Trying to make a little informative zine about mosh culture in hardcore and want to call out bands that I think are doing cool stuff and still holding true to the old school emo/screamo ethic. It might be a little preachy. If you think I'm a fun hating herb let me be but I'd love to know of any bands still trying to be curmudgeonly to this day.
I am leaving Toronto today and will probably leave without having gotten any filter coffee. Which is a shame. I live in Seattle and visit the Vancouver area a lot. Mostly whenever we go up to Surrey we just eat Punjabi food. Anyone have any recommendations for good south Indian, especially if they have good filter coffee?
Hi. I have often seen the claim that there weren't many emo bands from the northwest --- this is generally false. I made this list to try and capture emo and emo-adjacent bands who were active in the northwest from the 90s into the 2000s.
I didn't grow up with this music, but I did grow up in the Seattle area, and I am drawn to it for that reason.
There are many emo-adjacent acts on this list (you'll notice there are a lot of K Records / Kill Rock Stars artists who typically aren't referred to as emo). The goal of this list is not to give an empirical list of bands that are 100% purely emo, as even that sort of categorization is faulty, but instead to shed light on bands that floated around that categorization or shared ethics and ideals. Many of these bands had limited following nationwide, and are oftentimes missed or pigeonholed because they came from a semi isolated region.
I would recommend checking out the output of Excursion records if you're interested in this scene. Dave Larson put out anything from straight edge to indie to chaotic hardcore. In general, the northwest scene was quite heterogenous and progressive, and the way different bands shared spaces reminds me a lot of the Midwest, where there was generally less segmentation.
I am a bit grouchy when it comes to describing some of these bands... Sorry about that.