The Long Island hardcore band Glassjaw ended a 15-year hiatus in December with a pummeling new album, Material Control, intended to unite its fan base against Brooklyn gentrification (“New White Extremity”) and Catholic theme parks (“Bibleland 6”). A new listener might not realize that as recently as 2000, frontman Daryl Palumbo was writing misogynistic — what he now calls “immature” — lyrics like those in “Lovebites and Razorlines,” which describes a murderous fantasy of sexualized gun violence. “There are a lot of ignorant things I felt the need to say at the time,” admits Palumbo. “We don’t play that anymore.”
Whether or not you believe it’s possible for Glassjaw to redeem itself, it’s telling that Palumbo is attempting to do so now, at the end of a year marked by women exposing sexism across the spectrum. Say Anything, emo’s class clown of 2004, recently disowned one-time fan favorite “Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too,” which laughs off phone sex with a “too young girl.” And Brand New, which emerged from Long Island in 2000, shocked the industry twice this year: First with a surprise-released No. 1 album in August, then when two women made allegations of sexual abuse against frontman Jesse Lacey. (The band hasn’t said whether it will follow through on a hotly anticipated farewell tour, and declined to comment for this story.)
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“Consequences are what create change,” says Heather West, owner of Western Publicity. West has promoted punk-centric Riot Fest, which has a zero-tolerance harassment policy, since 2009. “A lot of times you see dudes groping women in the pit; that won’t be tolerated.”
It was at Chicago’s Riot Fest in September that Jawbreaker, a revered ’90s emo band, played for the first time since 1996, and proved that last generation’s punks needn’t sound problematic in 2017: Frontman Blake Schwarzenbach decried “corporate sexism and racism” and bassist Chris Bauermeister wore a bright red antifa shirt.
That Jawbreaker commanded what was likely its largest live audience ever underlines just how vital the genre remains. In October, former Sunny Day Real Estate frontman Jeremy Enigk self-released the gorgeous solo album Ghosts, his first since 2009. And on Feb. 9, 2018, Dashboard Confessional, one of a handful of emo acts to go mainstream in the early 2000s, is set to release the cathartic Crooked Shadows, its first album in over seven years.
Dashboard frontman Chris Carrabba recalls the “hardcore ethos” he learned in the ’90s Florida punk scene: “respect, hard work, shunning the trappings of what might come with success,” he says. “That time I took off made me raring to go.”
This article originally appeared in the Dec. 23 issue of Billboard.