"Saetia Is for the Children": On Screamo's Intergenerational Refuge

Bands like Saetia, Jeromes Dream and Orchid offer a riveting mix of fury and fragility that's hard to find elsewhere in music

“Saetia is for the children,” the guy next to me affirmed, riffing on ODB’s classic stage-crashing interjection. We were standing on the floor at New York’s Bowery Ballroom at around 6 p.m. last Sunday afternoon, listening to Saetia frontman Billy Werner extend his gratitude to the crowd — and especially the younger folks in attendance — for giving his band a second life.

Even before that moment, the generational diversity in the house was striking. Here, assembled to witness a band that had initially existed for only a few years in the late ’90s, were plenty of the middle-aged lifers you typically see at these sorts of punk-adjacent reunion gigs, but here too, were dozens of kids — average age, say, 17 — losing their minds along with the graybeards. Next to me, before the set, I overheard one showgoer compliment a fellow young fan on her T-shirt, bearing the logo of In Loving Memory, a Des Moines, Iowa, band from that same turn-of-the-millennium vintage. These same kids were part of the surge of bodies near the front of the stage when Saetia played, screaming along to songs surely written before they were born.

I missed Saetia’s first go-round not because I was too young, but perhaps because I was too old. Despite having grown up amid a healthy DIY, punk-adjacent underground in Kansas City in the mid-’90s, and having continued to keep tabs on all manner of aggressive and/or progressive underground-rock sounds, by the end of the decade, as I made my way to New York for college, my interests had broadened and my attention was elsewhere. While the scene that produced Saetia — now known by terms such as screamo, and the dreaded “skramz,” that seem distasteful to pretty much all involved but have stuck around by consensus — was gaining steam, I was acclimating to East Coast life and beginning to explore jazz. In short, I had no idea that Saetia and contemporaries such as Orchid, Jeromes Dream, Pageninetynine and many others were busy pushing hardcore to cathartic, frenetic extremes, and garnering fiercely loyal followings through explosive shows in basements and other off-the-beaten-path spaces.

These band names floated vaguely in the periphery of my awareness, but it wasn’t till around seven or eight years ago that I started really paying attention. I have precisely one person to thank for my screamo conversion: Rick Carp, a friend and former Rolling Stone colleague, who roamed the office daily in a denim jacket sporting a back patch that spotlighted the band Off Minor, which as I would later learn, was a Saetia spin-off. The Thelonious Monk reference in the band name piqued my interest, and after some months of seeing Rick around, I struck up a conversation and asked him for a screamo primer of sorts. A wave of enormously helpful recommendations followed, turning me on to not just the aforementioned bands but others that have since become part of my core listening diet: Portraits of Past, Yaphet Kotto, Gospel and many more.

This knowledge base dovetailed with my minimal awareness of the fabled Gravity Records scene that both pre-dated and intertwined with some of the aforementioned activity; my deep love for On the Might of Princes, a screamo-adjacent band from the early-2000s Long Island scene, whose still-potent latter-day incarnation opened for Saetia at Bowery; and a firm grounding in various earlier forms of post-hardcore music emanating from D.C., Louisville, Chicago and other points closer to home. (Special shout-out here to my perennial faves craw from Cleveland and Dazzling Killmen from the St. Louis area, the latter newly active and slated to return to the stage this fall.)

There was something beautifully retro about getting to know the music that way, through a trusted, like-minded pal like Rick, the same way I was once tipped off by in-the-know clerks at my favorite record stores back home. (I will never forget the time that John Anderson, drummer for one of my favorite local bands, Boys Life, walked me back to the “S” section at Streetside Records on 103rd St. and pressed a Spiderland CD into my hands, destined to become one of the crown jewels of my growing record collection.) I also have to thank my longtime friend and comrade-in-music John Delzoppo, both an eyewitness and a participant in the O.G. screamo scene via his Cleveland band Oblongata, for allowing me to pick his brain about this stuff incessantly via text.

And around the same time I started delving into it, serendipitously, screamo started to come back. Writers such as Dan Ozzi, who had grown up on the music’s first wave, were monitoring this in real time, the way that many of these bands were starting to reunite and release new music, finding that their stock had risen dramatically during their dormant years. Of course, this in some ways has been the larger story of indie music in the 2000s, as a slew of underground rock acts, from Mission of Burma to Bitch Magnet and the aforementioned Slint, have reemerged onto the scene to claim their rightful, overdue acclaim and audience share, first through the All Tomorrow’s Parties gatherings and later via an ever-growing series of specialty fests.

Across the past six years or so, I’ve been fortunate to catch some of this movement’s most legendary names, including Orchid, City of Caterpillar, Gospel, Saetia, Pageninetynine and the stunningly powerful Jeromes Dream, who I saw for the third time a few weeks back, coming away newly amazed by their unique combination of mind-frying abrasiveness and scorched-earth pathos. Sunday was my second time seeing Saetia, having witnessed a Le Poisson Rouge gig in 2022 that came on the heels of a run of Saint Vitus shows that sold out in seconds. They sounded ferocious at Bowery, celebrating their excellent new EP, Tendrils, which picks up right where their earlier classics left off.

It was the latest evidence in support of a motto I’ve taken up in recent years, which is: Always go to the screamo reunion show. Seriously, every single one of these bands lives up to their mythic reputation.

So I know how I, a veteran of the post-hardcore trenches, finally caught up with this glorious din around 20 years after the fact. But what I can’t quite figure out is how all those kids, who aren’t just showing up at the gigs, but starting their own bands in droves, ended up in the fold. I’ve been attending various sorts of underground-rock reunion gigs for more than two decades now, and I can say with authority that the great majority of them — the several Jesus Lizard gigs I’ve seen since their 2009 re-formation, the handful of Jawbox ones, etc. — are populated almost exclusively by the old heads. That’s totally cool by me — honestly, it comes with the territory; this is our classic rock, after all.

But there’s something electric, something magical about turning up for one of these nostalgia-centric happenings and finding yourself surrounded by youth. Emo, shoegaze and various other indie communities have seen a massive influx of young listeners, stoked by passionate chroniclers ranging from Washed Up Emo’s Tom Mullen to the indefatigable Numero Group. (A show I caught earlier in April by the lovable and profoundly poignant Little Rock, Arkansas, emo band Everyone Asked About You — who, as you can hear on their invaluable recent Numero reissue, sound nothing like the aforementioned screamo cohort but operated in a parallel, contemporary scene — was swarming with teenagers who screamed along with every word.) What I can’t quite figure out is, what is the access point? And what is the decisive factor? What brings a new generation rushing in the door to a scene like screamo? What cancels out the “ok boomer” skepticism and causes these bands to scan as cool as opposed to cringe in the eyes of the kids?

Dan Ozzi has examined some of this in an insightful essay on what he calls “The TikTokification of Screamo,” and Eli Enis and Ben Sisario have done valuable delving on how similar narratives have played out in shoegaze. My theory is that, in some ways, it may just be a question of enduring quality, and a brand of magnetic intensity that can’t be accessed elsewhere. The same way a certain sector of disaffected kids will probably always find some sort of timeless refuge in, say, Floyd or Sabbath as they navigate the choppy waters of young-adulthood, these screamo records will likely continue to get handed down like talismans, and be received by a select few as something almost sacred. The great strength of screamo, I’ve found, is its riveting blend of white-hot fury and naked fragility. Ozzi zeroed in on something similar, writing, in reference to an interview he’d recently conducted with Orchid frontman Jayson Green:

The entire reason I was drawn to screamo as a teenager was because I was so turned off by the macho side of hardcore. Bands like Madball and Hatebreed did not appeal to me. As I told Green, “I didn't want to feel like a singer was going to beat me up; I wanted to feel like they read more books than me.” So as long as that tough-guy stuff still exists, I’m glad an alternative to it does as well.

There’s a real desperation in this music, a sense of wrenching desperate beauty from the jaws of all-consuming pain, that you don’t find in most metal, which tends to have more to do with transmuting hardship into anger, expelling it, defying it, rather than commemorating it, really grappling with it. Screamo is handmade, scrappy — at its best, like, say, in the chaotic blur that is early Jeromes Dream, almost unbearable in its tormented catharsis.

As I kid, I found something similar in the music of craw. It terrified me, but it also spoke to me in a deeper way than the more familiar, intelligible, genre-beholden metal I was immersed in at the time. I loved metal then and still do, but I know firsthand that when you come across these more insular, unclassifiable, often downright unnerving varietals of underground music, they can feel like salvation.

So I don’t know exactly what’s bringing these kids to these shows. Or what can explain a stage full of young people, including one actual child, assembled on the Bowery stage during the finale of On the Might of Princes’ set, shouting along to every word. But I suspect it’s the same thing that has brought me into the fold as a curious latecomer: Screamo feels like a secret world, not exclusive, exactly, but also not clearly demarcated — you have to find your way there yourself, through word of mouth, or by following the trails of digital breadcrumbs on Reddit or Bandcamp. Once you’ve arrived, if you’re anything like me, you feel at home, and — in some consoling, enriching, life-affirming way — free.

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A few of my favorite screamo bands are:

Jeromes Dream
Their early material, esp. the album Seeing Means More Than Safety, is some of the most jagged, harrowing rock-based music I’ve heard. It’s also thrillingly tight and ingenious in its oddball construction. I love all their records since then as well, but The Gray in Between is something special — an album that finds them arriving at a still-harsh but somehow serene mature style. For more, check this enlightening New Scene podcast interview with JD drummer Erik Ratensperger, and also don’t miss Ratensperger’s own podcast Micro Spy, where he talks to many of the co-architects of this scene. And also: Do not miss this band live — overwhelming and enthralling.

Portraits of Past
Gorgeous, elegantly constructed songs that seem to bridge the ‘90s post-hardcore sound I grew up on (Dischord, etc.) with this slightly later generation. I and my trusted screamo whisperers Rick and John all swear by their self-titled 1996 album, included in this discography reissue. FYI: They’re back playing shows as well!

Saetia
Their whole discography comp is a killer, esp. the 1998 LP that opens the set. There’s a wonderful proggish undertone to this harsh and complex music, heightened by Werner’s poetic lyrics and delivery. (At Bowery, I caught bassist Colin Bartoldus warming up with a snippet of “YYZ,” so, make no mistake, it’s all connected.) The new EP is great too.

Gospel
Speaking of prog… Whew, this stuff is dark, ingenious and singular. Screamo in space! I love their reunion album The Loser and wondrously eccentric companion EP MVDM as much as their O.G. ’05 classic The Moon Is a Dead World. Again, never, ever miss this band live if you can help it. Also: Read my old math-rock comrade Mike Friedrich’s essential Gospel treatise, and look out for their agile crusher of a drummer Vinny Roseboom in newer bands Medicinal and the Supervoid Choral Ensemble.

Yaphet Kotto
Almost unbearably emotional. Scrappy, furious, with a palpable social conscience. I find the dual-vocal approach here to be revelatory: Mag Delana’s voice is a gotta-hear-it-to-believe-it marvel. Repeater Records, an essential outlet for classic-screamo reissues, recently put out a comp of their non-album tracks, but for my money, Syncopated Synthetic Laments for Love is the one. Soul-gripping brilliance.

Orchid
Chaos Is Me is rightfully hailed as a classic — again, that perfect balance of unhinged and scarily controlled. Addictive bursts of cryptic fury. Once more: See their reunion gigs if you can!

I’m also a big fan of City of Caterpillar, Pageninetynine and Reversal of Man, all back at it as well. And I’m doing more delving every day, trying to map out this strange underground topography.

And an honorable mention goes to the aforementioned On the Might of Princes, whose early-2000s full-lengths Where You Are and Where You Want to Be and Sirens are simply two of my favorite albums of all time. Not sure if you’d call them screamo, emo, post-hardcore or any number of other inadequate descriptors, but there’s definitely a strong resonance to what’s discussed above, in terms of fury meeting fragility. Truly heart-rending stuff. (See this recently released doc for a much fuller picture.)