Loma Prieta and Lord Snow being right on top of each other is also very funny because members of those bands are now working together in Stormlight (whose LP this year was stellar by the way) but also because I 100% believe that no band was a bigger stepping stone from Touche/La Dispute/The Wave type stuff to “true” screamo than Loma Prieta in the 2010s, and once that band started going into a more “post-hardcore”/very-self-conscious-of-being-on-Deathwish sort of direction Lord Snow really picked up their torch and ran with it.

The Man Overboard/pageninetynine connection is very very funny to me principally because it only proves that Man Overboard were much bigger hardcore kids than anyone gave them credit for (see: Defend Pop Punk being a parody of the Effort “Destroy Pop Punk” and Most Precious Blood “Defend Hardcore” shirts).

Almost anthemic but still very elliptical and aggressive) and pageninetynine is one of my favorite bands of all time, being one of the few artists that I own multiple pieces of merch for. Tier two is where things actually begin to get interesting because this is about the level that I was at in middle school/freshman year of high school and therefore I have a whole lot of nostalgia attached to a lot of acts, although these acts in particular and really this entire list just reminds me of how much my love for emo/skramz comes from the fact that it was something extremely obscure I could spend hours staying up all night reading about on the computer whenever no one wanted to hang out.Īnyway City of Caterpillar and pageninetynine are Richmond screamo bands related through members (and if you like either or both of them, I would very much recommend that you check out Malady, which is basically late 90s/early 00s screamo filtered through the lens of that very alt-rock-y sort of post-hardcore that was popular throughout the 90s a la Shades Apart, Farside, etc. Also, Texas Is the Reason is, very puzzlingly, in tier two, which is odd as I think of them as one-third of the Holy Triptych of 90s indiemo that influenced 99% of “underground” emo to come after it (the other two being Cap’n Jazz and Sunny Day Real Estate). However the inclusion of Cloud Nothings does serve to drive home the fact that tier one of this meme is extremely /r/emo, a fact that I am not just ashamed of but that actively makes me want to slit my wrists. Generally, these tier-one bands tend towards early emo pop (The Promise Ring, the Get-Up Kids) to very entry-level screamo (Envy, Saetia) to seminal Midwest/indiemo (Mineral, Cap’n Jazz) although, as Miranda again pointed out, the inclusion of Cloud Nothings here is fucking hysterical. The first tier is very funny because, as Miranda pointed out, any normal person would rightly consider you insane if you consider Brand New and Orchid to be comparable in terms of accessibility and popularity. In these quick hits I think I will try to imitate Miranda’s style (read: “bite” her “steez”) because I think that would also be pretty amusing. I was originally gonna take this week off the newsletter but I thought I would just do a real quick hit running over my favorite/most underrated artists from the tiers that Miranda covered, and I might follow along as she continues in a very response-track sort of way. In the process I was reminded of how severely internet-hardcore-nerd-poisoned I have become over the last 12 or so years, because I have (and this is not a brag and should in fact reflect very poorly upon me as a person) listened to every band in that meme at some point or another. So my homie Miranda did a great and very funny newsletter where she dived into the first two tiers of the emo iceberg meme.

2020 iceberg meme