‘In Defense of the Genre’: Best Punk & Emo Songs of April
The April roundup of our punk column ‘In Defense of the Genre’ includes recent news, reviews, and features, along with a list of the best songs of the month.
In Defense of the Genre is a column on BrooklynVegan about punk, pop punk, emo, hardcore, post-hardcore, ska-punk, and more, including and often especially the bands and albums and subgenres that weren’t always taken so seriously.
This past April marked the first time in my 15+ years of regularly attending music festivals that I made the trip to Coachella, and say what you will about the festival being too pop or too EDM or whatever now, but I had a very punk-centric experience thanks to sets from the Misfits, Green Day, Speed, Circle Jerks, Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, and Amyl & the Sniffers, and it was a blast. Since then, it was announced that two of those bands will headline the 20th anniversary edition of Riot Fest (Green Day and Weezer, playing Blue Album), alongside blink-182 (who began their comeback tour with a surprise Coachella set in 2023). The Fest announced its lineup this month too.
I also caught up with a couple of those bands at Coachella, and before I get to my list of the 10 best punk songs of April, here are those interviews and other recent features:
* Jimmy Eat World talk Coachella, next album, Charli XCX and more
* Speed give LP2 update, name 5 favorite hardcore albums, and talk representing hardcore at Coachella
* “An overall hopelessness and dread”: Superheaven talk first album in 10 years
* Heart Attack Man talk influences on new album Joyride the Pale Horse
* Pet Symmetry talk influences on. new album Big Symmetry
* April album reviews: Scowl, Superheaven, The Mars Volta, Speedway, Record Setter, Florida Man, Ursula, Iron Lung, Heavy Heavy Low Low, Rodeo Boys, Heart Attack Man, XweaponX (mem Knocked Loose), and Idle Heirs (mem Coalesce).
Some new exclusive vinyl we recently launched includes Northstar’s Is This Thing Loaded? (various color vinyl), Anthony Green’s So Long, Avalon (a reworking of his 2008 debut solo LP Avalon, on clear/purple splatter vinyl), the 10th anniversary edition of Turnover’s Peripheral Vision (“candied avocado” vinyl), the 25th anniversary edition of H2O’s Faster Than The World (opaque yellow & green), the 30th anniversary edition of Cap’n Jazz’s Shmap’n Shmazz (ice blue), Terror’s Live at CBGB 2004 (tri-color vinyl), and more.
Head below for my picks of the 10 best songs of April that fall somewhere under the punk umbrella, in no particular order.
Turnstile – “Never Enough,” “Seein’ Stars,” & “Birds”
When you release an album as monumental as Glow On and then wait four years to follow it, any direction you go in is gonna be under scrutiny. Is it too similar, or too different? Should you aim for more commercial success, or shy away from it? Should you please the old fans, the new fans, or yourselves? Is it even possible to please all three? Maybe, but focusing too much on all these expectations sucks the fun out of it, and Turnstile have always been all about fun.
So far, Turnstile have released three songs from the long-awaited Never Enough, and maybe I should’ve picked just one for this list but it paints a more accurate picture to have all three because they each go in noticeably different directions. The grungy, mid-tempo title track feels like a sequel to Glow On opener “Mystery,” while “Seein’ Stars” goes deeper than ever into Turnstile’s Prince-like ’80s funk side (with backup vocals from Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes and Paramore’s Hayley Williams) and “Birds” shows they’ve still got time for fast-paced, classic-style hardcore. Even the most familiar thrills have a refreshing sense of newness to them, and they always sound more knowingly self-referential than lazily rehashed. These songs have got it all: the deceptively simple hooks, the boundless energy, the crazy percussion, the casual genre-defiance. We’ve seen a lot of bands channel Glow On‘s pop-hardcore experimentalism throughout the last four years, but so far it looks like waiting for the real thing has been worth it.
Home Is Where – “Migration Patterns”
If Home Is Where didn’t historically identify as emo, I don’t know if “Migration Patterns” would make its way into a punk column, but if everybody else is going country, why can’t they? Especially with roots in swampy, northern Florida, it makes sense that Home Is Where could authentically introduce a little twang into their sound, and that’s what they did after getting homesick on tour and finding comfort in the late country rock pioneer Gram Parsons and his band The Flying Burrito Brothers. The first recorded taste of this new direction is a song that Home Is Where have been playing on tour for the last two years, “Migration Patterns,” and the studio version sounds as great as it did when I saw them bust it out during a packed show at Elsewhere Zone One in Brooklyn back in the summer of 2023. The rugged rhythm guitar would sit nicely next to anything from CCR to the Meat Puppets to MJ Lenderman, the Dylanesque harmonica and twangy slide licks add in some earthy embellishments, and singer Bea MacDonald’s uniquely impassioned delivery is the one thing that maybe makes “Migration Patterns” still count as emo. Genre aside, this song is an appealingly shaggy step in a new direction for Home Is Where, and I’m looking forward to hearing more where this came from when new LP Hunting Season drops later this month.
MSPAINT – “Angel”
This is another song that might not sound “punk” out of context, but it’s a very cool new direction for a band who tend to find themselves on hardcore shows. In the context of MSPAINT’s usual shouty synthpunk, “Angel” is damn near pretty sounding, and it includes an out-of-character auto-tune/vocoder section, but you’d never mistake this for any other band. Vocalist Deedee says the goal was to “[bring] poppier elements into our space and [make] them our own instead of trying to bring what we do into a pop space,” and I’d say that’s exactly what they did.
For Your Health – “Davenport (A Rotten Pear)”
For Your Health’s 2022 split with awakebutstillinbed made me think they were gonna go in a pop-emo direction on their next album, but I guess I thought wrong. They’re gearing up to release their sophomore LP This Bitter Garden in June, and lead single “Davenport (A Rotten Pear)” is right back to the kind of sassy, metallic screamo that they helped spark a sasscore revival with at the beginning of the current decade. It’s also one of their best and most maniacal songs yet, with the same perfect mix of aggression and flamboyance that made us fall in love with For Your Health in the first place.
Nuvolascura – “And in the End, You Threw It All Away”
After releasing their first two albums in a two-year span, LA screamo band Nuvolascura quieted down for a bit but now they’re back and louder than ever. The first taste of upcoming LP How This All Ends is 76 seconds of dizzying lead guitar melodies, moshable fury, and some of the most passionate shrieks that vocalist Erica has ever laid down to tape.
How This All Ends by nuvolascura
Joliette – “Nimbus”
April was a very good month for screamo and that’s thanks in part to Mexico City’s Joliette, who announced their first full-length album in six years, Pérdidas Variables. Guitarist Juan Pablo Castillo says the song is meant to capture “that moment when the city feels both distant and close, as the rain transforms the landscape into something dreamlike,” and in classic screamo fashion, Joliette are able to convey that sense of longing and beauty with music that scans as harsh and aggressive on the surface. If you find yourself gravitating towards heavy/beautiful stuff like Envy, Deafheaven, and Touché Amoré, make sure you’re keeping your ears peeled for the new Joliette album too.
Balance and Composure – “Alive & Well”
Balance and Composure returned in 2024 with their first album in eight years, With You In Spirit, but this song was actually written before any of the songs on that album. I can see why they didn’t think it fit on the LP, and I can also see why writing this song inspired them to keep writing more. After a hiatus that was partially induced by exhaustion, inner-band tension, and a muted response to their third LP, “Alive & Well” finds Balance and Composure sounding exactly that. It’s the kind of grungy post-hardcore banger that sends crowds into frenzies at every show they play, and with a hook that’s even catchier than a lot of the songs that did make the LP, this is an outtake that should not be skipped.
Stay Inside – “Monsieur Hawkweed”
Home Is Where aren’t the only band who put out a country/emo hybrid this past month. Stay Inside’s “Monsieur Hawkweed” is a little more traditionally emo than the Home Is Where song, but it finds them continuing to lean into the Americana elements of last year’s Ferried Away, and this NYC band remains very good at fusing these two very-non-NYC styles of music. It’s the first taste of the band’s first album for Tiny Engines (due this fall), and it’s also worth noting that Stay Inside will be opening the NYC stop of the aforementioned Four Your Health and awakebutstillinbed’s upcoming tour.
Vandoliers – “Life Behind Bars”
With all this talk of punk and country, I’d be remiss not to mention the new song from Texas country-punks Vandoliers. “Life Behind Bars” is the rowdy, anthemic title track of the band’s upcoming fifth album, and it’s also the first song released since singer Jenni Rose publicly came out as a trans woman, a journey she explores on this very song. She co-wrote it with her bandmate Cory Graves, as well as Joshua Ray Walker and John Pedigo, and says, “This song has four writers, and each came with a different perspective for what the title means… We all connected through a shared sense of being trapped—like we were all ‘on the edge of oblivion.”
Age of Apocalypse – “Impulse” (ft. High Vis)
High Vis were supposed to be on a North American tour with Militarie Gun as we speak, but they had to cancel it after vocalist Graham Sayle needed emergency surgery (wishing you a speedy recovery, Graham!), and that perfect hardcore-infused alt-rock double bill was going to have support from the Life of Agony-esque Hudson Valley band Age of Apocalypse. That seemed like a surprising combo to me, and I was even more surprised to hear that Graham from High Vis has a collab with them on their upcoming album In Oblivion. Even more surprising is neither party really bends towards the other. It’s AOA’s chugging, howling LOA worship on one side, and Graham’s Britpoppy hardcore shouts on the other, and it totally works.
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In an effort to cover as many bands as possible, I try to just do one single per album cycle in these monthly roundups, so catch up on previous months’ lists for even more:
For even more new songs, listen below or subscribe to our playlist of punk/emo/hardcore/etc songs of 2025.
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Read past and future editions of ‘In Defense of the Genre’ here.
Browse our selection of hand-picked punk vinyl.
