Product Code Database
Screamo (also referred to as skramz) is a subgenre of emo that emerged in the early 1990s and emphasizes "willfully experimental dissonance and dynamics".Jason Heller, " Feast of Reason". Denver Westword, June 20, 2002. Access date: June 15, 2008 San Diego–based bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow pioneered the genre in the early 1990s, and it was developed in the late 1990s mainly by bands from the East Coast of the United States such as Pg. 99, Orchid, Saetia, and I Hate Myself. Screamo is strongly influenced by hardcore punk and characterized by the use of screamed vocals. Lyrical themes usually include emotional pain, death, romance, and human rights.Jim DeRogatis, " Screamo", Guitar World, November 2002 Access date: July 18, 2008 The term "screamo" has frequently been mistaken as referring to any music with screaming.
Screamo lyrics often feature topics such as emotional pain, breakups, romantic interest, politics, and human rights. These lyrics are usually introspective, similar to that of softer emo bands. The New York Times noted that "part of the music's appeal is its un-self-conscious acceptance of differences, respect for otherness." Some screamo bands openly demonstrate acceptance of religious, nonreligious, and straight edge lifestyles.
Many screamo bands in the 1990s saw themselves as implicitly political, and as a reaction against the turn to the right wing embodied by California politicians, such as Roger Hedgecock.Interview with Justin Pearson on Skatepunk.net, [3] Access date: June 13, 2008 Some groups were also unusually theoretical in inspiration: Angel Hair cited surrealist writers Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille, and Orchid lyrically name-checked French new wave icon Anna Karina, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, French philosopher Michel Foucault, and critical theory originators the Frankfurt School.Orchid, Dance Tonight, Revolution Tomorrow. Allmusic Guide. Access date: June 17, 2008.
By the mid-2000s, the popularity of pop screamo had led to the word "screamo" being used loosely to describe any use of screamed vocals in music. In 2007, Juan Gabe, vocalist for the screamo band Comadre, alleged that the term "has been kind of tainted in a way, especially in the States." Quinn Villarreal of Sirius XM observed, "If a song had singing AND screaming in it, your grandmother and/or school bully probably called it screamo."
In New Jersey, the genre continued to grow, soon expanding into New York City. Native Nod, Rye Coalition, 1.6 Band, and Rorschach all became prominent in this scene, which was centred around ABC No Rio, while the sound expanded to elsewhere in the United States with Universal Order of Armageddon (from Baltimore) and Mohinder (from Cupertino, California).
In San Francisco, Portraits of Past were one of the earliest groups to merge the primitive screamo sound with post-rock. The band's 1993 demo and 1994 split EP with Bleed, showcased a higher pitched scream than many prior bands in the genre, which would set the standard style for vocalists to come. Their fusion with post-rock was continued by Funeral Diner, while also embracing the influence of black metal.
During the mid–1990s, Southern Ontario, Canada developed a populace and diverse hardcore scene. One element of this scene was bands who played music inspired by screamo, the most prominent of which were Grade, New Day Rising and Shotmaker, and based around the annual S.C.E.N.E. Music Festival. Grade had begun their career playing a style indebted to Chokehold. However, by the time of their debut album And Such Is Progress (1995), they had departed into a style more informed by Indian Summer, Rye Coalition and Lincoln. With this change, vocalist Kyle Bishop began contrasting his screams with sung vocals inspired by James Brown, Black Francis and Bob Mould. This fusion was widely influential. Writers, including David Marchese of Spin and Michael Barclay, have credited Grade with creating screamo. While journalist Sam Southerland credited them as the first band to "seamlessly" merge screaming and singing, also stating "They occupy the same space as Refused: they did something incredibly innovative... they either get no credit because their progeny is hideous, or they’re dismissed because serious music journalists don’t pontificate about bands Alternative Press covered."
Towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, Virginia developed a large and influential screamo scene: Pg. 99, who continued in the extreme and chaotic screamo sound; City of Caterpillar, who were one of the most influential early bands to merge screamo with post-rock; Majority Rule who merged the genre with metalcore; and Malady who merged post-inflected screamo with indie rock. All of which released albums which BrooklynVegan writer Andrew Sacher called essential albums in the genre. One of the most influential bands to come from the New York City screamo scene was Saetia, who formed in 1997 and created a sound influenced by math rock, jazz and Midwest emo. Following Saetia's 1999 disbandment, its members formed the similarly influential bands Off Minor and Hot Cross. Other impactful groups in the genre at this time included Jeromes Dream, Neil Perry, I Hate Myself, Reversal of Man, Yaphet Kotto and Orchid.
In the underground screamo scene, post-rock became an increasingly prominent influence amongst bands. The most prominent and influential of these acts was Richmond, Virginia's City of Caterpillar, who Vice Media writer Jason Heller stated "encompass the era". Music critics coined the term "post-screamo" to refer to this sound. Other prominent acts making this sound at the time included Circle Takes the Square, Raein, Envy and Daïtro. Fluff Fest, held in Czechia since 2000, was in 2017 described by Bandcamp as a "summer ritual" for many fans of screamo in Europe.
In Spain, bands such as Hongo, Das Plague, Ekkaia, Madame Germen and Blünt merged crust punk with elements of screamo, such as melodic minor key guitar leads, slow segues and acoustic passages. At the time, this fusion was called "emo crust". By 2002, Ekkaia and had toured with the American crust punk band Tragedy, and subsequently adopted elements of each other's styles creating the neo-crust genre.
In August 2018, Noisey writer Dan Ozzi declared that it was the "Summer of Screamo" in a month-long series documenting screamo acts pushing the genre forward following the decline in popularity of "The Wave," as well as the reunions of seminal bands such as Pg. 99, Majority Rule, City of Caterpillar, and Jeromes Dream. Groups highlighted in this coverage, including Respire, Ostraca, Portrayal of Guilt, Soul Glo, I Hate Sex, and Infant Island, had generally received positive press from large publications, but were not as widely successful as their predecessors. Noisey also documented that, despite its loss of mainstream popularity and continued hold in North American scenes, particularly Richmond, Virginia, screamo had become a more international movement; notably spreading to Japan, France, and Sweden with groups including Heaven in Her Arms, Birds in Row and Suis La Lune, respectively. Also in 2018, Vein released their debut album Errorzone to critical acclaim and commercial success, bringing together elements of screamo, Hardcore punk, and nu metal. This underground cohort of acts was primarily released by independent labels like Middle-Man Records in the United States, Zegema Beach Records in Canada, and Miss The Stars Records in Berlin.
The origins of sass trace back to the Nation of Ulysses, who formed in Washington, D.C. in 1988. The band expanded upon post-hardcore by being fashion-concious and creating dancable music. Under their influence, bands in mid-1990s San Diego screamo scene began to embrace elements of post-punk and gothic rock into their sound, including the Crimson Curse, Spanakorzo and Antioch Arrow on Gems of Masochism (1995), forming a "proto-sass" sound. Other proto-sass bands were Braniac, Le Shok and Milemaker. Sass solidified itself as a genre around 1998, as music began to be released by pioneers the Blood Brothers, who influenced the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower and These Arms Are Snakes to continue the sound. The centre of the scene was the record label Sound Virus.
Sass bands often take influence from a wide variety of styles including post-punk, new wave, disco, electronic music, dance-punk, grindcore, noise rock, metalcore, mathcore and beatdown hardcore. In particular, sass was originally split into a series of distinct substyles: the screamo-leaning music of JR Ewing and later Orchid; the dance punk-leaning "girlfriend sass" sound of Q and Not U, Black Eyes, the Faint and Milemaker; and the mathcore and grindcore influenced sound of the Locust, the Number Twelve Looks Like You, An Albatross and early Daughters, sometimes termed "white belt grind". Sass's influence permeated into many other genres, including the "sass pop" of Head Automatica and "sass metalcore" of Every Time I Die's second album Hot Damn. Sass was closely releated to the dance-punk revival, with sass band A.R.E. Weapons being one of the earliest bands in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn dance-punk revival scene. Furthermore, many bands who went on to be influential bands in the movement, began playing sass including Hot Hot Heat, !!! and the Rapture. The most commericially successful post-sass dance punk band was Death from Above 1979.
Sass began to decline in popularity around 2003, and had disappeared entirely by 2005. During the early 2010s, there was a revived interest in sass amongst fans active on the screamo message board Cross My Heart With a Knife (CMHAWK). Around 2020, a sass revival had formed, featuring Circuit Circuit and SeeYouSpaceCowboy.
The name sass was derived from , referencing the genre's flamboyant vocal expressions and lyrics. It's synonym white belt hardcore originated from how many musicians and fans of the genre wore white belts, which was controversial in the hardcore scene due to its percieved effeminancy. Other synonyms included dancey screamo and the more derogatory sassy screamo.
Around 2018, SeeYouSpaceCowboy, began to self-identify as sasscore, a portmanteau of sass and metalcore that the band considered themselves to have coined, to clarify their influences from both styles. In the following years, the term became a popular synonym for all sass, however in 2021 article, BrooklynVegan editor Andrew Sacher expressed that "sasscore" encompassed a narrower selection of bands than simply "sass", excluding the softer, less hardcore-based sound of the Blood Brothers, Death From Above 1979 and Hot Hot Heat.
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