Some bands that had been grinding for years released their most-loved album in 2002, others released albums that remain divisive to this day. A lot of the veterans who helped shape emo's second wave in the '90s were putting out records in 2002 that challenged (or entirely rejected) the boundaries of the genre.

Of course, when you look at the scope of 2002 emo and post-hardcore, it wasn't all up-and-coming bands.

A lot of these groundbreaking emo/post-hardcore bands had no idea they were contributing to something that was about to be a worldwide cultural phenomenon that would still be celebrated 20 years later so many of them were just scrappy hardcore kids who liked Something to Write Home About and Clarity and wanted to make something a little catchier and more melodramatic than other hardcore kids. As it became clearer and clearer that this type of music was quickly resonating with a new generation of music fans, record labels like Victory and Drive-Thru and Triple Crown and Equal Vision and eventually even the majors found themselves scooping up melodic, emotional punk bands like crazy, and though the new interest in that style of music might've outraged some older punks, the rise of this sound was largely ground-up and organic. 2002 was really the year that emo and its heavier sister genre post-hardcore began surpassing pop punk as the punk subgenre of choice for the youth of the era, and so many albums from that year are still influencing new bands today. In honor of their 20th anniversaries, this edition of 'In Defense of the Genre' looks at the best emo and post-hardcore albums from that year.Ģ001 was the year that emo broke (on a mainstream level), and once the floodgates were opened, 2002 birthed even more now-classic albums that fall somewhere under the emo umbrella.

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