, great Gared O’Donnell walked the walk–to borrow an anecdote from Alexisonfire, when he showed up in Canada to sing on their 2006 record Crisis, he had nothing but a pack of cigarettes, a flask, and the clothes on his back. He was as gritty in real life as he sounds delivering the whiskey-soaked, cigarette-burned growls throughout the entirety of Up In Them Guts. The album is slower and more atmospheric than its 2001 predecessor Fuck with Fire in a way that makes it even more heavy. When he lets out a roaring refrain like “WE’RE ALL GETTING FUCKED NOW!”, it’s as catchy as it is sinister.
5. My Chemical Romance – Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
Reprise
As Thursday’s Geoff Rickly has recounted in multiple interviews, when he produced My Chemical Romance’s 2002 debut album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, bassist Mikey Way asked him, “You don’t think we’ll ever be as big as Thursday, do you?”, and Geoff replied, “Dude… I think you’re gonna be so much bigger than Thursday.” It didn’t take long at all for Geoff’s prediction to become very, very true. They signed to major label Reprise Records in 2003, and they made their next record with Howard Benson, a producer who was fresh off making massive rock records with bands like P.O.D. and Hoobastank. That album was Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, and it launched two of the biggest songs of the entire mainstream emo era, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and “Helena.”
Those songs are so embedded in the DNA of pop culture that even non-MCR-fans tend to know every word, but the album as a whole still feels ripe for discovery. It’s a lot more palatable than the band’s debut, but not in a way that ever sounds like they’re sacrificing their integrity for the sake of commercial success. The songwriting on Three Cheers is just stronger, the band just sounds tighter (thanks in part to then-new guitarist Frank Iero), and My Chem were really just more suited for arenas than basements in the first place. Gerard Way’s theatrical star power is undeniable; he was meant to share it with the world.
With the assistance of MTV, My Chem brought their goth imagery and their undeniable hits to living rooms around the world, and those massive singles never overshadow the rest of Three Cheers. The album ranges from driving post-hardcore (“Give ‘Em Hell, Kid”) to haunting emo balladry (“The Ghost of You”) to metallic guitar heroism (“Thank You for the Venom”), and My Chem mastered it all. They looked the part of the “eyeliner emo” era, and the imagery in Gerard’s lyrics was as brooding and melodramatic as their music videos, but Three Cheers didn’t fetishize self-harm or direct ire at unnamed women. My Chem were already against that stuff in 2004, and Gerard often twisted his emo melodrama to specifically buck against those trends. Throughout the theatrical concept album, Gerard looks at addiction, mental health, gender, death, and toxic relationships with a wisdom that the “mall emo” era often lacked. It’s a big part of why the band kept winning over new generations of fans after breaking up, and were met with such a warm welcome when they finally reunited. For a band that seemed so of their time, My Chemical Romance were always subtly ahead of it.
4. Jimmy Eat World – Futures
Interscope
After 2001’s Bleed American turned Jimmy Eat World into long-overdue stars, they used their new rock star status as a chance to get weird again. Futures found Jimmy Eat World taking everything they learned about writing a Big Rock Record on Bleed American and combining it with the darker, more experimental songs they were writing on their 1999 cult classic Clarity. Following three consecutive albums produced by Mark Trombino, they made this one with Gil Norton, whose credits include Pixies’ Doolittle and Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape. It sounds larger than life, and it’s a masterclass in toeing the line between creative risk-taking and world-conquering hooks.
Futures‘ biggest single is “Pain” but its best is “Work.” The song’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”-gone-emo guitarpeggio and top-of-your-lungs chorus are both total ear candy, on par with any of Bleed American‘s biggest singles. It’s Futures‘ most purely euphoric pop moment. Elsewhere on this LP, Jimmy Eat World bust out the heavier, tech-ier, borderline-metal riffs of “Futures,” “Just Tonight,” and “Nothing Wrong,” and even those songs have soaring pop choruses. Then there’s the total Clarity-core of “Drugs Or Me,” “Polaris,” “Night Drive,” and “23,” darker slow-burners that leave you hanging on every note. The secret weapon, in my humble opinion, is “Kill,” a song that kinda falls in the middle of all of Futures‘ different directions. It’s as somber and bittersweet as it is a totally infectious singalong, and a huge highlight of the band’s live show to this day. (Should’ve been a single!) Bleed American‘s highs are higher than Futures, but this is a more consistent, cohesive record, and it really helped solidify Jimmy Eat World as lifers. To some, they’re just “The Middle” and “Sweetness,” but they’ve maintained a sizable diehard fanbase for three decades because their biggest hits are backed up by strong-as-fuck albums like this one.
3. Taking Back Sunday – Where You Want to Be
Victory
After skyrocketing to the forefront of the emo boom with 2002’s Tell All Your Friends, Taking Back Sunday had the kind of lineup shake-up that could crush a band’s career. Co-vocalist/lyricist and guitarist John Nolan, whose dual vocal back-and-forth with Adam Lazzara was one of the band’s most iconic trademarks, left the band, and bassist Shaun Cooper went with him. But, Taking Back Sunday made lemonade, and came out of it bigger than ever. Fred Mascherino of the sorely-underrated Breaking Pangaea took John’s role, and drummer Mark O’Connell’s friend Matt Rubano took over on bass, and the new lineup of Taking Back Sunday wrote the exact opposite of a sophomore slump.
The personnel on Where You Want to Be was a little different than Tell All Your Friends, but the approach was very similar. Fred, a great bandleader and songwriter in his own right, was the perfect candidate to take over as secondary vocalist, and he gelled with Adam just about as much as John always has. The lyrics were just as full of melodramatic, instantly-quotable one-liners, the dual-vocal delivery was just as built for group scream-singalongs, and the album is fully powered by the same hard-hitting approach to Long Island Emo that TBS took on Tell All Your Friends. Whether it’s the bulldozing opener “Set Phasers To Stun,” the groove-oriented “Bonus Mosh Pt. II,” the eternal singalong “A Decade Under the Influence,” the delicately soaring “This Photograph Is Proof (I Know You Know),” the revved-up post-hardcore of “One-Eighty By Summer,” or the mid-tempo pop punk drama of “Number Five With A Bullet,” this was the Taking Back Sunday you knew and loved, with a subtle makeover. Produced by Lou Giordano (Sugar, Sunny Day Real Estate, etc), WYWTB sounds a little bigger and more streamlined than its predecessor, Fred brings a little of his own flavor, and Adam sings with the newfound confidence of a rising star. There was obvious growth within the band’s songwriting, and they go in a few new directions too, like with the sappy, string-laden acoustic emo of “New American Classic” and the alternative rock power balladry of “I Am Fred Astaire.” For my money, Fred Mascherino-era Taking Back Sunday really come into their own on 2006’s Louder Now, but Where You Want To Be is a well-executed and necessary transition. Just like its predecessor and its followup, it’s one of the defining statements of 2000s emo.
2. Straylight Run – Straylight Run
Victory
The Taking Back Sunday lineup split was a big blow within the emo community, but the silver lining is it resulted in not one but two now-classic 2004 albums from that camp. After leaving TBS, John Nolan and Shaun Cooper linked up with a different Breaking Pangaea member (drummer Will Noon) and John’s sister Michelle (who sung backup on two Tell All Your Friends songs) and formed Straylight Run. Feeling burnt out on the punk/hardcore scene, Straylight Run took Taking Back Sunday’s emo melodrama and applied it to piano ballads and indie rock songs. John proved to be totally adept as a lead singer, and Michelle’s lead vocal turns were just as gripping.
On the album’s towering single “Existentialism On Prom Night,” Straylight Run wrote a piano ballad that became as much of a chest-clutching emo singalong as anything on the first Taking Back Sunday album. His lyrical style was just as impactful in this band, and the overall quieter music didn’t stop him from raising his voice to the half screamed, half sung level that he raised it to on TBS faves like “There’s No ‘I’ In Team.” There were other much-loved piano-emo songs before “Existentialism On Prom Night” (like “Konstantine”), but this song still felt like a watershed moment for the genre. It showed a band figuring out how to push boundaries and break genre confines without abandoning the things that made this music so resonant in the first place.
“Existentialism” was the only song on this album that really ever infiltrated the emo mainstream, which is unfortunate because there’s so much happening here, and a lot of the deeper cuts on this LP have aged better than a lot of the era’s more popular emo songs. It’s got other affecting ballads like “Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway),” “The Perfect Ending,” and the Michelle-sung “Now It’s Done,” as well as some louder songs like “The Tension and the Terror,” “Another Word For Desperate,” and “Mistakes We Knew Were Making” that could’ve ended up on a Taking Back Sunday record without anyone batting an eye. The Michelle-sung “Tool Sheds and Hot Tubs” is straightup synthpop and it remains a total anomaly in the band’s catalog, and “It’s for the Best” finds the band in folk-pop territory, duetting with Nate Ruess (then of The Format). When the Nolans and Nate overlap at the end, they prove Straylight Run could do the dual vocal thing as well as “Cute Without the ‘E.’”
1. mewithoutYou – Catch For Us the Foxes
Tooth & Nail
When mewithoutYou reinvented themselves with their 2004 sophomore LP Catch For Us the Foxes, they left an impact on post-hardcore that we’re still feeling today. In just two years, mewithoutYou elevated themselves from a great post-hardcore band to one of the most distinct rock bands of a generation. Catch For Us the Foxes is, for many fans (and certainly for me), the album where mewithoutYou fully created and solidified their trademark sound.
Catch For Us the Foxes was mewithoutYou’s first of two consecutive albums with producer Brad Wood (whose past credits included such iconic albums as Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville), and Brad helped give the band a warm, spacious, timeless production quality, and the more pristine sound is just what they needed for the growing ambition and experimentation in their songwriting. Catch For Us the Foxes polished up the abrasive attack of mewithoutYou’s earlier releases but retained their heavier post-hardcore traits, fusing them with their newfound art rock sensibilities. It’s a record that shares as much DNA with Relationship of Command as it does with OK Computer, and it’s just as distinct as both of those albums. mewithoutYou still found plenty of times to get heavy on Catch For Us the Foxes, but their arrangements felt a lot more considered than they were on the more downright aggressive [A→B] Life. Michael Weiss and Christopher Kleinberg developed an interlocking guitar style that sounded like a patchwork quilt of riffs, chords, and arpeggios, always blurring the lines between lead and rhythm. Daniel Pishock’s basslines didn’t just exist to add extra force; his bass sounded like it was in constant conversation with the guitars, while fitting Rickie Mazzotta’s thoughtful drum patterns like a lock and key. Aaron was at his most commanding, solidifying the blend of speaking, shouting, singing, and screaming that separated mewithoutYou from every one of their peers, and nailing the balance between complex, in-depth lyricism and memorable one-liners that’s made him such a compelling lyricist over the years. He’d come up with a remarkable way of combining Biblical imagery with personal introspection, and his clear delivery made every word land with impact. And just as crucial as Aaron’s unique speak-shouting were the melodic backing vocals that mewithoutYou perfected on Catch For Us the Foxes. On top of everything else that CFUTF had, it also had choruses, with songs like “January, 1979” and “Paper Hanger” giving mewithoutYou hooks that even the most casual listener could hum along to.
Catch For Us the Foxes is one of those albums where every move feels deliberate; from the sequencing, to the arrangements, to every last word out of Aaron Weiss’ mouth, you get the sense that no stone was left unturned during the making of this masterpiece. And it’s an album where every band member is contributing a necessary piece of the puzzle at every moment. The opening march of “Torches Together” couldn’t exist without all the instruments coming together in the seamless way that they do; the drums are just as melodic as the guitars, and the guitars are just as percussive as the drums. “Tie Me Up! Untie Me!” would never swing the way it does without the groovy bassline acting as mediator between the drums and guitars. “Paper Hanger” wouldn’t have the suspense and release of a seat-gripping mystery if every single member of mewithoutYou wasn’t feeding off one another with an almost telepathic chemistry. Throughout all of this successful experimentation, mewithoutYou pushed themselves in an array of new directions; Catch For Us the Foxes is home to some of the heaviest moments of mewithoutYou’s career, and it also begins their trek though exploring softer sounds, giving Aaron the opportunity to perfect his more melodic singing voice. It has songs that are nearly unclassifiable, and it also has the one mewithoutYou song that almost sounded like a straightforward post-hardcore/emo song, “January, 1979.” From its driving drums and guitars to its sneakily bouncy bassline to Aaron’s finger-pointing shoutalongs to its easily hummable chorus, “January, 1979” became the one mewithoutYou song that even non-fans might recognize. It was an easy entry point for many (and probably still is), and once it drew you in to Catch For Us the Foxes, it opened you up to a musical universe unlike almost any other.
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