EMO Girl

On the east coast, New York City-based Texas Is the Reason bridged the gap between indie rock and emo in their brief three-year lifespan by melding the melodies of Sunny Day Real Estate to churning punk musicianship and singing directly to the listener. In New Jersey, Lifetime gained a reputation as a melodic hardcore act, playing shows in fans' basements. Their 1995 album Hello Bastards on rising independent label Jade Tree Records fused hardcore with emo's tunefulness, turning its back on cynicism and irony in favor of love songs. The album sold tens of thousands of copies and the band inspired a number of later New Jersey and Long Island emo acts such as Brand New, Glassjaw, Midtown, The Movielife, My Chemical Romance, Saves the Day, Senses Fail, Taking Back Sunday, and Thursday.
The Promise Ring were one of the premier bands of the new emo style. Their music took a slower, smoother, pop punk approach to hardcore riffs, blending them with singer Davey von Bohlen's goofy, picturesque lyrics delivered with a froggy croon and pronounced lisp, and they played shows in basements and VFW halls Jade Tree released their debut 30° Everywhere in 1996 and it sold tens of thousands of copies, a blockbuster by independent standards. Greenwald describes the effect of the album as "like being hit in the head with cotton candy." Other bands such as Karate, The Van Pelt, Joan of Arc, and The Shyness Clinic incorporated elements of post-rock and noise rock into the emo sound. The common lyrical thread between these bands was "applying big questions to small scenarios."
A cornerstone of mid-1990s emo was Weezer's 1996 album Pinkerton. Following the success of their mutiplatinum debut, Pinkerton turned from their power pop sound to a much darker, more abrasive character. Frontman Rivers Cuomo's songs were obsessed with messy, manipulative sex and his own insecurities of dealing with celebrity. A critical and commercial failure, it was ranked by Rolling Stone as the second-worst album of the year. Cuomo retreated from the public eye, later referring to the album as "hideous" and "a hugely painful mistake". However, Pinkerton found enduring appeal with teenagers just discovering alternative rock, who were drawn to its confessional lyrics and themes of rejection and came to believe that it was directed at them. Sales grew steadily as word of the album passed between fans, over online messageboards, and via Napster. "Although no one was paying attention", says Greenwald, "perhaps because no one was paying attention—Pinkerton became the most important emo album of the decade." When Weezer returned in 2000, however, they did so with a decidedly pop sound. Cuomo refused to play songs from Pinkerton, dismissing it as "ugly" and "embarrassing". Nevertheless, the album held its appeal and eventually achieved both high sales and critical praise, and is noted for introducing emo to larger and more mainstream audiences.
The emo aesthetic of the mid-1990s was embodied in Mineral, whose albums The Power of Failing (1997) and EndSerenading (1998) encapsulated the emo tropes of somber music accompanied by a shy narrator singing seriously about mundane problems. Greenwald calls their song "If I Could" "the ultimate expression of mid-nineties emo. The song's short synopsis—she is beautiful, I am weak, dumb, and shy; I am alone but am surprisingly poetic when left alone—sums up everything that emo's adherents admired and its detractors detested." Another significant band of the era was Braid, whose 1998 album Frame and Canvas and B-side song "Forever Got Shorter" blurred the lines between band and listener, as the group was a mirror-image of its own audience in passion and sentiment and sang in the voice of their fans.