Emo started in the 1980s and really came to be a widespread genre throughout the 1990s, but emo's massive breakthrough moment came in 2001, with a series of albums that would take the genre out of the underground and onto television screens, radio stations, festival lineups, Myspace top 8s and Hot Topics all across America and beyond. Like when grunge broke into the mainstream a decade earlier, it was the culmination of a sound that had been building for over a decade,
The most acclaimed albums of 2025 make for impressively eclectic listening. Surveying them does not reveal much in the way of obvious musical trends. There's very little similarity between Rosalia's heady classical approach to pop on Lux and Lily Allen's conversational disclosures on West End Girl. You could broadly group CMAT's Euro-Country, Bon Iver's Sable, Fable and the Tubs' Cotton Crown together as alternative rock but they don't sound anything like each other.
