The Verge Playlist: the weird nomenclature of the pop-punk and emo revivals

The last few years has seen a big return of two particular music scenes: emo and pop-punk. Both had big moments in the recent decades — emo in the ‘90s, and pop-punk at the turn of the century — but the early aughts saw the most popular bands from each scene “make it” while the rest of them broke. Now the scenes are bigger, they’re more openly progressive, and the bands that comprise them are good. The wonderful mix of young talent and veteran bands blend being clever with the flat-out bizarre — especially in the way they name things. From the bands’ names (Tigers Jaw, A Great Big Pile of Leaves, Andrew Jackson Jihad) to the album titles (Have You Seen My Prefrontal Cortex?, Chicago Bowls), and especially the song titles below, you couldn’t get any weirder if you cut up a dictionary and stirred up the pieces.

Now before you say what I know you’re going to say, let it be known I’m casting a really wide net on purpose with these genres here. People get really touchy when you throw these terms around or claim that the scenes ever really went away. Genres are imperfect methods of classification, but it’s the best we can do save for wasting our breath hyphenating 10 words to accurately describe a band’s sound. So let go of that nonsense and have some fun with these strange and beautiful bands.