There’s a genre of music that rose to prominence in the early 2000’s often referred to as pop-punk, emo, scene, screamo, mall-punk or some combination of all of the above. I missed all of it* and my frame of reference for it is a fleeting amount of dying MTV, white belts, floppy bangs and songs that pushed emotional anguish to a limit that felt comical at the time. That is to say, I never “got it.”
So, upon first listening to 95COROLLA, I assumed I’d remain in the same camp. The songs would be crafted well but belong to a world I wouldn’t emotionally respond to. Fortunately, my assumptions were wrong. The Loud Fast Sad EP is cut from the pop-punk / emo / mall-punk cloth but it’s doing more than just checking boxes. Yes, it contains plenty of blazing drum beats, anguished gang vocals and forelorn lyrics but it’s also catchy as hell, sweetly romantic in a melancholy way and well deserving of a legitimate fist pump through more than one of the choruses.
It’d be easy to call this a nostalgic release — a group of musicians that grew up on a specific genre and reliving the glory days — but 95COROLLA is too good for that. This isn’t a rote exercise. These songs were written and performed with true passion for the style; a proper addition to the pantheon of emo before them. They may not find happiness (it’s a tenant of the genre after all) but they should be proud.
* we can have a conversation about the fluid definition of “emo” and how it ended up applying to no less than five different styles of music but that’s a topic for another day.