The line, long and winding but orderly, stretched around the corner from the venue, with concertgoers dressed in everything from rave apparel to dad sneakers.
Young women with glittery eyelids and 20-something men clad in Y2K styles patiently waited to be let into the Avalon Hollywood. Gen X couples and groups of millennial women on a girls’ night out were in line, too.
Once inside, the generational divides were stripped away as attendees danced to the hits of yesteryear. High-end special effects lights flashed, mosh pits formed and disbanded, and multiple DJs danced on tabletops. That includes two of the events’ creators, T.J. Petracca and Morgan Freed.
As the crowd scream-sang My Chemical Romance’s “Helena” — “So long and goodnight!” — it immediately became clear that no matter the so-called trends, pouring your heart out in song will never go out of style.
Emo Nite, the event that drew draw such a wide-ranging crowd in Hollywood, California this past June, is just one of many reoccurring across the country. The idea is to bring people together who love emo and pop punk music in a space where they can celebrate it together.
Emo music specifically features emotional and often confessional lyrics. It’s largely been associated with themes like social alienation, sensitivity, and angst. Some of the most famous bands include Jimmy Eat World and My Chemical Romance, for example. Pop punk and emo are cut from the same musical cloth, so to speak, though pop punk generally blends catchy pop melodies with fast-paced punk rock, like Blink 182.
The Emo Nite event, now a full-fledged national business in its 10th year, started out as a way for creators Petracca and Freed to listen to the kind of music they enjoyed — despite it not being considered cool by the music establishment of the time, they say. The pop punk/emo genre crossed into the musical mainstream in the mid-2000s, Petracca and Freed say, and by the 2010s, it had largely fallen out of fashion.
The two tell TODAY.com that during that time, they were working in the music industry and had to go to a lot of “s—y Top 40” shows.
“It wasn’t our style so we would hang out beforehand and listen to music,” Freed says. Petracca says they realized they were having a better time at home than they were going out.
“We were like, ‘Why don’t we just do that? All night?'” Freed says.
The initial iterations of Emo Nite were bare-bones — picture dive bars with an iPad playlist, Petracca says — and have expanded to a “full blown business.”
They’ve since brought Emo Nite to cities across the U.S. and even played Coachella. The event is billed with the following tagline: “Not a band. Not DJ’s. We throw parties for the music we love.”
Typically, Emo Nite will feature both live performances from names like Avril Lavigne, Mod Sun and Machine Gun Kelly, as well as recorded songs from the biggest hits of the early aughts. Some of the top bands played at Emo Nite include My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Pierce the Veil and Paramore, Freed and Petracca say.
Their burgeoning business is reflective of a larger national trend of listeners embracing the music of the 2000s.
Spotify tells TODAY.com that searches for “emo” and “pop punk” have grown nearly 150% over the past five years in the U.S. and user-generated playlists with the same keywords have increased nearly 200%. Over the past five years, U.S. streams of emo music have increased 130%, and streams of pop punk music have increased nearly 125% on Spotify, the music streaming platform says.
Emo Nite also recently partnered with Insomniac, another event company, and launched Grave Rave — a late night rave featuring emo music remixes with a hint of electronic dance music. The June 2024 event that TODAY.com attended was one such an evening.
The crowd was an eclectic and diverse mix of folks — something Petracca says was intentional.
“We tried to make a conscious decision at the beginning of this that we were never going to pigeonhole it as a nostalgia night,” Petracca says. “We never marketed as like, ‘Put on your favorite band tee and black out your eyes and dress like you used to.”
He says it would’ve been “easy to go that route” but they never did because they believed in the future of the genre.
“We always tried to make it like this is the coolest night that you want to go to tonight, and I think that that’s probably why we’ve lasted as long as we have,” Petracca says.
They’re pleased their event has lasted a full decade and that the style of music has resonated with newer generations.
Freed says he’s observed younger people at their shows and believes they’re there because the music speaks to their sense of teenage angst.
“There are always going to be teenagers and they’re always going to feel a certain way,” he says. “This music just really speaks to that part of a person.”
What is emo music?
In the simplest terms, “emo music” stands for “emotional music.”
The genre came out of the hardcore punk rock scene, which rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, University of Southern California professor Kevin Lyman tells TODAY.com.
That scene spawned the pop punk movement, he explains. The Offspring’s hit single “Come Out and Play” in 1994 was considered a breakthrough moment for the genre, Lyman says.
From there, Lyman says bands like Blink 182, Sum41, Simple Plan and Good Charlotte started getting more airtime in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
By the mid aughts, another subgenre known as “mall emo” or just “emo” for short, took the main stage, characterized by bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, Lyman says.
These days, pop-punk and emo music are often grouped together for simplicity’s sake, even though each genre started out with different scenes and slightly different sounds.
Lyman, now a professor at USC, is best known as founder and producer of the Vans Warped Tour, an annual traveling music festival in the U.S. and Canada that ran each summer from 1995 until 2019, and helped define the pop punk movement.
Petracca says there isn’t a hard and fast line about what constitutes emo music, exactly.
“A lot of it has to do with just community and scene,” he says. “A lot of it was just these bands were on Warped Tour together.”
“It’s like the punk scene, the hardcore scene, the emo scene … those all are together,” he says.
The future of emo music
If the presence of younger people in the crowd at June’s Grave Rave was any indication, emo music is having somewhat of a renaissance.
Lyman attributes the genre’s resurgence to the pandemic. Millennials were longing for nostalgic music that brought them joy, be it EDM or emo and pop punk. Then, as the music from the late ’90s and 2000s started to trend, it sparked another wave of fandom.
He cites the annual music festival When We Were Young as one example of the resurgence, which this year will feature a few of the bands mentioned above: Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Pierce the Veil and Taking Back Sunday, among many others.
Other bands from the punk scene, like Green Day and The Smashing Pumpkins, are still making new music and touring.
Paramore, one of the few original emo/pop punk bands to have a woman as a lead singer, is still touring internationally and performed as the opening act for some of Taylor Swift’s recent “Eras Tour” shows.
“They’re even more popular than they were, because (some) people had never got to see them play,” he says. “All of a sudden there is a renaissance. It’s a whole new movement of other fans.”
The genres’ legacy lives on in artists like pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo, who cites emo and pop punk as some of her influences. Lyman is planning another touring summer festival, Summer School Tour, which will feature younger artists inspired by the pop punk/emo music of the past.
“I don’t know what their new category (of music) would be,” he says, adding that the newer bands seem to be more of a “hybrid” between previous genres, including rap.
“They’re all kind of hybrids, they’re making a sound of their own.”
Petracca and Freed agree that the genre is having a second renaissance with new sounds, but the same emotional core.
“There’s always going to be people that have those emotions,” Freed says. “This music really speaks to it. What it’s going to look like and sound like is going to evolve, but it’s always going to be rooted in emo.”
