Post-hardcore in the context of "Senses Fail"

Emo (/ˈiːmoʊ/ EE-moh) is a genre of rock music that combines musical characteristics of hardcore punk with emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and post-hardcore from the mid-1980s Washington, D.C., hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the early-to-mid 1990s, emo was adopted and reinvented by alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, Mineral, and Jimmy Eat World. By the mid-1990s, Braid, the Promise Ring, American Football, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath.

The emo subculture signifies a specific relationship between fans and artists and certain aspects of fashion, culture, and behavior. Emo fashion includes skinny jeans, black eyeliner, tight t-shirts with band names, studded belts, and flat, straight, jet-black hair with long bangs. Since the early-to-mid 2000s, fans of emo music who dress like this are referred to as "emo kids" or "emos". The emo subculture was stereotypically associated with social alienation, sensitivity, misanthropy, introversion, and angst. Purported links to depression, self-harm, and suicide, combined with its rise in popularity in the early 2000s, inspired a backlash against emo, with some bands, including My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco, rejecting the emo label because of the social stigma and controversy surrounding it. There has long been controversy over which bands are labeled "emo", especially for bands that started outside traditional emo scenes; a viral website, Is This Band Emo?, was created to address one fan's opinion on this question. Emo and its subgenre emo pop entered mainstream culture in the early 2000s with the success of Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, and many artists signed contracts with major record labels. Bands such as My Chemical Romance, AFI, Fall Out Boy, and the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus continued the genre's popularity during the rest of the decade.

Antioch Arrow was an American punk rock band from San Diego, California, that formed in 1992. Most of their discography was released through the San Diego independent label Gravity Records. The label was responsible for raising San Diego's profile in the underground music scene of the mid-1990s. The band, breaking up in 1994 and releasing one final studio album posthumously in 1995, is now considered to be one of the most influential bands of the early 1990s that shaped emo and post-hardcore music of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I Hate Myself (often stylized as i hate myself) was an American emo band formed by Jon and Jim Marburger in Gainesville, Florida, in 1996. The band used elements of post-hardcore and indie in their songs.

Silverstein (/ˈsɪl.vər.stiːn/) is a Canadian post-hardcore band from Burlington, Ontario, formed in 2000. Their band name is a reference to the famous children's author Shel Silverstein, whom the band had admired and whose work they had read as children. They have released a total of eleven studio albums, seven EPs, a compilation album and a live DVD/CD.

The band achieved moderate success with their second studio album, Discovering the Waterfront, which was nominated for a Juno Award and reached No. 34 on the Billboard 200 charts, with the following two albums charting at similar positions. Silverstein has sold over one million albums worldwide.

AFI (A Fire Inside) is an American rock band from Ukiah, California, formed in 1991. Since 1998, it consists of lead vocalist Davey Havok, drummer and backing vocalist Adam Carson, bassist, backing vocalist and keyboardist Hunter Burgan, and guitarist, backing vocalist and keyboardist Jade Puget. Havok and Carson are the sole remaining original members. Originally a hardcore punk band, they have since delved into many genres, starting with horror punk and following through post-hardcore and emo into alternative rock and gothic rock.

AFI has released twelve studio albums, ten EPs, one live album and one DVD. The band first reached substantial commercial success with their fifth album, The Art of Drowning (2000), which peaked at number 174 on the Billboard 200. They then broke into the mainstream with their sixth, Sing the Sorrow (2003), which peaked at number five on the Billboard 200 and remained on the chart for 51 weeks. The album was supported by popular singles "Girl's Not Grey" and "Silver and Cold", both of which peaked at number seven on America's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart in 2003. "The Leaving Song Pt. II" was also released as a single, reaching number 16 on the chart. Sing the Sorrow was certified Platinum by the RIAA in 2006 and is AFI's best-selling release, having sold over 1.26 million copies as of September 2009.

Gravity is an underground independent record label from San Diego. It was formed in 1991 by Matt Anderson, a member of the influential underground band Heroin. It has been central in developing and promoting the "San Diego sound" – an idiosyncratic form of post-hardcore with loose, chaotic musicianship and vocals, initiated by Heroin, Antioch Arrow, and Clikatat Ikatowi, as well as Mohinder from the Bay Area and Angel Hair from Colorado. The sound is associated with the first wave of screamo, and the label played an important role in the development of post-hardcore in the 1990s. Gravity has also branched out into other forms of experimental or independent music, releasing seminal early works by Unwound, Black Dice, The Rapture, and a full-length from Man Is The Bastard. The label has no affliation with the Capitol Records subsidiary Gravity Inc Records.