Here comes the argument

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My intro to underground music started at the crest of a DIY post-hardcore revival in the early 2010s. Bands like Title Fight and Touché Amore were at the peak of their powers, drawing heavy inspiration from 90s acts with close connections to the hardcore scene. Aside from the musical lineage these bands drew to 80s hardcore like Youth of Today or Minor Threat, they often extolled their love for the classics in interviews, liner notes and onstage speeches. I believe both Ned Russin and Jeremy Bolm are vaunted collectors of old-school hardcore ephemera.

The scene felt like an outgrowth or extension of hardcore, both in a modern and historical sense. There was also what kids today might call a “shadow” scene — bands like Dance Gavin Dance and Emarosa who called themselves post-hardcore but had no discernible connection to our scene, musically, ethically or otherwise. It felt like stolen valour. Here are these kids who can’t name a Minor Threat song besmirching the honour of post-hardcore playing what essentially amounts to Blue Eyed Soul with math-rock riffs. How they felt emboldened to call their music post-hardcore was confounding.

Even weirder, in the intervening years, that version of post-hardcore seems to have won out and become the de facto definition for the genre to anyone not involved in hardcore. Go on r/posthardcore or the wildly popular Facebook group post-hardcoreposting and you’ll see tons of content about Rise Records era bands who built the strawman that my late teenage crusade against “false” post-hardcore set out to burn. The denizens of these spaces often recognize their genre’s early roots in labels like Gravity and Dischord. Many of them also celebrate modern bands like Drug Church and Gauge Away who fall closer to the “original” definition of post-hardcore. To them, though, Quicksand and Pierce the Veil belong at the same table. There is little discernment between the “real” and the “false”.

Hardcore dudes, especially older ones, still struggle to wrap their heads around this. One of my favourite Axe to Grind episodes involves the hosts running through the Wikipedia “list of post-hardcore bands” and deliberating on what qualifies. It’s not like they’re talking out their asses, either. Host Patrick Kindlon spent ten years fronting End of a Year, (in my opinion) the pre-eminent post 90s Rev Summer-style band, who pivoted and excelled with their own brand of indie-tinged post-hardcore as Self Defense Family. He now sings in Drug Church, a poster-boy for the wildly successful “hardcore adjacent” scene of the early 2020s.

The A2G discussion was considerate and insightful, but there was a hard line around bands like Pierce the Veil not being post-hardcore and some confusion as to why the moniker was given to them in the first place. That seems to be the general consensus on “post-hardcore” from within the hardcore scene. The post-hardcore scene, on the other hand, has more reverence for what we consider “false” than any 90s Rev band.

So who’s right?

That Axe to Grind episode (which must be three years old by now) set off an idea in my head to solve this mystery. I had a hypothesis, which I tested with a shit ton of research (aka listening to bands while browsing Wikipedia and Discogs) before proving myself half-right. This is the third time I’ve tried to present my findings. The first iterations were year by year analyses that got so granular and unwieldy they stopped making sense, even to me.

While I think it helps to pull out and talk about general trends rather than every specific milestone, the best way to contextualize everything is still chronologically. So, let’s start from the beginning.

The first bands Wikipedia refers to as post-hardcore are Articles of Faith and The Effigies, two Chicago bands who started putting out music around 1981. I’ve never heard anyone in real life refer to these bands as post-hardcore and it makes little sense to do so considering both formed before the Negative Approach 7” or the ROIR tape came out. That said, it’s important to TOUCH on these bands for what some members would GO on to do later in the 80s.

The earliest releases I’ve heard retroactively coined post-hardcore drop in the mid 80s, as or right after the first wave of hardcore wrapped up (fittingly). Some obvious examples include Dinosaur by Dinosaur Jr. (1985), Zen Arcade by Husker Dü and II by The Meat Puppets (both 1984). This first wave was comprised of hardcore bands (or in the case of D. Jr, members of) who pivoted to slower, more melodic music, sometimes as a direct reaction to the hardcore scene’s codified expectations.

In 2026, those three records are much more lauded for their influence on alternative rock. Almost concurrently, though, the DC hardcore scene was going through a massive upheaval as dudes were breaking up their bands, falling in love and going to college, then forming new bands to write love songs or musings on what they’d learned in Basket Weaving 202. The summer of 1985 is often referred to as “Revolution Summer”, where bands like Embrace, Rites of Spring and Dag Nasty shifted the Dischord Records sound towards melody, complexity and emotive lyrics.

It’s important to note that while Rev Summer is often cited as the genesis of post-hardcore as a musical lineage, the bands involved staunchly insisted they were simply playing hardcore. The term “emo” first appeared in a 1986 Thrasher article referring to Embrace as “emo-core” which singer Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Embrace, Fugazi) famously rebuked with a string of profanity before saying “as if hardcore wasn’t emotional to begin with.” I think the DC scene’s willingness to embrace (hurr hurr) hardcore while expanding its musical palette are why it’s more foundational on post-hardcore than the college rock stuff that tried to jump ship.

The mid/late 80s underground punk scene was a total hodge podge of bands trading ideas, playing weird mixed bills and listening to each other’s records. The aforementioned Chicago scene, heavily influenced by the presence of Steve Albini, became the foundation for noise rock with one-time hardcore label Touch and Go Records putting out wildly influential music by Big Black, The Jesus Lizard and later, Slint. Meanwhile DC was going nuts, with bands like Moss Icon and Shudder to Think expanding the Rev Summer sound in all sorts of wild directions.

Arguably the most important development from this time is the emergence of Fugazi. Formed from the ashes of Embrace and Rites of Spring, the DC band’s 1988 self-titled EP is arguably the turning point from post-hardcore being a retroactively applied conceptualization to an actual genre of music. Fugazi famously retained strict, hardcore informed DIY ethics (not charging more than $5 for a show) while becoming one of the most popular and influential rock acts of the 1990s. Their sound, while rooted in hardcore, was experimental and progressive from jump, featuring iconic, driving bass lines and meandering guitar work that would go on to define post-hardcore.

Moving into the 90s, post-hardcore was as widespread and perhaps more eclectic than hardcore itself. The second wave of hardcore was dissolving as members of Underdog, Gorilla Biscuits and Youth of Today tried smoking weed and got really into Krishna Consciousness. Revelation Records — the label behind many of second wave hardcore’s most iconic releases — capitalized on this new direction (hurrr). They signed bands like Quicksand, Burn and Into Another who infused hardcore energy into noise rock for a distinct New York sound.

On the West Coast, labels like Amphetamine Reptile and Sub Pop were curating the nascent grunge scene but also put out releases from bands like Seaweed, Helmet and Sunny Day Real Estate. San Diego bands took the most challenging elements of DC post-hardcore and stretched them to their logical limits. In 1991, Heroin (and ex-Battalion of Saints) vocalist Matt Anderson founded Gravity Records to showcase his city’s burgeoning sound, which would become the basis for what we now know as “screamo”.

By 1993, we have a fully established post-hardcore cannon, made up of releases on Dischord, Revelation, Touch and Go and Gravity, along with countless closely adjacent labels, bands and scenes. I feel like this is, more or less, the basis for what the hardcore scene recognizes as “post-hardcore”. Which makes sense. Everything we’ve touched on up to this point has roots in 80s hardcore; musically, ethically, aesthetically and pedigree-wise. Add Sunny Day Real Estate’s seminal 1994 album Diary to the mix and you can basically draw a line through the 90s and 2000s to stuff like Drug Church, Fiddlehead, Marathon-era Mil-Spec, and so on.

But that’s not where things end. The indie/alt leanings of bands like SDRE, Seaweed and Knapsack would eventually spread over the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest, creating second-wave emo. We could spend many paragraphs there, but for the purpose of this article, it’s more worth mentioning as a footnote. Sounds also become less localized in the mid-90s, and we get bands whose earliest reference points are first wave post-hardcore from five or six years prior — Hot Water Music, Grade, Small Brown Bike, etc.

Grade is particularly pertinent. Their debut album And Such is Progress is widely cited as the first to incorporate the sing/scream dichotomy that defines swoop haired post-hardcore. It’s fairly innocuous. One guy is doing a screamo voice and another is doing an emo voice over music that falls squarely between those two genres. It’s still worth noting because a year later, Vision of Disorder released their self-titled debut and brought the same vocal dichotomy to metalcore.

I’m not confident these were the first two bands in their respective styles to sing and scream at the same time. I’m also pretty certain these two things happened independently. Grade’s vocals are the logical limit of some shit like Indian Summer while VOD sounds like they’re trying to ape Life of Agony or Biohazard. Still, these bands were groundbreaking and popular, so we can safely assume they influenced others.

Metalcore bands sprinkled clean vocals into their music throughout the late 90s. You even hear it occasionally from bands like Disembodied, Converge and Harvest who have traditionally been more fondly remembered as “real” hardcore than something like Poison the Well, whose LP The Opposite of December dropped on Trustkill Records in late 1999. On the other side of the coin, two vocalist post-hardcore was easily adopted into the basement scene, but came to a head on Thursday’s 1999 debut Waiting for Eyeball Records because Geoff Rickley could sing his ass off.

Buoyed by those two records and Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool, ‘99 is another demarcation point for post-hardcore’s development. Aside from the obvious (singing and screaming at the same time became popular), we also see cultural shifts that somewhat mirror the landscape of the early 90s. Both Trustkill and Eyeball had notable 90s hardcore releases on their roster but would become more successful and prominent once they started leaning into the sing/scream stuff. Same with Equal Vision Records, who went way more melodic after Through Being Cool, a massively influential record on pop-punk and third wave emo. Thursday’s breakthrough Full Collapse dropped in 2001 on Victory Records, (almost in)arguably the most important 90s hardcore label. Victory was trying to go more mainstream, and Full Collapse is, retroactively, the moment this style of “screamo” became MTV-ready.

Much like Dischord and Rev in the early 90s, these labels pivoting (combined with the success of Warped Tour) brought in countless new kids. Four or five years later, we start to see bands who are entirely referential to this new wave. Which leads to my original hypothesis:

I believed Saosin’s Translating the Name EP (2003) was patient zero for this entirely self-referential scene of swoop haired music that eventually devolved into sing/scream, bleep bloop soup.

If you hear this EP (one I’ll sheepishly admit as being among my favourite pieces of recorded music), my point becomes obvious. The “post” elements of that record refer to post-Thursday, a band named after a Turning Point song who filtered screamo and melodic hardcore through so many lenses that by the time Saosin got ahold of it there was nary a trace of Don Zientara to be heard. As for Saosin’s “hardcore” elements, we’re talking the VOD family tree: big room, uncanny valley stuff that by 1999 shared more DNA with metal than anything Touch and Go ever put out.

A cursory listen of that Saosin record also affirms it as a pretty obvious starting point for shit like Pierce the Veil, Dance Gavin Dance and Circa Survive. That’s not the only style of post-millennial post-hc we hardcore kids decry as false. There’s also shit like The Devil Wears Prada and A Day To Remember pulling more from Underoath or Hawthorne Heights. This is where things start to get messy.

By 2001 bands like Alexisonfire and Boysetsfire were doing full on sing/scream shit that most hardcore kids considered anathema until quite recently. As they mentioned in the Axe to Grind episode, those bands have one foot in the big room, new school, guyliner world but also owe a lot to shit like Hot Water Music and Braid. The notable stuff that would be entirely referential to that wave, like The Devil Wears Prada, post-dates Saosin by six months to a year at the earliest.

That being said, the 1999-2004 era is an absolute gong show of obscure bullshit, so I would not be surprised if there’s something I missed. While researching this article I discovered Saosin had members who played in a band called Open Hand. Their music, though leaning in Saosin’s direction, also nods heavily at pre-1999 post-hardcore. This revelation caused me to do some fact checking which unearthed a few interesting discoveries.

Hawthorne Heights started in 2001 as A Day in The Life. Again, you can hear the direction they would go, but some riffs on that record sound straight ripped from Hot Water Music. A Day To Remember has a demo that, to nobody’s surprise, is fully formed dog-shit with no trace of anything cool, but it drops about six months after Saosin. Same with Pierce the Veil. What I did rediscover, however, are Dashboard Confessional and The Used.

Let’s start with The Used because they come after Dashboard. While that technically makes them “not the originators” of this sound, they’re the first band I could find who are doing the sing/scream thing over music that has little, if any, connection to actual hardcore. Alexisonfire and Underoath come out around the same time doing a similar thing vocally, but both have musical parts with very obvious nods to post-hardcore and metalcore. The Used (2001) sounds like Skillet with a dude screaming overtop of it. I think you could make a strong case for them being the first true Gen 1 scene band because Dashboard Confessional are doing something way different, but in my opinion, that “something” was just as influential.

My introduction to Dashboard (aside from seeing vocalist Chris Carrabba get dunked on in Emo Game) was the Rolling Stone Top 40 Emo Records series I did on this blog in 2023. I remember at the time thinking “parts of this sound like Midwest emo without drums”, but it would be disingenuous to say it’s noticeable compared to how obvious the connection to Saosin, DGD et al. is. This is the blueprint for all that shit. Their debut, The Swiss Army Romance, comes out in 2000 — predating everything else I’m talking about by a fair bit.

So there you have it! Blame Chris Carrabba, I guess. Emo Game did.

Now that we know the origins of the species, who wins the debate? Is the 2000s Rise Records catalog in the post-hardcore lineage of Embrace and The Effigies or not?

It depends. Assuming Dashboard Confessional is patient zero for new-school post-hc, I think the answer is no. While you can hear traces of 90s emo in Dashboard’s early material, the entire premise of a guy crooning “emo songs” over an acoustic guitar has zero precedent from the 80s or 90s. Also, while second wave emo (in my opinion) squarely falls in the lineage of post-hardcore, it draws influence from a ton of other stuff. Do I hear any Dischord or Gravity Records in Dashboard Confessional? Absolutely not.

As I mentioned before, bands like Saosin’s post hardcore lineage only go back to 1999. They do sound like Dashboard or Thursday, but not the bands who came before. Any “core” leanings (like the double-kick two step part in “They Perched on Their Stilts…”) come squarely from PtW-style metalcore. In that sense, I think it’s more apt to call bands in the lineage of Saosin or The Used “post-metalcore”.

On the other hand, if we examine the morass of early scene music from 99-03, a lot of it still has auditory hallmarks of what the hardcore scene might identify as post-hardcore. Furthermore, many of these bands were tangentially related to the 90s hardcore scene, whether they were ex-members, came out on hardcore labels, or toured with hardcore bands. In the literal sense, that makes them “post”-hardcore like Quicksand or Jawbox were ten years earlier — a strong case for their successors (Saosin et al) inheriting the lineage of the genre.

A possible reason for the perceived divide (aside from the obvious ones) is that we see revivalist or “roots” sentiments pop up almost as soon as the “scene” shit completely loses the plot. End of a Year’s demo comes out in 2003 along with Translating… by Saosin. La Dispute and Algernon Cadwallader, two bands synonymous with revivalist post-hc, both debuted in 2006 along with Pierce the Veil and Dance Gavin Dance.

From that perspective, there is almost no break in continuity between bands who had 90s elements in their sound and bands who were actively trying to sound like they came from the 90s. Does that mean anything? Probably not.

Ultimately, this conversation is like arguing over the word “literally” or the Oxford comma. It’s almost purely semantic at this point because everyone in the world sees Dance Gavin Dance and Beartooth as post-hardcore bands, except people in the hardcore scene who don’t even like that music in the first place. Language is fluid. If the new school bands and their fans see/refer to themselves as “post hardcore”, it doesn’t really matter what a bunch of 30+ year olds with Hot Water Music tattoos think.

Which is unfortunate, because that music bears almost no resemblance to actual hardcore in terms of sound, ethics or sensibility. As someone who cut his teeth on the “wave” of early 2010s post-hardcore, which was (or at least started as) musically challenging, egalitarian and fiercely DIY, it sucks to see my early faves as a footnote to music I find unpalatable in every sense.

Except, of course, for the first Saosin EP. Maybe some other stuff too. Honestly, I think the

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I relistened to those classic Axe To Grind episodes after writing this article. They are a bit more charitable with new gen post-hardcore, and even call A Day To Remember “post-Uncanny Valley-core”. I guess I’ve never had an original thought in my life. Anyways…