The Year That Emo Broke: The 20 Best Emo Albums of 2001

"Emo started in the 1980s and really came to be a widespread genre throughout the 1990s, but emo's massive breakthrough moment came in 2001, with a series of albums that would take the genre out of the underground and onto television screens, radio stations, festival lineups, Myspace top 8s and Hot Topics all across America and beyond. Like when grunge broke into the mainstream a decade earlier, it was the culmination of a sound that had been building for over a decade,"

"The popularity led to backlash, and a rapidly-changing music industry eventually turned its attention away from punk-adjacent bands in the mainstream, leaving the genre stigmatized by the end of the 2000s, and eventually - as far as the mainstream was concerned, dead. Of course, it wasn't actually dead, and by the early/mid 2010s, a new wave of underground emo bands began enjoying critical acclaim,"

Emo evolved from 1980s roots through the 1990s into a widely varied genre that broke into the mainstream in 2001 via several influential albums. That breakthrough pushed emo onto television, radio, festivals, Myspace and retail culture, prompting rapid mainstream growth into 2002 and the mid-2000s. Widespread popularity produced backlash and industry shifts that marginalized punk-adjacent bands and stigmatized the genre by the end of the decade. The genre persisted underground, resurfaced critically in the 2010s, and influenced emo-rap through artists like Lil Peep and Juice WRLD, leaving a lasting imprint on alternative music.

Read at BrooklynVegan