FIVE YEARS AGO, punk came in only three shades of cool: hardcore, screamo, and math rock (or some sexless composite of these). The ’90s weren’t “in” yet, an emo dance party at Holocene would have seemed surreal, and crusty arbiters of taste reflexively dismissed anything sounding even vaguely blues-derived as hokey. (I’ll never forget putting Elliott Smith’s Figure 8 on in Laughing Horse Books and hearing someone describe it as “dad rock”).
Writing about musical history this recent feels sort of ridiculous, but the reemergence of mid-tempo, melodic guitar rock in the underground can almost certainly be traced back to bands like Joyce Manor and the Sidekicks—reformed pop-punk groups with a contagious revisionist love for Weezer’s least-shitty album. Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag’s influences stretch back an extra generation—they’re a punk band that doesn’t make overtly punk music.