In Defense of the Genre is a column on BrooklynVegan about punk, pop punk, emo, hardcore, post-hardcore, ska-punk, and more, including and often especially the bands and albums and subgenres that weren’t always taken so seriously.
August is a wrap, and I highlight 10 new songs from underneath the punk umbrella from the past month below, but first, some features and reviews we ran this month:
* 10 emo bands you need to be following in 2023
* 11 albums that pushed hardcore towards its current genre-defying moment
* Fiddlehead on how their new LP was inspired by the movie Kids, James Joyce, DC hardcore & more
* Streetlight Manifesto‘s Everything Goes Numb turns 20
* Norman Brannon (Texas Is The Reason) on why 2023 was the time to bring back his ’90s hardcore fanzine Anti-Matter
* Ratboys on how Maps & Atlases, Land of Talk & more inspired their new album
* Chris Farren‘s sincere, and hilarious, list of things that influenced his new album
* Blind Equation talks new album, cybergrind community & more
* 7 of Patrick Kindlon’s (Drug Church, Self Defense Family) favorite live concert videos
* With Honor pick 6 pivotal songs from throughout their career
* August album reviews: Fiddlehead, Ratboys, Chris Farren, Spanish Love Songs, The Armed, Oldsoul, Creak, M.A.G.S., and Move.
We’ve also got some new exclusive punk vinyl in the BV shop, including the new Taking Back Sunday album (splatter), The Blood Brothers’ Burn, Piano Island, Burn 20th anniversary edition (splatter), Fireworks’ Gospel (pink/red blob), American Nightmare’s Background Music (black/clear), Stretch Arm Strong’s A Revolution Transmission (splatter), Macseal’s Yeah, No, I Know (blue/black swirl), Strange Joy’s Five Tracks (red), the new Magnitude LP (splatter), Citizen’s new album & Youth reissue (swirl and tri-color, respectively), Balance and Composure’s The Things We Think We’re Missing (splatter), The Wonder Years’ The Greatest Generation (splatter), some Kill Your Idols represses, and more.
Read on for my picks of the best songs of August that fall somewhere under the punk umbrella, in no particular order…
awakebutstillinbed – “redlight”
In underground emo circles, awakebutstillinbed have reached Frank Ocean status in terms of fans clamoring for them to drop the album, and it’s finally going to happen on October 20 via the newly-relaunched Tiny Engines. Their second and album (and first in nearly six years) is called chaos takes the wheel and i am a passenger and two great songs from it are out now. It was hard to pick one for this list but I’m going with “redlight,” which reminds you that awakebutstillinbed’s take on emo is just as unique as their take on screamo. They touch on both of those styles on this towering, hard-to-pin-down song, which features guest screams by Hayden Rodriguez of For Your Health (who absib released a split EP with last year). It sounds massive and intimate all at once, and it doesn’t really sound like any other band in the world.
Teenage Halloween – “Supertrans”
Like awakebutstillinbed, Teenage Halloween are gearing up for a sophomore album that’s highly anticipated in certain underground circles, and actually, both of these albums were produced by Hop Along/Algernon Cadwallader guitarist Joe Reinhart. Teenage Halloween’s lead single/opening track “Supertrans” picks right up where their great debut LP left off, with propulsive, powerful, melodic punk rock fueled by Luk Henderiks’ fiery voice and incisive ruminations on gender identity. It’s only 64 seconds long, but it’s full of so much fire that it feels monumental. (The music video is longer because it also features second track “Takeaway,” which also rips.)
Into It. Over It. – “New Addictions”
Evan Weiss has been writing impactful emo songs for over 20 years, and “New Addictions” is one of his most genuinely moving pieces of music yet. It was written about the death of a friend, and, from the kinetic instrumentation to Evan’s passionate delivery to his instantly-quotable refrains, it feels like a musical portrayal of a freshly opened wound. IOII’s later material has gotten its fair share of Death Cab comparisons, and when Evan sings “This country will kill us before this cigarette will,” it feels like one of the best Ben Gibbard lines that Ben himself hasn’t written.
Broken Vow – “1.5”
From their primal chugs to their environmentally-conscious lyrics, I’d be willing to bet that the members of Broken Vow own at least a couple Earth Crisis records, and their new single “1.5” echoes that band’s classic ’90s era without sounding like rehashed idol worship. Its title comes from the fact that “every year we lose 1.5% of wild nature to development, extinction, and general human intervention,” and vocalist Tommy Harte voices his discontent with conviction and a delivery that you can really latch onto. Once this song settles in, he’ll be getting mobbed by fans every time they play it. (Broken Vow’s debut album Anthropocene arrives 9/29 via Triple B.)
Arm’s Length – “Up In Smoke”
The best emo is often about catharsis, about bursting through an emotional threshold, about hitting those notes that are just a tiny bit out of reach. Ontario band Arm’s Length have been doing this across two EPs and their 2022 debut album Never Before Seen, Never Again Found, and new single “Up In Smoke” is one of their best examples of it yet. They aimed for something a little grittier and a little faster than most of the material on their LP, and they recruited producer Jon Markson (Drug Church, One Step Closer, Koyo, etc) to help make their dream a reality. From its blasty fury to its scream-singing, it leans into the aggressive side of Arm’s Length’s sound without losing their sense of beauty, and it crosses that emotional threshold over and over.
SeeYouSpaceCowboy – “Chewing The Scenery”
If you liked the cleaner, catchier moments of SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s 2021 album The Romance of Affliction, you’re gonna be very pleased with the direction they go in on “Chewing The Scenery.” It goes full They’re Only Chasing Safety, with the most purely pop-oriented chorus of SYSC’s career (outside of their If I Die First collaboration), and still plenty of bone-crushingly heavy parts. The song wonders if it’s possible to have love without “the pain and frustration that can and most likely will accompany it,” and it does so with exactly the kind of theatrical, melodramatic, teenage poetry that defined mid 2000s emo-pop.
Free Throw – “Spacer’s Choice”
Free Throw’s upcoming album Lessons That We Swear to Keep is their first with drummer Zach Hall since their 2014 debut LP Those Days Are Gone, and vocalist Cory Castro said that making this album with Zach felt like being “back in a garage with my buddies writing music again,” but nothing about lead single “Spacer’s Choice” is rehashing the past. The band sounds sharper, harder, and more explosive than they did when Zach last played with them, and “Spacer’s Choice” is a perfect example of that. It’s a burst of emo-tinted pop punk that puts honesty over everything, and its bright melodies are contrasted by the personal struggles that Cory has been singing about for years. “The song is about how the issues I’ve touched on over the years aren’t just ‘solvable’ problems,” he says. “I know I write about a lot of the same issues, but hey, those problems don’t just go away.”
Mannequin Pussy – “I Got Heaven”
Mannequin Pussy’s new single is all about clashes. Shouted, sneering punk clashes with ethereal dream pop. In Marisa Dabice’s lyrics–to use her words–the sacred clashes with the profane (“What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?”). It sounds like an alternate version of the ’90s where “Rebel Girl,” “Popular,” and “Only Happy When It Rains” were all one song, and it also feels very ’90s in the way that it might actually piss people off. The song battles the way Christianity is weaponized by people in power, and you can just imagine the moral panic that would’ve ensued if this was on MTV in 1995. More modern punk should be this genuinely provocative.
Equipment – “LO/FO”
Equipment singer/songwriter Nick Zander is tired of all the negativity, arguing, and trolling that constantly plagues social media, and if you are too, then “LO/FO”–which stands for “log off/fuck off”–might be the new emo song for you. He wrote it after hitting a personal breaking point with all this stuff, and it channels those feelings through a lens of sunny power pop and fidgety emo (with a Weezer-worthy guitar solo to boot). It’s as feel-good as ungluing yourself from your screen. (New album Alt. Account due 9/29.)
Good Looking Friends – “Jaywalker”
It only took Brooklyn emo band Good Looking Friends 73 seconds to get me excited for their upcoming LP Wasted Now (due 9/15 via Acrobat Unstable). This song is on the verge of combustion from the second you click play.
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In an effort to cover as many bands as possible, I try to just do one single per album cycle in these monthly roundups, so catch up on previous months’ lists for even more:
* Best Songs of July
* Best Songs of June
* Best Songs of May
* Best Songs of April
* Best Songs of March
* Best Songs of February
* Best Songs of January
For even more new songs, listen below or subscribe to our playlist of punk/emo/hardcore/etc songs of 2023.
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Browse our selection of hand-picked punk vinyl.
Read past and future editions of ‘In Defense of the Genre’ here.
