My sophomore year of high school, I found a great indie/emo band called Sky’s the Limit on Interpunk.com (oh, Interpunk…their website has never been updated, btw). I bought their only release, which was only released on a burned CD-R, and I was spellbound by the intricate guitar work, catchy rhythms, and soaring melodies.
So when I discovered Mae on an old Tooth & Nail compilation, I was attracted to them for many of the same reasons. I bought this album, and was amazed to find a Sky’s the Limit song on it. It was only then that I realized that Dave Elkins was the lead singer and principal songwriter for both of them.
I first saw Pittsburgh’s 
In 1994, a Seattle hardcore* band called Sunny Day Real Estate released Diary. It was a veritable tour de force of emotional range, led by the otherworldly falsetto of 
I don’t know a whole lot about Hop Along. I know that they’re on Saddle Creek—home of bands like 
Jorden Dreyers, lead singer of La Dispute, is a bit of an enigma. He masquerades as a hardcore frontman, thrashing across the stage as he screams his lungs out.
In the great scheme of music history, it’s near impossible to talk about La Dispute without mentioning mewithoutYou. And I’m as guilty as anyone in that regard—mewithoutYou has been my favorite band for around thirteen years, and they were the first band to mix hardcore conventions and spoken-word (shouted-word?) vocals that La Dispute also uses.
Memory is a funny thing. When the intersection of thrift and communal nostalgia led me to buy this record when I found it on the cheap, I didn’t expect that I would have ever had every single song on here memorized.
Being a well-loved indie darling is something of a double-edged sword. You can either suffer in anonymity while your immense talent fails to find the appreciation it deserves, or you can find widespread success and get labeled a sell-out.
Often, when a band jumps between genres, it betrays a lack of self-awareness—a sign that they have no idea what their voice sounds like.
It was tough out here for a punk kid in the early 2000s looking for new music. Internet speeds to support streaming would take years to develop. We had Napster, but we it took hours to download a single song.