15 albums that defined the 2000s post-hardcore boom

This edition of 'In Defense of the Genre' looks at 15 albums that defined the melodic style of post-hardcore that took off in the early 2000s thanks to bands like At the Drive-In, Thursday, and Glassjaw, many of whom are still breaking ground and/or influencing new bands today.

As punk and its many offshoot genres were thriving in both the mainstream and the underground in the late '90s and early 2000s, a new version of a previously-existing subgenre started to take shape, and that genre was post-hardcore. The genre dates all the way back to the '80s -- depending on who you talk to, Big Black is post-hardcore, Zen Arcade is post-hardcore, and Dag Nasty is post-hardcore, though none of those things sound like any of the others. The genre thrived in the '90s, thanks to Fugazi, Quicksand, The Jesus Lizard, Unsane, Drive Like Jehu, and a slew of other bands who don't necessarily sound like the '80s bands (or each other), and it hit the mainstream in the early 2000s thanks to bands like At the Drive In, Glassjaw, and Thursday. This article is about the early/mid 2000s bands. Specifically, it's about 15 genre-defining albums from that era.

Even tying post-hardcore to an era doesn't necessarily tie it to a sound. Post-hardcore constantly crossed over with metalcore, screamo, emo, indie rock, and more, and some bands fell into two or more of those categories at once. It's a subgenre that really should be split into a few subgenres of its own, so for the purposes of this list let's call these bands "melodic post-hardcore." I'm talking about the bands with both screaming and clean singing, melodic yet heavy instrumentation, and songs that are too experimental to just be hardcore or punk but not so experimental that they’re inaccessible. Again, the genre lines are blurry, but this is not a list of post-hardcore albums that are primarily metalcore (if you want a list of classic metalcore, go here), or screamo (classic screamo list here), or emo, or the more indie rock side of 2000s post-hardcore like Unwound or Hot Snakes. Some of these albums might cross over into those territories, but they represent a sound of their own.

The list is chronological order and it goes from 2000 to 2006, which were really the peak years for this era and sound. (There wasn't that much time between this wave of bands and what became known as The New Wave of Post-Hardcore, which started in the late 2000s and thrived in the 2010s with landmark albums by Touche Amore, La Dispute, Pianos Become the Teeth, Title Fight, and others, but that wave is also distinctly different, so this list ends before that wave begins. There's also yet another new wave of post-hardcore happening right now... more on that another time.) As I say a lot for these 'In Defense of the Genre' lists, 15 is a small number, so if your favorite album isn't here, try not to get too angry with me but feel free to leave it in the comments.

Read on for the list...

Cave In - Jupiter (2000)

We included Cave In's 1999 debut album Until Your Heart Stops on that list of 15 classic metalcore albums, but just a year after that album came out, Cave In did an about face and released an album that couldn't count as "metal-" anything. It's spacey and atmospheric but still with a thunderous low end that qualifies it as heavy music (not unlike what Hum had done in the '90s and what Deftones were experimenting with on White Pony the same year as this album), and Stephen Brodsky almost exclusively utilized clean vocals. When he did scream, it sounded like even more of a cathartic release than it did when Cave In were primarily a hardcore band, because on Jupiter the screams only came when singing alone couldn't convey the raw emotion. It was a radical move for a band who were so much heavier just a year earlier, but it turned out to be a much more original album than its predecessor, and you could hear its influence reverberating all throughout the remainder of 2000s post-hardcore.

At the Drive-In - Relationship of Command (2000)

Cave In were a metalcore-turned-space-rock band who ended up sounding a whole lot like a post-hardcore band, but At the Drive-In had been building up a reputation as the new leaders of post-hardcore since the mid '90s, and it all came to a head on 2000's Relationship of Command, which really marked the start of the early/mid 2000s post-hardcore boom. It was their first for a major label, produced by Ross Robinson who was already known for producing most major nu metal bands (and who produced the debut album by another important post-hardcore band that same year, Glassjaw -- more on them soon), and mixed by Andy Wallace (Slayer, Nevermind), and it proved to be a huge breakthrough for ATDI and helped them land some of the biggest shows of their career (like their infamous Big Day Out performance). At the Drive-In couldn't keep it together for much longer -- frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez went full psych/prog in The Mars Volta while Jim Ward, Tony Hajjar, and Paul Hinojos formed the more straight-up post-hardcore band Sparta -- but thankfully they all managed to bring their opposing ideas to the table for Relationship of Command, which in hindsight sounds like a band trying to be Sparta and The Mars Volta at exactly the same time. Compared to their earlier, screamier work, Cedric was basically singing by this album, Omar's guitar work was going way off the hardcore/punk grid, all while the rhythm section and Jim Ward's crucial backing screams kept things grounded. Of the bands who formed after them, I don't think there's a single band on this list who wouldn't count ATDI as an influence, and Relationship of Command is really what opened the doors for all of those bands to thrive on a major level.

Thursday - Full Collapse (2001)

If Relationship of Command opened the doors, then Full Collapse kicked them right off their hinges. Thursday had absorbed the influence of not just post-hardcore like ATDI, but also '90s emo, screamo, punk and the New Brunswick, NJ house show scene, and they stirred it all together for this album which kinda single-handedly started the music industry feeding frenzy on "bands that scream." Full Collapse was Thursday's second album and first for Victory, who at the time were still primarily known as a metalcore label. The only other scream/singing emo/post-hardcore band that Victory really had before Thursday was Grade, who were great but never really had a big breakthrough. After Full Collapse hit, Victory started signing tons of bands like that and became inseparably tied to the post-hardcore and emo boom. The album spawned countless imitators, and it's held up better and sounds more timeless than nearly all of them. Its warmer, more indie rock production style made it sound less heavy than some of Thursday's peers at the time, but it also makes it sound less dated today. Thursday themselves quickly moved on from Full Collapse and reinvented themselves -- sometimes more drastically than others -- on every subsequent album. They've got a rock-solid discography that remains worth exploring from start to finish, and I often find it hard to pick a favorite. But Full Collapse is the album that started it all, and these songs continue to rival the best of the best in post-hardcore.

From Autumn to Ashes - Too Bad You're Beautiful (2001)

Compared to Full Collapse, Long Island band From Autumn to Ashes' debut album Too Bad You're Beautiful from that same year does have very of-its-time production, but the charmingly raw sounds of this album work to FATA's benefit in other ways. It technically sounds dated, but not outdated -- if you want to be transported directly back to 2001, this album does the trick. And compared to the cleaner, more mainstream-friendly production of FATA's later albums, the rougher sound of Too Bad You're Beautiful gives this one an edge that the others don't have. Too Bad You're Beautiful dabbles in the kind of machine gun chugs that would sooner qualify them as metalcore, but this album has a punk/hardcore sound and aesthetic, thrilling scream/sung vocal interplay, clean post-rocky emo passages, and some real nice embellishments like the occasional string arrangement or soaring guest vocal from One True Thing's Melanie Wills [editor’s note: Where is she now?]. FATA were often squeezing all of these ideas into individual songs, with an everything-at-once mentality that recalled '90s screamo but looked to the future and proved to be pretty influential. Even today, great bands like Ithaca are namedropping them as an influence.

Fugazi - The Argument (2001)

There is really no way to overstate the influence of Fugazi's late '80s and early '90s material on virtually all of the post-hardcore, emo, and indie rock that came after them, and just as post-hardcore was reaching new heights in 2001, Fugazi released one last album that reminded the world almost none of this music would sound the way it did without their influence. Fugazi would probably still be legends if they did nostalgia tours for Repeater until eternity, but they insisted on always pushing forward -- it's no surprise that members currently have new projects together but Fugazi still won't reunite -- and The Argument saw them breaking new ground over a decade after they formed and two decades after Ian MacKaye helped write the blueprint for hardcore in Minor Threat. It didn't sound like Repeater or "Waiting Room" or like any of the new post-hardcore in 2001, but it sounded fresh and it fit right in with the younger bands who owed their careers to Fugazi. Fugazi had evolved into a more cerebral indie rock band by the time of The Argument, but when Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto raised their voices to a roar, The Argument hit just as hard as anything.