Full Collapse

Thursday caused a major stir in the underground with their second record. With a sizable push from MTV2, the New Jersey group brought mainstream attention to screamo, a subgenre highlighting the dissonant hardcore roots of emo. While this is far from pop-punk, Thursday mostly uses the screaming backing vocals and guitar noise to draw a line in the sand between them and their pop-oriented peers. In other words, Thursday renews the original tension between Rites of Spring and Embrace that Fugazi was one version of. A socially and politically conscious stance is implied (fully developed on subsequent records) and “Understanding in a Car Crash”, an emo classic, is nuanced and full of ambiguities as the music bobs and weaves towards uncertainty. It was quite mature for this most adolescent of genres, and Thursday would recede from the spotlight shortly after the follow-up to Full Collapse.