Andrew Sacher’s ‘Emo Revival’ Maps the Tangled History of a Scene’s Return

By the early 2010s, the word “emo” had been stretched thin by pop radio and major-label co-option. The music that reclaimed it came from basements and hardcore clubs, not malls. In Emo Revival, former Brooklyn Vegan senior editor Andrew Sacher traces that return with the obsessive detail of someone who was there, covering it in real time.

Sacher’s definition is deliberately wide. He frames the revival not as a single sound but as a network of overlapping movements, from the nascent defend pop-punk of the Wonder Years and the Story So Far to the soft grunge of Title Fight and Citizen, the twinkly screamo of Lion of the North, and the melodic hardcore collective known as the Wave (Touché Amoré, Pianos Become the Teeth, La Dispute). A chapter each on Canadian bands Pup and Metz further stretches the map, acknowledging that the geography was never tidy.

The book rightly notes that a major publication first named the emo revival in 2013, via Ian Cohen’s review of Crash of Rhinos for Pitchfork. But Sacher excludes the twinkly British math-pop scene that band belonged to — a defensible cut, given its early timeline and diluted emo DNA. More noticeable is what’s omitted about the Midwest emo sound itself. While American Football’s clean, arpeggiated guitars are often cited as foundational, the band wasn’t regarded that way in their own moment; their post-rock debt to Tortoise was more immediate. The book treats their influence as given, sidestepping how the fourth wave retroactively broadened “Midwest emo” to include grunge-adjacent acts like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral. That missing context keeps Emo Revival from fully unpacking the semantic drift it otherwise documents. Still, as a record of a chaotic, fruitful period, the book makes clear just how much the term contained — and how hard it is to pin down.