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.
Characteristics
Screamo is a style of hardcore punk-influenced emo with screaming. Alex Henderson of AllMusic considers screamo a bridge between hardcore punk and emo, and Andrew Sacher of BrooklynVegan states the genre is "built on chaos". Screamo uses typical rock instrumentation, but is notable for its brief compositions, chaotic sounds, harmonized guitars, and screaming vocals. Screamo is characterized "by frequent shifts in tempo and dynamics and by tension-and-release catharses". Many screamo bands also incorporate ballads. According to AllMusic, screamo is "generally based in the aggressive side of the overarching punk-revival scene". Screamed vocals are used "not consistently, but as a kind of crescendo element, a sonic weapon to be trotted out when the music and lyrics reach a particular emotional pitch". Emotional singing and harsh screaming are common vocals in screamo.
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 embodied by California politicians, such as Roger Hedgecock.Interview with Justin Pearson on Skatepunk.net, 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.
Etymology The term screamo is a portmanteau of the words "scream" and "emo". While the genre was developing in the early 1990s, it was not initially called "screamo".Ebullition Catalog, Portraits of Past discography. Access date: August 9, 2008. The term began to be used by the mid-1990s, solely amongst the DIY hardcore scene. Chris Taylor, lead vocalist for the band Pg. 99, said "we never liked that whole screamo thing. Even during our existence, we tried to venture away from the fashion and tell people, 'Hey, this is punk.Lars Gotrich, Pg. 99: A Document Revisited : NPR Music Interview Jonathan Dee of The New York Times wrote that the term "tends to bring a scornful laugh from the bands themselves".
Corruption Following the late 1990s popularity of screamo-adjacent band the Locust, screamo began to attract the attention of people outside of hardcore, and its name was being used more broadly. During the early 2000s, the term became equally as tied to the original screamo sound, as to the more melodic, but screamo-influenced, pop screamo sound of Alexisonfire, Poison the Well and the Used. In 2003, Derek Miller, guitarist for Poison the Well, noted the term's constant differing usages and jokingly stated that it "describes a thousand different genres". In 2008, Bert McCracken, lead singer of the Used, stated that screamo is merely a term "for record companies to sell records and for record stores to categorize them".
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 SiriusXM observed, "If a song had singing AND screaming in it, your grandmother and/or school bully probably called it screamo."
Recodification To combat the increasingly broad-nature of "screamo", the retronym "skramz" began to be used to describe the original DIY definition of screamo. This term was coined jokingly by Alex Bigman of San Diego bands Seeing Means More and Fight Fair. This codification also saw the rise of the term "pop screamo", for the more mainstream derivative, as well as its synonyms "MTV screamo" and "mall screamo". Lars Gotrich of NPR Music made the following comment on the matter in 2011:
History Origins (early 1990s)
Around 1990, a number of bands began pushing the sound of early emo into more extreme and chaotic territory. In particular, San Diego's Heroin is the band generally cited as either pioneering screamo or being the band that inspired the earliest acts in the genre, with other notable bands from the city, including Antioch Arrow and Swing Kids. At the time, the sound of these groups was called the "San Diego sound", a style which Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music (2008) described as "a new sound in hardcore rooted in tradition but boasting a chaotic sound that showcased a new approach" to the genre. The most influential acts were those signed to Gravity Records, a label founded in 1991 by Matt Anderson, member of Heroin, as a means to release the music of his band and of other related San Diego groups. In a 2024 interview, Aaron Montaigne of Heroin and Antioch Arrow, credited the bands' influence largely as coming from Revolution Summer bands, in addition to the Birthday Party and that their vocal style was inspired by San Francisco emo band Fuel.
These early San Diego screamo bands were sometimes called "spock rock" by fans due to many of them dyeing their hair black and cutting straight fringes similar to the Star Trek character Spock. This, in combination with their geek-chic style of dressing would prove particularly influential on the development of the subsequent emo and scene subcultures.
Gravity Records also featured releases by non-San Diego bands including Mohinder (from Cupertino, California) and Angel Hair (from Boulder, Colorado), who were also labelled with the San Diego sound. Gravity Records bands were closely related to the scenes based on Paramus' Gern Blandsten Records and Santa Barbara County's Ebullition Records. On those labels, styles similar to the San Diego sound were produced by Downcast, Born Against, Rorschach, Econochrist, 1.6 Band and Merel. The influence of these three labels initiated a wave of bands that Zap magazine called "Gravity-core" in 1991, including Chino Horde, Policy of 3, Native Nod and Still Life. This was particularly prevalent in San Francisco Bay Area, beginning when Cory Linstrum of End of the Line moved there from San Diego in 1991. Linstrum formed John Henry West with Fuel guitarist Sarah Kirsch. Alongside Downcast from Santa Barbara and Manumission from Goleta, the band occupied a state-wide space, equally playing San Diego's Ché Café, Hollywood's Macondo, Isla Vista's the Red Barn and Berkley's 924 Gilman Street.
Diversification (mid–to late 1990s)
Many bands in the southern United States began pushing the early screamo sound even further sonically. Columbia, South Carolina band In/Humanity coined the term "emoviolence" to describe this sound, played by them, as well as Florida bands Palatka and the End of the Century Party. When coined, the term was a tongue in cheek portmanteau of "emo" and "powerviolence", two genre descriptions the members of In/Humanity maligned.
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, many screamo bands began to embrace elements of post-punk, new wave music and gothic rock, due to the influence of Nation of Ulysses. Antioch Arrow did so on their second album Gems of Masochism (1995). Following the 1993 disbandment of San Fransico's Portraits of Past, the majority of its final lineup formed the Audience, who adopted synthesizers, Rhode Island's Six Finger Satellite adopted elements of no wave and disco music on Severe Exposure (1995) and Washington state's Satisfact adopted post-punk and new wave synthesizers. By 1998, this had developed the sass genre, pioneered by the VSS and the Blood Brothers. Vice Media writer David Anthony stated that in the late 2000s, "Detractors would often lay the scourge of white belts and so-called 'sass-core' at" the feet of Justin Pearson, vocalist for Crimson Curse and the Locust.
In Southern Ontario, Canada developed a populace and diverse hardcore scene during the mid-1990s. 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.
Mainstream crossover (2000s)